20 Mar How to Respond to Divinely Induced Failure
5 STEPS FOR REINTERPRETING FAILURE
Have you ever felt like a failure? Have you ever failed so often, or so badly, or for so long that you have concluded that you are a failure? Have you ever felt as though God has forgotten you… that he has left you behind, doing more important things with more interesting people?
If so, you’re not alone! This is the third and final post in this series on turning failure into success.
We saw in the first post in the series that failure is more common than success, but that if we deal with it effectively, failure can become a valued friend.
We saw in the second post in the series that there is “failure baggage” we must not take into the future. We must overcome both the internal and the external weaknesses that contributed to our failure.
This week, we look at biblical principles for responding to divinely-induced failure.
The fact is, there may be times when God wants us to fail, using divinely induced failure as an instrument to increase our spiritual capacity:
“All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful; yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.” Hebrews 12:11
How do we cope when we feel like failures, and when God seems to be the one behind it?
1. Evaluate with eternal values, not temporal values
Ultimately, success is determined by eternal values and not temporal values. The world’s values will lead us in the wrong direction nearly every time. For example, Jesus said that if we want to be great, we must become a servant to others:
“…whoever wishes to become great among you shall be your servant…” (Mark 10:43).
Well, a servant doesn’t look successful in the eyes of the world, but a servant does look successful in the eyes of God. So, we must transfer our value system to heaven, and recognize that failure from Earth’s perspective may not be failure from heaven’s perspective at all.
2. Account for divine training sessions
God takes us through training sessions, during which we may feel that we have been taken out of the game.
For example, basketball players are made in the summers, and displayed in the winters. In the summers, it’s running, lifting weights, skill drills, and no basketball games. It’s a time of preparation for the games, which come later.
God does the same thing with us. He puts us through periods of preparation before he uses us.
Abraham, Joseph, Moses, and David were all given indications by God that He was going to use them greatly. But before He actually did use them, He put them through trial after trial after trial… as training sessions to prepare them for being used.
3. Factor in eternal rewards
Apparent failure in earth’s eyes may be an avenue of great eternal reward for us. As long as we are doing what God asks us to do, even if it’s less than we wish… if it is what He asks us to do, we are given eternal reward for faithfulness!
“We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may be paid back according to what he has done while in the body…” 2 Corinthians 5:10
4. Welcome failures as instruments of spiritual transformation
God takes us through trials in order to make us into the kind of people he wants us to be. So we should not resent the trials, but should welcome them as instruments through which God will make us more like Christ.
“Consider it all joy my brothers when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” James 1:2-4
5. See more than meets the eye
What we are doing that seems unsuccessful in our eyes may be much more important than we realize.
After Joseph had been sold as a slave by his brothers and was then reunited with them in Egypt, Joseph’s brothers were afraid Joseph would exact revenge against them. But Joseph didn’t. He forgave them because he saw more than met the eye:
“As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive.” Genesis 50:20
As a modern day example, imagine that you are a CIA agent, and that you have been assigned to a very mundane task. You’re staying in a hotel across from the United Nations, watching who comes and goes. If a certain person comes or goes, you are to immediately contact your superiors and let them know.
Here you are… well-educated, highly trained and deeply motivated to do something important for your country, and all you are doing is staring out a window for hours a day, days on end. You might think, “What am I doing? Why are my talents being wasted?!”
Well, you have to reorient your thinking. There is a larger operation going on. There are other agents in other places, doing other things, reporting back… while someone in headquarters is putting all the pieces of this information puzzle together, and making strategic decisions that will result in a successful operation regarding something of national importance.
What you are doing is functioning as a smaller cog in a larger wheel, and therefore it is vital! Without your piece of information, the overall goal cannot be met.
As a Christian, we have to take the broader picture and understand that God may be doing something much more important through our faithfulness than we could ever imagine.
Perhaps He is using us to train someone else who is going to do something spectacular in the future… and the impact of our ministry cannot be known until the other person does that spectacular thing. This is especially true in teaching/rearing children.
We must come to believe that what we are doing, while it may seem modest to us, may be much more important in heaven’s eyes than we realize.
Conclusion
We must let God be God, we must let Him be boss, we must understand that He loves us and would never squander His investment in us. If we focus on faithfulness rather than success, God can use us however He chooses, in ways more important than we may realize.
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