Confronting Failure

It's good to see you all here, and again, as Amy already mentioned, hello to those on our webcast. I know, for example, my kids and grandson are there, so I'm saying a lot of them, for sure. And also to all of our guests and visitors, we're going to get that mic adjusted. Okay, perfect. Thank you. On April 1st, 2009, shortly after midnight, and I remember it just like it was yesterday, my boss walked into the bankruptcy court in the southern district of New York and declared our company SGI bankrupt.

It was that same time that Chrysler declared bankruptcy. Many companies declared bankruptcy. SGI had been one of the great technology companies of Silicon Valley in the 1990s. It was founded by a gentleman named Jim Clark, who, along with Mark Andresen, later went on to found Netscape, the first internet search engine. And it supplied, SGI supplied the latest technology to Steven Spielberg for his first Jurassic Park movie. And if you were cool, you had an SGI workstation in the 1990s. Revenues were in the billions. President Clinton came to speak at the company event.

And one year, the company was doing so well that it decided to buy every single employee, I think there were about 15,000 employees at that time, a Tag Howard watch, just to say thanks. In fact, in one of the company parties, the Beach Boys came to perform, just to keep it interesting. Today, Silicon Valley's tech museum is housed in one of SGI's old buildings.

And in fact, there's this little company you've probably heard of called Google. They bought SGI's headquarters, and it is now their headquarters today. I decided to join SGI in 2008 as the chief accounting officer, with the intention of being part of a turnaround story. The company had been in decline for a number of years by the time I arrived. And now, on April Fool's Day, of all days, I felt like a fool being an officer of a bankrupt company going into the teeth of the Great Recession. If you look back and remember 2009, those were dark days. Those were difficult days. SGI was purchased out of bankruptcy by another company, and thankfully, I was offered my same role as an officer of the new company, which, surprisingly, renamed itself SGI.

So SGI continued for a number of years until it was purchased recently by Hewitt Packard. And I'll never forget the first meeting I had with my new boss, the CEO of what was then rackable and eventually became SGI. He was going through the reporting that he wanted to run the company. And I questioned a few things, and he cut me off immediately. And he looked at me, and I'll never forget, he looked at me and he said, I bought a bankrupt company. In other words, you basically shut your mouth because you're a failure.

You guys were bankrupt. And I don't want to hear your opinions because your opinions didn't do very well and I don't want to be a failure. Now, he didn't know me very well at the time, and I didn't know him. And that was not a good beginning. And in fact, to my shock, he actually apologized about that because he said, we probably didn't get off on the right beginning. And indeed, we didn't. And then we began to develop a very good relationship from that point forward.

But, you know, he had a point, right? I came from failure. Now, I had only been with the company for a year, but still, I came from that. And you don't want to repeat failure, do you? You want to make sure you're doing something else. And that hurt. It hurt to be associated and be part of failure. It was a difficult time in my career. Our failures are not something we like to talk about, right? I don't really particularly... I'm so excited about having my story of being part of a bankrupt company being on the web in a sermon.

But that's a fact. I was part of that story. I couldn't remember the date exactly, so I just Googled it. When did SGI follow bankruptcy? There it was! About 20 search results, all giving me all the information about it. Failure is embarrassing. Failure has long-term consequences, if not handled correctly. And today, I want to talk about failure. Failure like bankruptcy. Failure like divorce. Failure like defeat. Failure like poor judgment. Failure like bad decisions with long-term consequences, if not handled.

Not sugar-coated failure. Really tough, tough times. Failure. The Bible calls it the consequences of sin. How do we come back from failure? How do we come back when we're so beaten down, we can't even see a future? How do we deal with that? How do we live with ourselves after we failed? The title of today's message, as you heard, is Confronting Failure. Because that's what I'm talking about. I'm talking about confronting it. Not running from it, not pretending it didn't exist, but just looking into the face and staring it down.

And if we're dealing with guilt, if we're dealing with shame, if we're dealing with trying to figure out how we're going to move on with our lives, I hope this message can wake us up and get us back on track to what we need to be doing, what God wants us to do.

We're going to read the book. We're going to read a little bit from the book of Lamentations. I don't know if we've read from that book in this congregation in a while. We're going to read a little bit. In fact, we're going to read probably a lot more than you'd want to read from the book of Lamentations. And then we're going to look at some causes and responses to failure.

So let's go over to Lamentations 3. Lamentations 3, we're going to read, oh, I don't know, I read a third or so of Lamentations 3. I don't think there's any other place in Scripture where we can really see the depths of despair from failure, like we can see it in the book of Lamentations.

The context of the book of Lamentations, just so we're on the same page, is the fall of Jerusalem and the overthrow of the kingdom of Judah. It's the end of an era, 400-plus years of the temple existing under Solomon, and the end of the freedom that the people of Judah experienced in the face of just poor judgment, bad kings, just terrible decisions made decade after decade, and we heard about being deceived and, you know, kind of the long-term consequences of that. It was a time of national sorrow.

It was a time of pain. And we think Jeremiah wrote the book of Lamentations. It's not completely clear, but we'll use that for today. Jeremiah sat down and he wrote out really sort of a cathartic set of verses that captured what we would call now the zeitgeist of the time, just the spirit of the depths of despair, and just gave words to what people were feeling.

Let's look in Lamentations 3, verse 1. He says, I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of his wrath. Now, his here is capitalized. He's talking about God. This is not something of, like, well, things happen to us and, you know, I don't know how this happened. Now, this is God's wrath upon his people. He has led me and made me walk in darkness and not in light.

Surely he has turned his hand against me time and time again throughout the day. He has aged my flesh and my skin and broken my bones. He has besieged me and surrounded me with bitterness and woe. He has set me in dark places like the dead of long ago. You see, failure is like being in darkness.

Failure is like being in a hole. You can't get out. You can't even see the light. You might not even be able to see the sky. It feels like you're so deep in it. It's like you've been buried alive. It's like you're dead of long ago.

It's a sense of feeling besieged. It's a sense of bitterness of how you got there. It's this sense of just, it just ages us. It just tears at us. It just breaks our spirit like it breaks our bones. That's what he's talking about here. This is failure. This is despair. We're going to keep reading, so hang in there because this is not easy. This is not a pleasant topic.

Verse 7, he has hedged me in so that I cannot get out. He has made every, he has made my chain heavy. Even when I cry and shout, he shuts out my prayer. He has blocked my ways with hewn stone. He has made my paths crooked. He has been to me like a bear lying in wait, like a lion in ambush. He has turned aside my ways and torn me in pieces. He has made me desolate. He has bent his bow and set me up as a target for the arrow. When we have failed in our spiritual walk of faith, it feels like God can't hear our prayers.

It feels like no matter what we do, it's like there's no way out. There's no way out. We're blocked on every side. If you can imagine being mauled by a bear and a lion, being left mangled from that, you're just numb and you're mangled and somebody comes across as heap of flesh, that's what he's describing.

That's what failure feels like. It feels like you're literally just torn to pieces or you're somebody's target practice, right? You just got a giant target and it's just like, oh, you know, it just never stops. Verse 13, he has caused the arrows of his quiver to pierce my heart. I have become the ridicule of all my people. You feel ridiculed. You feel embarrassed.

You feel just everybody's just looking at like, oh, that poor man. I feel so sad for him, right? And you just feel that, it's that pity from people. I have become the ridicule of all my people and their taunting song all the day. He has filled me with bitterness and he has made my drink, made me drink wormwood. He has also broken my teeth with gravel and covered me with ashes. You have moved my soul far from peace and I have forgotten prosperity and I said my strength and my hope have perished from the Lord. Are we exhausted yet? Is this exhausting to read? Is this like, please just stop. I don't want to read this anymore. And it just goes on and on and on like this. And for me, the imagery of somebody taking gravel and shoving it in my face and breaking my teeth with this gravel and grinding it into my... I mean, that's just... that is such a metaphor for just utter hopelessness. You just lying there with broken teeth and a mouthful of gravel, total and utter defeat. Verse 19, remember my affliction and roaming the wormwood and the gall. My soul still remains remembers and sinks within me. This I recall to my mind, therefore I have hope. Whoa! Where'd that come from? I remember all this. I remember the mangling and the mauling of the bear and the gravel and the darkness and the despair. And I have hope. And I have hope. And so finally, 21 verses, we have the slightest piercing of the crack of light that might be shining through. Just this tiny little thing. I like how the Expositor's Bible Commentary describes this verse.

It says, the hope that the writer expresses here is not created by denying or minimizing suffering and misery. Rather, these are transformed when the mind is turned to God. There's no minimizing here. There's no holding back. There's no pretending. There's no denying. It's like David in Psalm 51, where he says, my sin is ever before me. There's no minimizing there. There's no blame game there. This is just staring failure in the face for all its ugliness and pain and suffering and just staring at it, embracing it, and moving towards it with a desire to understand what it is that's going on. Moving towards what God desires. We don't have to turn there, but at the end of the book of Job, Job 42, verse 5, you can just note that. Job says something very profound. He says, I have heard of you. One translation says, I've heard rumors of you. I've heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you. Therefore, I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes. The implication is that Job had finally seen God for who he was, and he could see the difference between who God was and who he was, that chasm that existed between him and God, and he realized just how awful a man he was. And therefore, he abhorred himself, and he wanted to repent of the attitude and behaviors that he had exhibited, and he wanted to repent with the greatest fervency of dust and ashes.

It is the gaze on our own depravity from which hope can spring. That's what verse 21 and 2021 is saying. It is the gaze of our own depravity from which hope can spring. And so now we come to verse 22. And verse 22 now turns the corner, and it takes that little sliver of light that we saw, and it opens the door to hope. Through the Lord's mercies, the N. Avi says, because of his great love, because of his great love, we are not consumed. Because his compassion fails not. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, says my soul. Therefore, I hope in him. Therefore, I hope in him. We don't get to embrace verse 22, verse 23, and verse 24, until we have confronted 21 verses of failure. We can't rise from failure through God's grace until we have spent time contemplating our own brokenness, our own failure. And if you notice, the first 21 verses, as I said, there's no blame game going on. There's no excuses. There's no obfuscation. There's no equivocation. Or the real cause of the failure was there is accountability in those 21 verses. There is an acceptance of consequences. It is in these 21 verses that we learn the lesson that God is looking to teach. I was part of a team. I sat in meetings. I could have spoke up, and my company failed. I failed. We opened that computer, and we typed that phrase.

We refused to listen. We made decisions without getting proper input. We were stubborn. We pretended that things really weren't that bad. Whatever the reason, God demands that we own our failures, and we confront the reasons why. And until we do, God will not be our portion, as is described here in verse 24. He's not going to be our portion, because our sins will separate us. What we see in the book of Lamentations is a failure at a national level, just like what I experienced, a failure at a company-wide level, but every single person in that nation, just like every single person in that company, bore responsibility for the failure of one of the great companies in Silicon Valley that doesn't exist anymore today. The nation of Israel, the nation of Judah, in this case, did not believe that there was a loving God that would eventually hold them accountable.

They were God's people on earth. God is not going to destroy Jerusalem. This is Solomon's temple.

Oh, surely he will not destroy Jerusalem. And yet, they were told. Look at Shiloh.

Look where God's presence used to be, and he destroyed that place.

So that's failure on a national level. What does failure look like on a personal level? Well, let's just look at a couple causes and effects of failure. The first one is failure is caused and continues because of our deceitful heart. It's over at Jeremiah 17, verse 9.

Just a few pages back, a memory verse for many people. Hopefully you remember this one. This is a very important verse. Failure is caused and continues because of our deceitful heart.

The heart is deceitful. Jeremiah 17, verse 9. The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it? I, the Lord, search the heart. I test the mind even to give every man according to his ways and according to the fruit of his doings. That's accountability, isn't it?

You know, you reap what you sow.

Now, we really should ponder what this means for our lives because if we don't, I believe that we can keep believing somehow that by our own power we can be good. We'll keep assuming that we're good even apart from God. See, I think human beings desperately want to believe that they're good, or at least to be seen to be good. Right? Yeah, I'm a good guy. Yeah, I'm a good guy.

And it's very painful to think that that's not true. Because what we're doing is we're saying, no, I'm not as good as I think I am. And then for other people to see it, one author, John Eldridge, calls it the poser. Right? The poser. And now the poser has been exposed for who he really is. And so when we sin, when we miss the mark, when we fail, the normal human nature says, hold on, we're going to make sure nobody knows about that. We're going to hide that. The other cause and consequence of failure is that we hide.

We hide. We'll go over in Genesis 3, verses 8 and 9. We'll see this first example of human beings hiding after they made a mistake. And it really hasn't changed since then. Genesis 3, verse 8, says, and this is Adam and Eve. We heard about this in the sermon. And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. They hid themselves because they knew they were in trouble. They had contradicted. They had gone against what God had told them to do.

And they didn't want to face the music. And so they hid. Verse 9, then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, where are you? And he said, I heard your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself. Oh, okay. Well, now he's making some excuses, right? What he should have said is, I knew I was in trouble, and I was scared, and so I ran and hid, right?

And from that time on until now, we as human beings hide when we make mistakes.

And the reality is that most human beings, us included, have the hardest time dealing with our own failure. We just want to pretend it didn't happen, or pretend it was not our fault, or put the blame on somebody else. Our unwillingness to admit that our own hearts can deceive us, that our own heart generates wicked thoughts, that is the nature of who we are as humans. We desire to be good. We desire to be seen to be good. And God is our Father, and God is good, and so we're made in His image. So I think it's natural, you know, like we're made in His image. We want to do that. But when we fail, we can react just like this. We can end up running and hiding.

We can't deal with what we're what we've done, with the consequences of what we've done.

We put on a facade. We pretend. He comes down to self-preservation, because we have an image to preserve. We have sort of a sort of a view of ourselves that we need to make sure we keep intact, because if that falls apart, then we just fall apart. And then, who are we? And that's the problem with failure. We're suddenly confronted with who we are, and we don't like that picture.

And so we run from it, and we hide from it, and we preserve ourselves.

Luke 8 verse 17, or we at least preserve an image of ourselves, even if it's not what God wants.

Luke 8 verse 17. When we're running and hiding from failure, Luke 8 17 is a verse that's very important to remember, because we're running and hiding. Jesus makes it very clear. Nothing is secret, Luke 8 17. Nothing is secret that will not be revealed, nor anything hidden that will not be known and come to light. It's all going to come out.

We can't hide it. We can't run from it. You know, in worldly wisdom, they say it's not the crime, it's the cover-up. Right? You never, the crime is never really what gets people. It's the cover-up.

That's where the problems start. Part of being converted is to understand that when we fail, we are not in the hiding business. We're in the cleaning business. Right? We're in the business of coming clean. It's time to come clean. Our attempts to hide our failures, our lacks, our deficiencies, they're going to fail. And every secret is going to be disclosed. It's just a matter of time. God is a God of mercy, and He loves us, and He's not going to allow us to keep hiding. When we attempt to hide, what we do is we carry a heavy burden by ourselves.

Right? We've got nobody to talk to because we're scared to death to actually say something. So, we're carrying this burden of what we've done. We refuse to seek help. We refuse to seek counseling, as we'd rather not. People know what's happening in our hearts and minds. It's too painful.

And eventually, what's going to happen is it's going to be too big, and something's going to break, and something's going to come out. So, how do we deal with it? Okay? All right? You say, all right, I'm not going to hide anymore. I'm going to confront this. What do we do? Well, there's three points that I want to share here. And they come from 1 Timothy, verse 1. If you want to go over to 1 Timothy 1 and verse 12, we're going to read a section of Scripture because the example of the Apostle Paul is a very powerful example of a man who confronted his failures, who confronted his past. 1 Timothy 1, verse 12. The first thing that, and you can note this down, the first thing we see in 1 Timothy 1, verse 12, is that Paul took ownership for his behavior.

He took ownership for his behavior. We have got to take ownership for our behavior. We did it. Nobody else did it. There's nobody else to blame. 1 Timothy 1 and verse 12. We read here, and I thank Christ Jesus, our Lord, who has enabled me because he counted me faithful, putting me into the ministry. Although I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and an insolent man, but I obtained mercy because I did it ignorantly in unbelief.

You know, this word, insolent, here is the margin it talks about being violent or violently arrogant.

Violently arrogant. The reason God tells us our hearts are deceitful and desperately wicked is because it gives us a starting point to identify who we are. It gives us a chance to think about humility. It gives us a chance to understand that in the deepest part of our being, that without Him, we're going to fail. We must own this. And when Paul said, well, okay, I was this way, now I did it in, you know, I thought I was doing the right thing or I did it ignorantly, that didn't change the fact that he did it. And sometimes our mistakes are done in ignorance. They're done because we think it was the right thing to do. Well, you know, typically, you know, as I've talked about before in the Ten Commandments, hopefully most of us are not going to walk in and rob a 7-Eleven. All right? But that doesn't mean we might not steal something thinking it's okay. And then later we realize, you know, I was stealing. I was taking something that I shouldn't take. But it doesn't change the impact.

It doesn't take away the accountability. Another company that I worked for was a company called Intel Corporation. And Intel had some difficult times in the 1980s before I worked there. And when I worked there, it was a well-known story that during those difficult times when Intel was facing stiff competition and frankly the risk of bankruptcy, Robert Noyce, Andy Grove, and Gordon Moore, the three sort of leaders of the company, got together and they asked themselves a hard question. They said, if we were fired and somebody else came in, what would they do to fix this problem? Now, that may seem like kind of a silly question to ask because it's like, well, you are in charge, so you can't fix it. But see, it's an interesting question because if you say, well, if I was fired and God brought in somebody else, what would what would he have him do? Or what would he have her do? And what it does is it gets rid of the pride, it gets rid of the hiding, it gets rid of the personal feelings of guilt and shame, it gets rid of the blame, and it just goes to the reality of what's happening. Right? It just goes to the reality. And these three gentlemen said, well, if we were fired, we would, you know, do this. And they kind of outlined a couple things. And they looked at that and, of course, you know, it meant, well, you know, you had to do this because you made a stupid decision over there, and you have to do this because somebody had a bright idea over there, and they're all looking at themselves going, these were all our ideas. So we've got to make a break. We've got to do something different because we were dumb. We made mistakes. And so why don't we go ahead and learn from our own mistakes so that we don't have to get fired and have somebody come in and do stuff that we know we would have to do anyway. Now Robert Noyce was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan, and he was a mentor of Andy Grove, sorry, of Steve Jobs. Okay, so, you know, a little credibility.

Gordon Moore, one of the richest men in the United States, I think he was worth something like six or seven billion dollars, he decided to give all of his money away to charity. I think he kept a small amount for his kids, you know, a hundred-something million dollars, you know, something would be great for us, right? But, you know, literally the man gave away his fortune. And Andy Grove was Time Magazine's Man of the Year in 1997. So these three men kind of have some credentials when it comes to rising to a point where there's a certain recognition of their contributions to society and to the world.

And so I think we can learn a little bit of worldly wisdom that maybe we should ask ourselves, you know, what advice would somebody give me that I'm not taking? Right? If I was fired and somebody was put in my place, what would that person do? If we get rid of that, we can move forward. So Paul said, okay, I for whatever reason, I did it ignorantly, but I did it. I did it. I was a blasphemer. I was violently arrogant, right? I didn't do what I needed to do, and God in his mercy gave me grace. And that's the second point that we have to walk through to understand failure when we confront failure. We have to live by grace. Because if we spend the rest of our lives beating ourselves up because we were the stupidest person in the world and we destroyed our lives, to some degree, obviously, if we're listening, we're still here, so we haven't completely destroyed our lives, we live by grace. We live by grace. And we see this in verse 14. And the grace of our Lord was exceedingly abundant with faith and love which are in Christ Jesus. Paul recognized his need for God's grace. He accepted God's grace. Jesus said to the woman caught in adultery, I do not condemn you. Go and sin no more. There were mitigating circumstances. There were things going on that we don't know in that story, but Jesus knew. And he told that woman, I don't condemn you. Go and sin no more. We live by his grace, accepting that we deserve death. We deserve those 21 verses in Lamentations 3. That's what we deserve. And perhaps it's with a heavy heart that we accept the consequences of our actions. But knowing that we have been cleansed by the blood of Jesus Christ, we don't have to live that way. We don't have to live like we're just this awful person. We accept what we did. We own up to our behavior. We accept the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for our sins and we move forward in faith. This is why Paul's preaching about grace is so powerful because he was a murderer. How did he feel? He could have walked around his whole life imagining those final words of Stephen, imagining the bloody blows that came from the stones as Stephen was martyred. And he could just take that to his deathbed. But he moved forward in grace. Now notice verse 15, this very simple statement that gets to the third point.

We confront our sinful nature. We confront it. Look at verse 15. This is a faithful saying, and it comes right after grace. So we start with grace. We start with grace. But right after that, this is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners of whom I am chief. So if Paul was in this room, he'd say, you got nothing on me. I am the worst. I am the worst of the sinners. Paul knew that he was no different than anyone else in the whole wide world. In fact, he was worse. He was a sinner, and not just any sinner. He was a specialist in chief. He had a degree in it. He excelled at it.

And you know what? You and me, in God's church, we're the same. We are just as much of a sinner as anybody else in this whole wide world. Now just think about that for a second. You could walk out of this room right now. You could drive across that bridge if you could make it through the traffic. And you could join the gay pride celebrations today, and you could look around you and say, I am just like these people. And we might say, oh, can you believe that? They're celebrating transgender, and they're celebrating homosexuality, and they're just degrading our society.

Well, look at yourself, because we're the same. Paul says he's chief, okay? I mean, Paul wrote a lot about sexual morality. He wrote a lot about covetousness. He wrote a lot about law-breaking.

That's what he says. Are we ready to accept that? Are we ready to accept that? That's confronting our sinful nature. You know, sometimes, oh, well, you know, we're called out. We're in the church. Well, yes, we're different because God has put his spirit in us. That's what makes us different. It's God's spirit in us. And God's spirit working in us to follow his ways. That's what makes us special. And when that's gone, we're just like anybody else. We're going to fall into whatever crime, whatever sin, whatever it might go through. Verse 16, though, says, however, for this reason, so he's a chief sinner, but for this reason, I obtained mercy because Christ came into the world to save me from my failure. I obtained mercy that in me first, Jesus Christ might show all long suffering as a pattern to you and me, to those who are going to believe on him for everlasting life. He showed a pattern, a murderer, a lawbreaker, somebody who was the worst, and he obtained grace and he obtained mercy because he confronted his human nature, he confronted his sinful nature, he accepted God's grace, and he said that's a pattern for those who would come after me. That's a pattern for what he was going to share with us. Have I failed? Have you failed? Have we fallen short of what God would want of us to be in his kingdom?

Every single one of us has done that, and the next time we start bragging about being in the Church of God or thinking that we are inherently in some way special, I hope we stop in our tracks and we think about verse 15 when Paul said, I am the chief sinner and I have obtained mercy and he has done this so that people would have an example to follow. We are only special because God has granted us his spirit and dwells in us. And when we accept our status, apart from God, that we are just sinners, this is when things begin to change for us because that's when we have really confronted the failure. That's when we wake up and say, hmm, I guess I was a little stubborn, wasn't I? I guess I was maybe kind of close-minded to what you were saying. I guess I was being selfish. I guess I am defensive, maybe by nature. I need to work on that. I need to change.

I guess I'm getting angry over nothing, aren't I? I guess I am shifting the blame off of myself and I'm not accepting my responsibility. I guess I'm ignoring the problem in myself. And this is when we go to someone who's giving a straight talk, right? Who's really just telling us where we stand.

And then all the time that needs to be a professional if we have an issue. Or some family member who is not going to hold back and tell us exactly where we stand.

And that's when we ask the other person, what have I done that hurt you? Because I know I've done a lot of things. I know I've done a lot of things to hurt you. What have I done? I need to know.

I can't change unless I know. Now some people respond to that and go, oh, I don't feel comfortable telling you because if I tell you, you're going to explode at me. Right? And so then if you start like, but you got to tell me, you got to tell me, oh, hold on. Maybe they're not ready to tell you. Maybe your behavior has been so bad that they're like, I'm going to wait six months to see if like this continues because I don't know if you're a safe person. So don't start getting demanding, right? Because the relationship might not be there yet. And when this happens, the words in verse 17 ring out in power. Now to the King, eternal, immortal, invisible to God, who alone is wise, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen. He says amen. I mean, this is failure being turned around. And that's why he gives God the glory. Because it is only through God's spirits, something like this is going to happen. It's only through God's spirit, something like this has happened. He gives God the glory. There's a quote attributed to Winston Churchill that he didn't actually write. So I'm just going to, if you find this attributed, he didn't actually write this. It's not clear the source, but it's a good quote anyway. Success is not final.

Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts. And when I read this passage here in verse 12 to 17 in 1st Timothy, and I think that Paul had the power to just keep going and going and going. I think it's because he owned up to his bad behavior. He lived by grace, and he didn't pretend that he was any better than anybody else. And he wasn't going to hide. And to take a phrase back from our modern culture, since this is this interesting weekend, we live out loud. We live authentically because we know who he was, and we know who we are, and we're moving forward in faith towards him, towards our issues, towards our failures. I'd like to conclude by turning to Proverbs 24 verse 15. There's an interesting proverb in here, and it's the way it's written.

It's just sort of written as a fact. It's just sort of an observation of a wise man.

Just a fact. And Solomon doesn't really sort of build on the fact at all. He just puts it out there.

Just something that he's noticed. Proverbs 24 verse 15. He says, do not lie and wait, a wicked man, against the dwelling of the righteous.

The New Living Translation says, don't wait and ambush at the home of a godly person.

Do not plunder his resting place. Verse 16. For a righteous man may fall seven times and rise again, but the wicked shall fall by calamity. And again, the New Living Translation message says, the godly may trip seven times, but they will get up again. But one disaster is enough to overthrow the wicked. The righteous know how to recover. It's just an absurd fact. The righteous know how to recover. They know how to get back on their feet.

It says seven times, but the metaphor is, as many times as it happens, they're just going to come back. So don't try and go after these people, because they're going to just come back.

They're going to get back on their feet. Whereas somebody who's wicked, they don't have the skills.

They don't have the tools. They don't have the mechanism to be able to do this, because when failure comes, they hide, they pretend, they blame. They do all the things that don't allow them to actually overcome the failure. And so one disaster is enough, and it's over. That's the difference between the righteous and the wicked.

Let us confront the darkness of failure. Let's confront the darkness of failure that we might embrace the hope of restoration. We just don't wallow in pity. We just don't wallow in what we've done. We do it for the purpose of being restored to hope, both for our physical relationships today and for our spiritual future in the kingdom of God.