“All of us have failed, falling way short of fulfilling the beauty of God‘s plan, that which God intended us to be.”(paraphrase of Romans 3:23)
One of the first facts of failure is that failure is a fact. We are all going to fail in some way. The Bible clearly tells us that. “We all stumble in many ways.” And we are learning how to handle failure. If failure is a fact of life, we need to know how to handle it. Many people stay bound their entire lives because of a failure - either one major one, or several small ones, or because of a repeat offence.
I have discovered that many times we mistake self-disappointment for sinful degradation. We can disappoint ourselves, and we think it is testimonial of God’s disappointment. But God said, “My strength is made perfect in your weakness.” He ministers through those failing, insufficient areas.
That’s not to say that we don’t need to strive to do good, but that we need to get failure into proper focus. There are times when we sin. There’s no other way to say it. But there are other times when we just feel “satanic guilt.” The devil just wants you to feel guilty, for no reason. He wants you to feel like a failure.
And this morning, we began to understand a couple of things about failure, that fine tunes our perspective a little bit. 1. Remember That Everybody Fails. It’s a fact of life, and a Biblical truth. We all fail. 2. Realize That Failure Isn’t Fatal. The devil will try and convince you that you will never get back up. Failure isn’t fatal, it’s not the end. Failure isn’t final with the Father. I’m glad of that.
But let me share with you two more things that we should do:
3. RECOGNIZE THE BENEFITS - Are there any benefits? We usually think of failure as a negative experience. But wise people (like the kind in Proverbs) learn from failure. Wise people use failure to their advantage. Wise people make the most of failure. They learn from it, they grow from it. They use it as a stepping stone. They get back up and try again.
Thomas Edison failed 9,999 times before he figured out the light bulb. He said, “They were not failures, I just learned 9,999 ways it wouldn’t work.”
George Washington lost two-thirds of his battles, but he is known as one of the greatest men ever in our nation, our first President, and a founding father of our country.
R. P. Macy, the guy who founded Macy’s department store, failed seven times at retailing – seven bankruptcies before he started Macy’s, which was obviously a big success.
You have to learn from your failures, your mistakes. Did you know that one of God’s primary tools in making you the kind of person He wants you to be is failure? Failure is one of the tools God uses in your life to mold you, shape you, develop your character. *We rarely learn anything from success. Rarely. When we succeed we immediately think, “It’s just because of my sheer natural talent.” We don’t figure out why we succeeded. We seem to feel, "I just instantly knew how to do it.”
We rarely learn from our successes. But we can learn from our failures. And God uses those in our lives for multiple benefits. There are many ways He does that, but here are three ways that God uses failure to benefit your life.
1. God uses failure to educate me. Mistakes are a learning process. Some things we only learn through failure. One thing you learn is you learn about yourself. You learn more than your identity, you learn your content - your weakness, your inability, your insufficiency.
We learn that our ways are not good enough to propel us to success. We discover our inability to resist temptation, to stand on our own, and we recognize that we don’t know enough on our own, in our own wisdom and knowledge, to get us through in life. Failure teaches us about our self.
But failure also teaches us about God, His power, ability, sufficiency. It teaches us that we are dependent upon Him, and without utter dependence on God, we will fail and fall every time. Psalm 119:71 “My troubles all turned out for the best. They forced me to learn from God’s textbook.” God’s textbook is the Bible.
Isn’t it typical that often our Bible sets on our desk gathering dust but when the crisis comes, when the heat’s on, when the winds arise, we get out the Bible and start looking for truth and instruction and comfort and support and encouragement. God says, “Sometimes I have to use failure to get you into My Word so you’ll start learning the things that I want to teach you.”
“A man who refuses to admit his mistakes will never be successful” (Proverbs 28:13). You should circle “mistakes” and “successful”. Draw a line between them. Those two words go together. There is no success without making mistakes. If you’re not making any mistakes, you’re not growing. You had better just resolve in your heart that you’re going to miss it, mess up, fail, fall, get it wrong…..
You are going to make mistakes every week, probably every day. You need to learn that it’s okay to make mistakes, it’s okay to fail, as long as you take that failure and gain wisdom from it. What you want to do is learn from it, because God uses failure to educate us.
2. God uses failure to motivate me. We don’t usually change when we see the light; we change when we feel the heat. And there’s no heat quite like the heat of failure. Proverbs 20:30 - “Sometimes it takes a painful situation to make us change our ways.”
Sometimes God has to use a little pain to get us to change, to steer us in a new direction. And sometimes, that only comes through failure. Now, God doesn’t make us fail. We fail because we try and walk on our own, independent of God’s help. We fail because we’re human. It is a fact of life. But God uses our failure to motivate us to change our ways, our methods, and our practices.
If there is one thing that should motivate us to change our ways, it’s failure. God’s purpose in allowing it is to motivate us into becoming a changed person. Sometimes, a person has to experience a great failure to realize their own capabilities. People who fail, and give up, and run from God, instead of learning from their mistakes, are missing the whole point God wants to make in their life.
You have to understand two things: 1. You’re human. 2. Satan has desired to sift you like wheat. Satan appeals to our flesh, to our insufficiency, and the only way we’ll stand, or continue to participate in life, is if we realize that we cannot resist him on our own. We need God’s help, and sometimes we don’t realize it until we fallen on our face. God uses that to motivate me to change, and if I fail to do that, I’ve missed the point.
3. God uses failure to cultivate me. It can actually cultivate my character, can help me grow in my character. Romans 5:3-4 - “We can rejoice when we run into problems and trials for we know that they are good for us. They develop strength of character.” It says we can rejoice. Circle “rejoice”. Is that your typical reaction when you’re in pain? I doubt it.
When you’re at the point of failure you don’t usually rejoice. It says, “We can rejoice when we run into problems and trials for we know [circle “know”] What do we know? It’s what we know that makes us be able to rejoice. It’s not the problems that we rejoice over, it’s what we know that we rejoice over. We rejoice over the fact that God uses problems to cultivate our character. *Failure has a way of softening our hearts. It makes us sensitive to others. It makes us less judgmental. It makes us more sympathetic.
If you had an unbroken string of successes, if you never failed in life, if everything you did turned to gold, if every game you played you won, if the career you had always succeeded, if every investment you made, made millions of dollars, you had the Midas touch, do you realize how difficult you would be to live with?
You would be a very pompous person. You would have an ego a mile wide. You would have so much pride, so much arrogance, ego in your life that you would be impossible to live with. So God just allows all of us have a little bit of failure in our lives so we’re not so arrogant. God says, “I can use failure to cultivate you.”
Failure in your life does not automatically grow character. Just because you have problems doesn’t automatically mean you’ll grow character. You only grow in character if you respond in the right way. I know a lot of people who have been through problem after problem and they’re still a problem their self.
They’ve had crisis after crisis, failure after failure, and they’re still ignorant. Why? They’ve never responded in the right way. They haven’t responded in the way God wanted them to so God couldn’t use it to educate them, motivate them, and cultivate them. What do you do when you fail? Remember everybody fails, realize it’s not fatal, recognize the benefits, and you…
4. REST IN GOD’S GRACE - God isn’t surprised when you fail. He knew it was going to happen. In fact, He expects it. Even if you do fail, God doesn’t stop loving you. That’s called grace. Psalm 103:14 “God knows what we’re made of. He remembers that we are dust.” God knows how you’re wired up. He knows you’re just a human being. He knows your frailties. God doesn’t expect you to be perfect. Because He knows what you’re made of. He doesn’t stop loving you when you blow it and He doesn’t stop loving you when you fail.
This is a hard concept for some people to get because they grew up in performance driven homes. Many of you were taught that if you succeeded that meant, “I’m valuable. I’m worthwhile. I’m only significant if I succeed at a certain level.” But when you failed it meant, “I’m worthless. I’m invaluable and not significant.” You were taught that your worth was based on your performance, that what you are was based on what you do. That is a lie! It’s not true.
Your value as a person has nothing to do with your performance. God says, “I love you – period!” God’s love for you isn’t dependent upon what you do. It’s dependent upon who He is. It’s not based on your performance. It’s based on His character. God says you are worthwhile simply because He made you and He doesn’t make junk!
If you think you have to be perfect in order for God to love you, you have missed the central message of the Bible. You’ve missed the whole thing if you think you have to work for God to smile at you, or wink at you, or flirt with you. Don’t you know you are the apple of His eye? That you are precious in His sight?
The point is, God says “I love you, unconditionally. Regardless of what you‘ve done, and in spite of the failure.” *Let’s review the basics about God‘s love for you: 1) There is nothing that you can do that will ever make God love you more than He does right now. Nothing. 2) There is nothing you can ever do that will ever make God love you any less than He does right now. You can’t make Him love you less because His love is based on who He is – a loving God.
When Jesus Christ died for you on the cross, He paid for every failure you’re ever going to commit – the ones you did yesterday, the ones today and the ones tomorrow. The point is, you can rest in God’s grace. No matter how you fail, if you have committed your life to Christ, and will return to Him, God will pull you through that failure. He’ll even turn it around and use it for good. *Some of you may have gone through major failures in your life, and some of you may be in them right now. Often when you’re in the middle of a failure, it’s difficult to see God’s hand in your life.
The Christian life is not a failure-free life. It’s a life of grace. We are all trophies of grace. Everybody say this: “I am a trophy of grace.” Everybody is a trophy of grace. That’s the bottom line. If you are a believer, your primary witness to the world may be how you handle failures and struggles.
Christians have failures just like non-Christians do. The issue is how do we handle them. Are we intent on projecting an image of self-reliance, or do we show forth a life that is dependent on the grace of God? Relying on God’s grace is a whole lot better than fake perfection.
Really, there is only one failure you need to fear in life. You don’t need to fear any other failure except this one, but you do need to fear that you fail in this area. Hebrews 12:15 “Be careful that no one fails to receive God’s grace.” This is the one failure you can‘t recover from: To fail to receive the grace of God.
That means you go all through life rejecting God’s love, God’s son, God’s grace, God’s forgiveness, God’s power, God’s help. If you go all through life rejecting that, that is inexcusable and irrecoverable. There is no action that will make up for doing that.
I know that some of you’ve thought that because you’ve had a major failure in your life, you have been disqualified from the race, that you are now set on the shelf, you’re out of the game, and you cannot expect God to either bless your life or use your life from here on out. I say to you: You don’t understand grace.
This book is full of examples of failures that God used in significant ways. Abraham failed with his wife. Isaac and Noah failed with their kids. Moses failed to control his anger and killed a guy. David had a moral failure, committed adultery, and then killed the husband.
Thank God that He uses failures. If God only used perfect people, nothing would get done in this world, because there are no perfect people. None. If there are no perfect people, then God has to use imperfect people - and that means we’re all qualified! God looks for people with the “quality” of imperfection. That’s me! God uses imperfect people. That’s called grace.
*And if you will give your failings and failures to God, it can be your greatest life message, your greatest contribution, your greatest significant input into this world. Let Him transform it, teach you, motivate you, cultivate you through it and grow you by it. If you’re willing to be honest about it, God can even use your area of failure to teach and help and even deliver other people.
I don’t care what failure you struggle with and stumble over. It hasn’t changed God’s purpose for your life. God still has a plan for your life. God still has a purpose for your life. And God still has a place for you in this world. You just need to Face The Facts About Failure!
