Minister: Marv Vose
Psalm 38:17-22 (The Message)
Attitude and perspective are everything. You can have the same, identical situation, but a different attitude and it makes the situation seem completely different.
A college girl wrote a letter to her parents. It went like this:
"Dear Mom and Dad,
I have so much to tell you. Because of the fire set off by the student riots, I experienced temporary lung damage and had to go to the hospital. While I was there, I fell in love with an orderly, and we have moved in together. I dropped out of school when I found out I was pregnant. He got fired because of his drinking, so we're going to move to Alaska where we might get married after the birth of the baby. Signed, Your loving daughter.
P.S.: None of this actually happened, but I did flunk my chemistry class, and I wanted you to keep it in perspective."
You see, our perspective really does make a difference. When it is framed properly, that F in Chemistry Class doesn't look so bad!
I want to start with our attitude today about failure. The truth of the matter is that we have developed a bad attitude about failure. We have gotten to the point where we think something is wrong if we make a mistake. If we fail, we think something is wrong with us or with our life. Many of us are afraid of failure!
Which is really silly! Do you remember how the kids or the grandkids learned to walk? (Go out into the congregation.) Did they ever fall down? (Let someone answer.) And what did they do next? They got back up and fell down again! And they just kept doing it until they got it right! That is who we learn to walk. We learn to walk by falling down and failing.
Do you remember how you learned to ride a bike? I remember it clearly. My two big brothers took me to the top of the lawn, sat me on this huge bike that was much too big for me and gave a shove! After that, I decided I would work on it myself. We learn to ride a bike the same way we learn to walk-by falling down. By failing!
Do you remember what it was like to learn to swim? If you were like me, you almost drown regularly!
Do you see a pattern emerging here? We learn by failing. We learn by hurting. In fact, Ben Franklin said, "Things which hurt, instruct." It is true in every aspect of our lives. We simply don't get it right the first time. We have to work at it before we get it right.
But then a funny thing happens. I'm not sure why this is but we start to forget how we succeed. We start to forget that it takes practice to learn to do new things and we become afraid of failure! Have you noticed that? We quit! We quit learning and growing because we get this lousy attitude about failure. We somehow decide it is wrong to fail!
Maybe it is because we start wanting our life to be a sure thing. You know what I mean? No more risks! We want to be able to know how everything is going to turn out and when! Which is really silly, isn't it? None of our ventures is certain. Nothing we do is a sure thing. We do our best and take our chances.
When Caroline and I got married, we did it with fear and trembling. Now I know everyone has some of that, but we had lots of it. And for good reason! We didn't really know if we knew how to be married. Her parents had been divorced. My parents had been divorced. We knew what the statistics were. We had about one chance in four of staying together. Just to make matters worse, one of my brothers had gone through an ugly, messy, painful divorce just a few years before. And I had been exposed to some of the nastiness, so I knew firsthand how it looked and felt. I actually wrote to my oldest brother, who was still married, and I asked him if marriage was worth the risk. He was the only one I knew who had had any success with marriage so he looked like an authority. He wrote me back a very thoughtful letter and talked about the ups and downs of marriage. He shared some of his successes and failures. But, in the final analysis, he said it was worth the risk. So we got married, but we said, "Let's not have kids for at least five years, because we don't know if this thing will last."
It has...so far! We have survived two children, going back to school, more moves than I want to count and lots and lots of ups and downs. But who knows about tomorrow? Our marriage wasn't a sure thing. It still isn't a sure thing. But I'm really glad we took the risk! And we still keep taking that risk!
But we like sure things. We are afraid of failure.
Maybe we hate failure so much because it impacts our self-image. If we fail at something, we tend to personalize it and think we are failures instead of simply learning life. And the temptation is to simply ignore our failures or generalize them and say everybody does that. It is just normal.
And there are certainly lots of ways that we can fail and ignore those failures. We can fail at work and miss the promotion. We can fail in our relationships and cause all kinds of pain to ourselves and others. We can fail as parents. I used to tell me kinds that they didn't come with an instruction book and so I was just making it up as I went along! Did you ever feel that way? I've known folks who flunked retirement! They went back to work! Can you imagine that? We can fail at just the simple things.
This elderly couple was leaving church one Sunday. They were walking along a narrow sidewalk that led to the parking area. The man behind them was in a hurry so he tried to walk around them, but they stopped to admire some flowers. The man tried to go a different direction, when the woman bent over to smell a rose and blocked his path again. And then the older gentleman bent over to smell the same rose. The crowd was starting to back up behind the elderly couple and getting a little impatient. At just that moment, the elderly gentleman straightened up, looked at the man behind him and said, "It took us almost a lifetime to learn to do that." Then they moved on. Out of that whole crowd, one elderly couple stopped to smell the roses. They got it right, but it had taken them a long time! Sometimes we ignore our failures.
Or maybe we just don't notice. Sometimes we fail in our relationship with God.
The Psalm we read is attributed to King David. He's talking about his failure with God and you can hear the pain of it. It's excruciating. Sometimes we do the same, but don't notice. How many of you love the Lord your God with all of your heart, your mind, your soul, and your strength? I'm afraid I can't say that I do. How many of you love your neighbors as yourself? Well...you would need to know our neighbors! Failures! We don't measure up.
But if we don't notice our failures, if we ignore them, if we try to shrug them off as insignificant, then our failures lose their value! We don't learn the lessons! We don't grow into the people God calls us to become.
Failure can be our pathway to success. If we use our failures well, then we can continue to become mature in the faith. As is says is Ephesians 4, we can become "fully alive, like Christ." That's our standard and we don't want to lose sight of that.
If we are going to turn our failures into successes, we have to persevere. We have to fall down and get up. We have to fall off the bike and try it again. We have to jump into the deep water and flail until we learn to swim. We have to keep doing it and doing it. But the temptation is to stop! And so many people stop without learning the lesson.
Thomas Edison said, "Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up." Isn't that a sad statement? To think of people being just almost there and they give up.
John Maxwell wrote an excellent book entitled, "Failing Forward." If this is a topic that interests you, I'd encourage you to get it and read it. It might just change the way you think about your life and what happens in it. It just might help you learn to use failures as training for success. When you get to that place, you've made a major turning point in your life.
In chapter 12, which is called, "Make Failure Your Best Friend," he shares a personal experience. He was at his companies Christmas party and felt an excruciating pain in his chest. He went down for the count. As you have probably guessed he had a major heart attack. As he says, "A minor heart attack is when it happens to you. It is a major heart attack when it happens to me!" He really thought he was going to die that night and the Doctors later said that if it had occurred a few years earlier, he would not have survived. Medical technology had improved that much in a short period of time. John went on to say that the heart attack was extremely shocking, surprising and painful, but he learned from it. He lists his lessons in the book. "When it comes to telling the important people in your life how much you love the, you can never do it enough." That was one. Number two. "I believe my work on earth is not yet finished and God has spared me so that I can complete it." Finally, "I must change my living habits for the sake of my health, the quality of my life, and the impact I desire to make in the future."
Pretty good lessons, aren't they. And they all came from what many people would consider an unqualified tragedy.
Jesus knew all about failures. He lived with them for most of his life and he taught others to do the same thing. Do you remember that story where he was preaching beside the Sea of Galilee and the crowds got so big he borrowed a boat to teach in? He sat down in the boat and taught to the people on the shore. After he was done, he told James and John to go out into the deep water and let the nets down again. Now there were all kinds of reasons not to do that. After all, they were professional fishermen. They knew how to fish and he was just some rabbi. They almost had the nets cleaned and they were tired and on and on and on. But maybe most significantly, they had failed that night. No fish. All night long and no fish. That's a failure. And now some rabbi wants them to do it again? Who wants to take that kind of risk? But they did it one more time and it was such a stunning success that it changed their lives and the course of human history. I'm so glad they tried one more time!
When you look at the life of Jesus, he was failing consistently! We tend to think of his life as one success after another because we have read the end of the story, but as it was unfolding it was one failure after another. Remember when he went home and preached there? Things turn ugly and they take him out of town and try to stone him! I've gone back to my hometown a few times and the reception has always been better than that!
He had some successes with healings and other things that people couldn't explain. Some called them miracles, but the Sadducees and the Pharisees didn't believe a bit of it! They said he was the devil himself! That's the way he was able to cast out demons, because he was the leader of the demons! Try as he might, Jesus never ever was able to convince the religious establishment. They just grew to hate him more and more. He was a miserable failure where they were concerned. As Jesus got closer and closer to the end of his life, it became more and more obvious that he had been unable to convince so many people that the Kingdom of God was upon them. We see Jesus entering Jerusalem and weeping over the city because of his failure. He had been working so hard for three years to bring in the Kingdom and now he was at the end and what had he been able to accomplish. Seems pretty much like a failure, doesn't he? And then they arrested him and killed him. His followers were convinced that he had died a failure and so they scattered and tried to hide for their own protection. But Jesus never gave up. He never stopped. He persevered even to the very bitter end. And that changed everything! When everyone else was sure he had failed there was still one more chapter. Resurrection! Easter! And that changed everything!
As Christians, life is all about being faithful. And sometimes being faithful is all about living and learning through failure. Sometimes being faithful is about persisting through failure. And becoming more and more God's person.