Moral Failure Series

If you have your Bibles with you today and you want to follow along, we are going to be looking at a passage in the Old Testament Genesis 39. Today is September 1. Summer is just about over. That is hard to believe isn’t it? Especially when we consider that really it probably in many ways hasn’t come because of all the rain going on. One sure sign that the summer has ended is that the children returned back to school last week for most families. I suspect that there were a lot of tears shed about that. We don’t have children living at home anymore, but I can remember that first day of school. You bring them to school or put them on the bus. It just choked you up. I was driving home from the Sewickley area last week and I went by the bus stop and sure enough I saw parents there with their cameras and getting their kids on the bus and shedding a few tears. I also suspected that, even though there were some tears on the outside, there might have been a little bit of joy on the inside. Joy for some people so much so that they may be able to identify with the woman who was seen on the news last week doing a happy dance when the kids got on the school bus. Did anybody see that? There was some celebration going on with the kids going back to school for the parents at least. But for the kids, returning back to school is not such a happy time. A return back to school means a return back to the books, which means a return back to study, which means a return back to tests, which means a return back to the possibility of failure. That is what we are going to address today; the idea of failure.

As many of you know, we have been going through the series through the summer called “Do not conform. Be transformed.” It is based on Romans 12:2. The idea of “Do not conform to the patterns of the world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” We looked at a lot of different patterns in the world, and we came up with a number of them. What we are going to do today is just again examine one remaining pattern. That is the pattern of failure. As I already implied, we live in a culture where we pretty much realize that tests are a part of life. The context of where these tests often occur, or the most frequent context, is normally in some sort of a school setting. From the minute we step foot into school as a preschooler all the way up to college and doctoral programs and beyond, you basically are bombarded with a lot of tests. A lot of tests come in the form of multiple choice, true/false, and that sort of thing. When I was doing a little research, I realized there is a lot of criticism regarding how American kids are tested. Especially in regards to what they call standardized tests. What they have learned is that standardized tests really do not demonstrate what a child has learned but just basically how well that child can take a test. What happens often is I think the teachers teach to the test. They teach the material that they know is going to be tested on because they have to keep the test scores high. The school maintains it status and the kids graduate. The problem with that is when a child graduates from high school or someone graduates from college what happens is you leave the school and enter the real-world environment and you really don’t know what you are doing. You are not able to apply those things you have learned. Some of you know that I received an undergraduate degree from Portland State in Business Administration. I am the type of person that when I first enter a class, I figure out what I need to do to get a grade and I begin to think about how do I need to study for this and what do I need to study. Back then, a long time ago, I was very good at taking tests. I knew how hard I had to study to get a B or an A. I would just study that material. It worked. It got me through college and I think I ended up with a 3.5 average. But when I went into the work world, I had a very difficult time connecting the things I learned in the books to the things in the real work setting. Those standardized tests are not really the best way to determine what the child or adult has learned. As bad as those tests might be or as much criticism we receive about those tests, we know that tests are going to continue. Until they come up with a better system, it still is somewhat of a gauge to see what the child or adult is learning. We know they are going to stick around a while.