Turning Failure Into Achievement
Acts 13:13 -- “Now when Paul and his company loosed from Paphos, they came to Perga in Pamphylia: and John departing from them returned to Jerusalem.”
Acts 15:35-41 -- “Paul also and Barnabas continued in Antioch, teaching and preaching the word of the Lord, with many others also.” “And some days after Paul said unto Barnabas, Let us go again and visit our brethren in every city where we have preached the word of the Lord, and see how they do.” “And Barnabas determined to take with them John, whose surname was Mark.” “But Paul thought not good to take him with them, who departed from them from Pamphylia, and went not with them to the work.” “And the contention was so sharp between them, that they departed asunder one from the other: and so Barnabas took Mark, and sailed unto Cyprus;” “And Paul chose Silas, and departed, being recommended by the brethren unto the grace of God.” “And he went through Syria and Cilicia, confirming the churches.”
2 Timothy 4:11 -- “Only Luke is with me. Take Mark, and bring him with thee: for he is profitable to me for the ministry.”
l. INTRODUCTION -- THE BEGINNING STAGES OF GREATNESS
-One of the greatest things about God is that He continues to work with men despite their own limitations and failings. Too often men do not allow God to complete what He starts within them.
-What is it that makes the difference? Why are there some who seem to accomplish so much with their lives? Is it. . . . . .
Family Background – Having a good family growing up is something to be grateful for, but it’s not the reliable indicator of accomplishment. High percentages of great men have come from broken homes.
· Wealth – Some of the greatest men of accomplishment have come from households of average to below-average means. Wealth is not an accurate indicator of high achievement, and poverty is no guarantee of low achievement.
· Opportunity – Opportunity is a very peculiar thing. Two people with the similar gifts, talents, and resources can look at a situation, and one person will see tremendous opportunity while the other sees nothing. Opportunity is in the eye of the beholder.
· High Morals – I wish it were that simple and that this were the key, but it’s not. I’ve known people with high morals but were low achievers and I have known scoundrels. . . . rats who were high producers.
· The Absence of Hardship – For every success who has avoided tragedy, there’s a Helen Keller who overcame extreme difficulties or a Viktor Frankl who survived absolute horrors.
-None of these elements, I believe are the key. I believe that the difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure.
-One must always remember that the difficult takes time, the impossible a little longer.
-Nothing is great in the beginning stages of when God first starts working in a man’s life. That man’s prayers will be elementary. His efforts will be clumsy and uncoordinated. His whole sense of walking with God will be spent in the shallows. But if that man refuses to give up or if he refuses to give in, if his desire and determination and his sense of purpose will capture his emotions, then God will work with his life.
A. Thomas Edison and His Light Bulb
Thomas Edison did not give up on his first efforts to find an effective filament for the incandescent lamp. He did countless experiments with countless materials. As each failed, he would toss it out the window. The pile reached the second story of his house. Eventually, he sent men into many different countries such as, Japan, South America, Asia, Jamaica, Ceylon, and Burma in search fibers and grasses to be tested in his lab. One weary day, on October 21, 1879, after 13 months of repeated failures, he succeeded in his search for a filament that would stand the stress of electric current. This is how it happened. Casually picking up a bit of lampblack, he mixed it with tar and rolled it into a thin thread. Then the thought occurred to him, “Why not try a carbonized cotton fiber? For five hours he worked, but each time it broke before he could remove the mold. Two spools of thread were used. At last a perfect strand emerged, only to be ruined while being placed in a glass tube. However, Edison refused to be defeated. He worked non-stop for two days and nights without sleep. Finally he managed to slip one of the carbonized threads into the sealed glass bulb. When he turned on the current, he beheld a sight that he had worked so long for, the bulb burned and provided light.
-Nothing is very great in the early stages of a man’s life. It takes time, persistence, and desire. These elements become the fuel for revivals, energy for relationship with God, and the absolute authority in the Kingdom of God.
ll. JOHN MARK’S STORY
-The whole series of Scriptures that we read gives rise to the John Mark’s story. He was the nephew of Barnabas, the son of Barnabas’ sister.
-In Acts 13, John Mark became a man who quit when the difficulty of missionary work settled in on him.
-The island of Cyprus lay behind them. The Apostle Paul and his company were now advancing into territory that would test the strongest man. Pamphylia lay to the south, Cilicia lay to the east and Lycia bordered them on the west. The Taurus Mountains lay in front of them.
-Paul, Barnabas, and John Mark had to endure the attack of Elymas, a man who was a sorcerer and full of the devil. John Mark had watched in awe as the power of God had struck this man with blindness.
-Acts 13:5, indicates to us that John Mark was in the position of a minister. In this context, the Greek word is a nautical term, HUPERETES. It literally means, under-rower, a galley slave. He was a man who was to be an errand boy and a gopher. Perhaps this is one of the things that was upsetting to John Mark.
-Yet, in front of them now lay the Taurus Mountains. The coastline was infested with pirates. The mountains were the home to robbers. The way was steep and rugged and full of wild animals and lawless men. The going was to be tough. But none of these things deterred Paul.
-To surrender at this point would mean that giving in would be the pattern for the rest of his life. But it was at this same point that John Mark quit. For one reason or another, just when he was needed the most, he gave up.
-Paul was apparently shocked at the desertion of John Mark. There is no record of what was spoken but he was written off as a quitter.
· He did not wait to test the difficulties just the imagination of hardship got to him.
· He did not throw himself into the work he quit before he had even made a mile into uncharted territory.
-Paul viewed him as a renegade. He looked upon him as one who was never again to be worth anything to the Kingdom of God. But there was something in the heart of Barnabas that refused to give up on him.
-Acts 15 moves forward two years. Again, faced with the dilemma of what to do with John Mark, the Bible states that a very sharp contention arose between Paul and Barnabas over the welfare of John Mark.
-Consider the plight of John Mark. Consider what his thoughts were.
· He could have decided that he was unimportant to the work of God.
· He could have felt that Paul had a personal vendetta against him.
· He could have decided that he had reached all of the potential that God had for him.
-There are no short-cuts to a man’s life becoming great for God. If a man tries to remove the disappointments, the defeats, the discouragements, the difficulties, the perplexities of his life, he is removing the finishing touches of God’s hand in his life.
-Too often men allow their circumstances to place the finishing touches on their lives. They allow the bitter disappointments, the trials they are forced to endure, the very dilemmas of life forge and shape their character in such a way that nothing profitable ever comes of them.
· Esau allowed God’s refusal to finish him.
· Lot’s wife allowed a backward glance to cement her to a place in history.
· Orpah travelled just a short distance toward her finish.
· The mixed multitude that left Egypt felt their finish with the pangs of hunger in their stomach for the fleshpots of bygone days.
-But to be an unfinished man. To be a man who turns failure into achievement, to be a man who can turn defeat into victory. To be a man whom is constantly seeking the hand of God in his life is what I want to be.
-So one might ask what is determination? How do I get the determination to go beyond my own failures and mistakes? I think it is best illustrated in something that a boxer once said:
At the end of the nineteenth century, a boxer named “Gentlemen Jim” Corbett, held the heavyweight championship title for the world for five consecutive years. When someone asked him what the key to it was, he answered with these words: “Fight one more round. When your feet are so tired that you have to shuffle back to the center of the ring, fight one more round. When your arms are so tired that you can hardly lift your hands to come on guard, fight one more round. When your nose is bleeding and your eyes are black, fight one more round. When you are so tired that you wish your opponent would crack you on the jaw and put you to sleep, fight one more round. Always remembering that the man who fights one more round is never whipped. . . . . He is always battling one more round.”
-There are endless ways by which God shapes the soul of a man.
· For some all it takes is a look, as with Zacchaeus.
· For some all it takes is for them to be blinded by light, as with Paul.
· For some it takes a midnight confrontation, as with Nicodemus.
· For some it takes a noonday conversation, as with the women at the well.
-The only growth worth investing in is that which grows slowly. Great men are made in stages. Not overnight.
Men who have labored to destroy diseases that crippled man, most of them faced defeat at every turn. But in spite of the lack of success, they kept pursuing in the labs, reaching for the answers that would defeat disease. Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, and Max Gottlieb all lost something in trying to find the answers to the problems of disease. Some would lose their wives who would be infected by the plagues they sought to kill. Some would find in later years they had been alone and abandoned because of their efforts to help someone else.
-It is not what a man keeps but rather what he gives that makes him great. It is not what a man possesses but rather what possesses the man.
-When a man says:
I don’t want to hurt. . . . . He is placing the finishing touches on his life.
I don’t want loneliness. . . . .He is placing the finishing touches on his life.
I don’t want defeat. . . . . . He is placing the finishing touches on his life.
The Process of Recovery
-There is only one road that returns back to the way of the Master. Along that road are three stopping places:
· The consciousness of the fall.
· The repentance for the failure.
· The final is a deepened consecration to the Master.
lll. JOHN MARK’S GLORIOUS RECOVERY
-The last Scripture that we read was written seventeen years later after the confrontation between Paul and Barnabas.
-There were two different stages in the life of John Mark. Sometimes a very poor looking specimen will turn out much better than we have anticipated. Sometimes it is in the young man that over the course of his life, time has a way of establishing and developing great qualities within him.
-Life and character have so many sharp turnings that you can never calculate the direction that ultimately will be taken.
-The opinion of Paul had been a very contemptible one. He concluded that John Mark was one of those men who placed a hand to the plow and then looked back.
· How much of John Mark’s progress came because of an uncle who loved him?
· Or how much of his progress came because of the contemptuous refusal from Paul?
Those are questions that will remain unanswered. But I am willing to set forth to you that every man needs a Barnabas in his life.
Business professors Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad have written about an experiment that was conducted with a group of monkeys. It is a vivid story of failure.
Four monkeys were placed in a room that had a tall pole in the center. Suspended from the top of that pole was a bunch of bananas. One of the hungry monkeys started climbing the pole to get something to eat, but just as he reached out to grab a banana, he was doused with a torrent of cold water. Squealing, he scampered down the pole and abandoned his attempt to feed himself. Each monkey made a similar attempt, and each one was drenched with cold water. After making several attempts, they finally gave up.
Then researchers removed one of the monkeys from the room and replaced him with a new monkey. As the newcomer began to climb the pole, the other three grabbed him and pulled him down to the ground. After trying to climb the pole several times and being dragged down by the others, he finally gave up and never attempted to climb the pole again.
The researchers replaced the original monkeys, one by one, and each time a new monkey was brought in, he would be dragged down by the others before he could reach the bananas. In time, the room was filled with monkeys who had never received a cold shower. None of them would climb the pole, but none of them knew why. (Adapted from Failing Forward by John Maxwell)
-Unfortunately people who have gotten used to failure can be a lot like those monkeys. They make the same mistakes again and again and their neighbors and friends around them become their greatest liability. That is why every one of us needs a Barnabas in our lives.
-What the monkeys did not know was that after the fourth monkey had neared the top of the pole that the water had been turned off. The fifth monkey would have gotten the bananas if he would have overcome the monkey business! ! !
-But God has an ability to create. . . . . . . .
· The heart of an intercessor.
· The passion of a prayer warrior.
-BUT YOU CANNOT QUIT TOO SOON, YOUR FAILURE MUST BECOME ACHIEVEMENT AND YOUR DEFEAT VICTORY. . . .
For six, arduous, lonely, grueling months, he tunneled through the granite, limestone, and shale. Digging his way into the heart of the mountain. For every outward appearance, the play of in the creeks and streams below this point, all the geological fingers pointed that somewhere in this mountain, deep in the inner recesses contained the precious gold-bearing quartz. But after long months of drudgery, sacrifice, and struggle had yielded not even a trace of the long sought-for metal, the prospector buried his pick, his candle, and his dynamite in discouragement at the extreme end of the tunnel. He abandoned his dream and hopes in bitter disappointment.
Years passed with amazing swiftness and an Eastern mining company was aware of the progress that had been made with this particular mine. They found the claim abandoned and placed notice that it would be re-opened. In the re-opening process, the timbers that had served as supports were replaced and the fallen rock had been removed. The company reached the end of the tunnel and there they found the rusty pick, the time-worn traces of the candle and the dynamite remained uncovered. The excavation started and six inches further on through the granite, gold was discovered.
In northern California, the mine proved to be one of the richest mines since the Gold Rush Days. Six inches further on was the gold. Consider the tragedy of those lost six inches. The words of the Lord, “Thou art not far from the Kingdom of God. . . .”
IT’S TOO LATE TO QUIT NOW. FORGET YOUR MISTAKES, SEEK THE GRACE AND POWER OF GOD AND KEEP PURSUING THE KINGDOM ! ! ! !
Philip Harrelson
barnabas14@juno.com
barnabas14@yahoo.com
