The Christian and Failure

Good morning! Today we will have a shorter message followed by a time remembering the Lord with the bread and cup, and then we will have a sharing time. Our sharing time will focus on lessons the Lord has taught you in 2010 as well as things you desire to see the Lord do in your life in 2011. I realize we have just gone through Christmas, and it may be hard to even think about 2011 so soon, but this will be what we try to do.

First though, I want to talk a bit about failure. My message at Faithwalkers this year is entitled The Christian and Failure, and what I share now is a portion of what I will share in that message. So if you are going to Faithwalkers, when you are there, don’t listen to me, but go to one of the other sessions when I am speaking.

Have you ever struggled with feelings of failure? Most, if not all of us have. Some of us know what it is to be paralyzed by a fear of failure, to be “bitten once,” so to speak, and then to be afraid to act in such a way so as to be hurt in the same way again. This too is pretty common.


Unfortunately, fear of failure is an area of our lives we can tend not to really look at, and just accept as somehow “who we are.” Tragically, it is an area of our lives in which we keep things hidden, even subconscious, and thereby fail to examine things in light of Scriptural truth, and we also fail to bring it in prayer to Christ. I say “tragically” because the result is tragic, tragic because we don’t have to be permanently scarred by failure or paralyzed by fear of failing again. This is not how our loving God desires that we should live.

I thought we could start in prayerful reflection. Ask God to show you how feelings of failure or fears of failure affect you. Ask God to search your heart and reveal to you past incidents that you have suppressed. Ask God to show you things you are doing now (or not doing now) that are a result of past hurts in this area. And after you ask God these things, simply sit quietly and listen. Allow the Holy Spirit to reveal things to you, and as things come to mind, write something down, not detailed descriptions, but just enough so that later, you will remember what it was that came to mind. I’m not going to ask you to share these, or turn anything in; these are just for you.

Well, one of the main reasons I am speaking on this topic today at Faithwalkers and here today is that I have experienced these feelings myself. I will confess to you that if I allow myself, I can fall back into patterns of unhealthy thinking even now. I tend to think of my life in three spheres, as professor, as pastor, and as husband and father, and in each of these spheres, there are things that can trigger these feelings. I know I have weaknesses in each of these areas, things I just don’t do well, important things. There are other things in these areas I think that, by God’s grace, am reasonably good at. But there are days when I feel like I fail at these things too.

If you have similar feelings, or if maybe you don’t feel like you have found anything yet that you excel at, that’s OK! As we go on, I think you will be encouraged.

I want get into how we can define failure Biblically, as opposed to what our culture would say about failure. And to do this, I want to talk about the opposite of failure, success. I would say that our culture would define success in terms of the ability to gather possessions, to wield power, and to obtain prestige. Ultimately, in our culture, a successful person is one who has wealth, is a leader, and is well known and envied by others for what they have and what they have done. Now, let’s look at these aspects of culturally-defined success one by one.

If you’ve been a Christian for any length of time, you’ve probably figured out that success in the Christian life and becoming wealthy are nowhere near the same thing. Now, that’s not to say that wealth and Biblically-defined success are mutually exclusive; it is possible to be wealthy and successful, but it is equally possible to be poor and successful. Of course, you can also be successful and somewhere between wealthy and poor. Now, Biblically speaking, wealth and poverty each have their own challenges when it comes to being successful. This is spelled out clearly in Proverbs 30:8-9:

“Give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread. Otherwise, I may have too much and disown You and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’ Or I may become poor and steal, and so dishonor the name of my God. – Prov. 30:8-9

Here in America, what we call middle class is far above “give me only my daily bread.” For most of us, the risk is of “disowning” God rather than being tempted to steal out of hunger.

So, Biblically defined success is not based on accumulating wealth. What about prestige? Prestige is about pleasing man and getting his approval. As with wealth, it is possible to be Biblically successful and be well-known and respected, and it is also possible to be Biblically successful and either relatively unknown or even scorned by other people the world calls “important” or “prestigious.” Again, popularity and obscurity each have their own challenges when it comes to Biblically-defined success. Anyone can be tempted to seek out man’s approval. Those who are popular can become addicted to popularity, and those who are not can become jealous of those who are popular, forsaking God in the process.

What about power? In our culture, I think power is less of a draw than wealth or popularity, but many people are enticed by power, especially as they become older. Again, Biblically speaking, success does not depend on being powerful. Both the powerful and the powerless can be successful, if you use the Bible to define success. Like wealth and fame, it is something separate from Biblical success.

So just what is success, Biblically speaking? One definition of success I really like is attributed to Dr. Charles Malik: “Success is neither fame nor wealth nor power. Success is seeking and knowing and loving and obeying God.” If you allow the world to define success, note that it is highly unlikely that you will ever be successful. What are the odds that you will become truly famous, fantastically wealthy, and extremely powerful? Note that if you seek after these things, the more you achieve, you will inevitably ratchet up your definitions of “enough” in each of these areas. With regards to wealth, for example, when you have $100K, you will think $1M will be enough. But when you have $1M, you will think you need $5M, and so on.

By worldly standards, the Pharisees in Jesus’ time were the definition of success. They were generally well-to-do, well-respected (at least by each other), and they had a degree of power (although only as much power as the Romans would let them have). But by a Biblical definition of success they failed miserably. Did they really seek God? Did they know Him? Did they love Him? Did they really obey Him? No.

In as an extreme contrast as you can possibly have, you have Jesus. Although fully God, He was also fully human. And yet in His humanness, He sought God. He knew God. He loved God. And He obeyed God, even unto death. Jesus was not rich; He was poor, even by the definitions of the culture at that time. He really wasn’t all that famous; yes, some crowds followed Him, for a time, but they eventually left Him too. Even His closest disciples left Him at the end. Was Jesus powerful? Yes and no. It is true that God did many miracles through Him. But Jesus always only used God’s power in accordance with God the Father’s will. Jesus did nothing on His own. Do you really “own” power when you never, ever use it for yourself? From a worldly perspective, I think the answer would be “no.”


So we have talked about success. What about failure? If Biblical success can be defined as seeking and knowing and loving and obeying God, then Biblical failure must be not seeking God, not really knowing Him, not loving Him, and not obeying Him. I think it is really important to grasp this. Write it down! To see if you really get this, I am going to give you some scenarios and ask you whether, Biblically speaking, these would qualify as failure.

1. You have a job doing xyz at company ABC. You try hard, but you aren’t that great at it. You get laid off and can’t find a job for the next 12 months. Success or failure? Biblically, neither. These issues are tangential to Biblical success and failure.

2. You have a job doing xyz at company ABC. You are good at it. You are promoted after a year, and promoted again 18 months later. You make a down payment on a nice house. Success or failure? Biblically, neither. These issues are tangential to Biblical success and failure.

3. After college, you move and don’t really find a perfect church, and eventually you give up looking; life is busy. You meet the most amazing person and fall in love. This person is not a believer, but seems so nice and kind. You ask this person to marry you, and this person says “yes.” You have a good job and life seems great. Success or failure? You are heading towards failure.

4. You are plugged into a good church and have meaningful quiet times. You would say that you love the Lord. But you are shy and are afraid of speaking in public. You feel pressure to share the gospel with people but you just can’t. You can’t even pray out loud in your small group. Success or failure? I would say, Biblically, success. Can you grow in this area? Can you learn to pray out loud? Can you even learn to share your faith? Absolutely! But your current weakness in this area is not failure. It is actually an exciting area in which you will have the opportunity to see God work in your life. If you allow it, it will grow your faith and grow your love for Christ.

5. You are a college student or a teenager, and because you have good social skills, you are asked to lead a small group in your church. You agree. Things go well; the group is a good mix and has some people who are great people-bringers, and soon your group doubles in size. Success or failure? Neither. Growth in a group can happen for good reasons as well as not-so-good reasons. But in any case the reasons may not be related to you. How is your walk with Christ doing? That is the question that will determine whether you are Biblically on the path to success or failure.

6. You are a college student or a teenager, and your pastor asks for volunteers to lead a small group. Because you desire to serve the Lord any way you can, you agree. Although the leadership helps equip you to do this work, you don’t feel very gifted at it, and over three painful months your group steadily declines. Finally, your pastor combines your group with another or ends it altogether and you no longer continue to lead. Success or failure? Biblically, I would say success. You did what you did, you endured a lot of pain, because you desired to serve your Lord. That is great! Why did the group fail? Should you dare try to lead another group again? These are hard questions, and each situation is different. It is possible that your gifts lie in other areas, but it is equally possible that God wanted to use this time to train you for future group leadership opportunities in a way you could only learn through the pain of this experience. God may have wanted to use this to grow you for different ways of serving Him. The bottom line is that you served because you loved, and you shouldn’t let a hard experience keep you from seeking Him to lead you and serving Him again.

7. You would say you love the Lord and you serve Him in many ways in your church. You are now part of a group of people receiving special attention, a kind of discipleship group. You, however, all this time, have been indulging in a secret sin, and although you used to confess it regularly to God, you don’t talk to God about it anymore. Success or failure? Although there are some good things going on, you are heading towards failure. You need to not only confess this to God, but to find a trusted leader or other mature believer and confess and seek accountability and help. As it says in James 5:16, Confess your sins to each other and pray for one another so that you may be healed.

It is so important that we have a proper Biblical perspective on success and failure. I hope that these examples have helped. It is so easy to deceive ourselves on these things, and so often, what the world would call success turns out to be failure and vice versa.

As we have gone through these examples, you can see that sometimes we are dealing with genuine failure, and other times we are dealing with trials. To look at each, let’s examine the life of the Apostle Paul for a moment.

Did Paul experience genuine failure, Biblical failure? Absolutely! This was a man who zealously persecuted Christians, who almost single-handedly scattered the early church. He personally put both men and women in prison. He was present at the stoning of Stephen, not just as a bystander, but as a sort of ringleader, for the witnesses laid their coats at his feet.

For Paul, the following meeting with Jesus on the Damascus road was not a restoration, because there was nothing to restore. It was an introduction. Jesus’ question to him was “Why are you persecuting Me?” And after being restored of his sight, Paul began to preach that Jesus was the Son of God.

Paul went on to bring many many people to Christ. He really was the Apostle to the Gentiles. Generation after generation, what largely started with Paul grew to the church we have in the world today. Paul wrote many of the books in the New Testament, books that we cannot imagine being without. It is hard to imagine anyone a greater success than Paul.

But do you ever stop to think how Paul had to deal with feelings of inadequacy? He experienced more kinds of ministry failure than we can count. One is that he had to experience people, both individuals and groups, deserting him even though he had spent time with them. He had to watch ministries he had started literally fall apart. We talked about this quite a bit in 2 Corinthians this year. Here is another example:

You know that everyone in the province of Asia has deserted me, including Phygelus and Hermogenes. – I Timothy 1:15

Again and again Paul had to deal with people attacking his ministry and his character. Some of these attacks were entirely without merit, but others were based on realities, on aspects of true weakness in Paul’s life. For example, Paul was apparently not a super-wonderful speaker. Many could speak better than he in the classic Greek tradition. Here is just one example of this:

For some say, “His [Paul’s] letters are weighty and forceful, but in person he is unimpressive and his speaking amounts to nothing.” – 2 Cor. 10:10

Paul goes on to admit that he was not “classically trained.” And the effects of his preaching and even the miracles God did through him often went with little or no fruit. In Lystra, Paul healed a man who was lame. But what was the result?

When the crowd saw what Paul had done, they shouted in the Lycaonian language, “The gods have come down to us in human form!” Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul they called Hermes because he was the chief speaker. The priest of Zeus, whose temple was just outside the city, brought bulls and wreaths to the city gates because he and the crowd wanted to offer sacrifices to them. – Acts 14:11-13

(By the way, I can’t help it, but when I read this passage I always think of the scene in Star Wars Episode VI in which the Ewoks are worshiping C3P0.) Now, you can say that Paul couldn’t blame himself for this, but read on. In verses 14-18, Paul and Barnabas speak to the crowd and turn them away from sacrificing to them. But then,

Even with these words, they had difficulty keeping the crowd from sacrificing to them. Then some Jews came from Antioch and Iconium and won the crowd over. They stoned Paul and dragged him outside the city, thinking he was dead. – Acts 14:18-19

Talk about failure in ministry! In a contest of sorts between’s Paul’s message and the message of the Jews, Paul lost to the point that not only did he almost fail at stopping the sacrifices, and not only did he have no converts, he was so hated and reviled that the crowds tried to kill him and almost succeeded.

I also think of Paul’s experience in Athens, in Acts 17, where he spoke up in the Areopagus. It says that some people did ultimately come to Christ through this teaching, but in general, the fruit was small. This was no Acts 2 event. The more common fruit of Paul’s words in Athens was that people “sneered.”

Another example we could go into was the near-riot in Ephesus, Acts 19. Paul wanted to speak to the half-mad crowd, but the disciples did not let him. I’m not going to even begin to try to figure out if Paul or the disciples were “right.” My point is to think about how this felt to Paul. I can imagine how the arguments might have gone. “Paul, don’t take this the wrong way, but when you speak, there is a tendency for people to get mad at you and want to kill you. These guys already want to kill you! Please, don’t speak. Your gifts do not extend to bringing a sense of order and calm to a people.”

But let’s apply the previous parts of this teaching. Do these incidents really point to failure from a Biblical perspective? Is Paul not seeking, not knowing, not loving, or not obeying God? Quite the contrary! He is doing what he is doing for precisely these reasons! It’s a hard lesson, but it is undeniably true that sometimes God leads us directly into hardship, into what the world would call failure. We need to stop judging failure and success from a worldly perspective, especially with regards to ministry. Should we be fruitful? Ultimately, yes. But in the short term, fruit may or may not happen, just as we have seen with Paul. The real test should be our hearts. Do we seek Him? Do we know Him more and more? Do we love Him? Do we obey Him?

If we are struggling with feelings of failure, what can help us? How can we help others who experience feelings of failure? There are many verses we could use here, but I want to point to 1 Corinthians 1, Paul, speaking of his inadequacies, writes:

For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel—not with wisdom and eloquence, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.” – I Cor. 1:17-19

Do you catch the incredible message here? God did not allow Paul to speak the words of the gospel with wisdom and eloquence! Why? Because God did not there to be any confusion about where the power comes from. The same is true of you! What you consider your failings, if they are lack of abilities, a lack of gifting (as opposed to sin and disobedience), may in fact be God’s perfect plan for you.

This message appears many ways, again and again, in the Bible. In 2 Cor. 4, we saw it put this way: But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. – 2 Cor. 4:7

A jar of clay is the complete opposite of a fancy jewelry box. The modern-day equivalent would be a Wal-Mart plastic bag. Plain, cheap, common, unimpressive. Nobody ever says, “Ooh, look at your Wal-Mart bag!” It might be that, your whole life, nobody ever says, “Ooh, look at you!” So be it! How much better that they would say, “Oh! Look at Jesus!” and fall before Him!

Going back to our passage in I Corinthians 1, Paul says this:

Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength. – I Cor. 1:20-25

Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written: “Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.” – I Cor. 1:26-31

It doesn’t matter whether you feel chosen or not; these verses are clear. You have been chosen by God, not because of your gifts and talents, but in spite of your lack of them, and perhaps, even because of your lack of them! You are going to have some weaknesses, weaknesses that affect how you serve God, weaknesses that affect you at work, weaknesses that affect your ability to be a husband or wife, father or mother. You may or may not achieve a measure of success, as the world defines success. But if your heart remains tender to God, if you continue to seek to know Him, if you continue to love Him, if you continue to work to obey Him, God will use you and produce good things through you. If you do these things, God will shame the world for eternity through you. God will show the world the emptiness of worldly success, and the unimaginable and eternal fulfillment of Biblical success, through you, if you remain in Him.

And we remain in Him because He died for us. So let us follow the instructions He gave us, and take the bread and the cup and remember Him. From a worldly perspective there was no greater failure than to die as a criminal on a cross. And we cannot even begin to imagine the physical pain He went through, let alone the anguish He experienced has He took our place, experiencing the full power of God’s wrath for the sins He did not commit, but we did.

And so, as the music plays, remember Him, and worship Him. Thank Him for His incredible sacrifice. Thank Him for His love. Thank Him for 2010, even the trials it contained. And commit to Him 2011, that He would use you for His glory.