Fear of Failing

Good afternoon, everyone. Good to be here with all of you. I want to say welcome to all our visitors who are with us today. Nice to have you here with us. Hopefully enjoy the nice, peaceful view of Boston Mills after a fresh snow that's up on the screen there.

Okay, that was supposed to be a joke. Okay, people are a little slow today. That's all right. We'll go with it. No secret what our topic is for today. You've seen it up there on the screen.

Failing. It's one of those topics we probably don't like to think about too much, but it is simply part of the human condition. I'd like to spend a little time today talking about failing, and part of the reason is we're coming up in a couple months' time now. I haven't counted the exact weeks, probably eight to ten weeks, from Passover. And of course, as Mr. Thomas was talking about in New Covenant sense, Jesus Christ is our Passover, and we do keep that Passover as a time to renew our commitment to God, and also to think back on the past year that we've had, to consider our spiritual progress and consider where we are. And for some, it can turn into a bit of a thought about failure and thinking about all the ways that we're failing. And so what I'd like to do today is to think a little bit, maybe in a slightly different dimension, about failure, as part of the human condition. And as we see here on the screen, it is the way we learn.

Children don't learn to walk without failing. Athletes don't learn to play their sport without failing and missing shots. Musicians don't learn to play their instrument without playing wrong notes. I know I sounded like I was murdering a cow whenever I would practice my trumpet as a kid. It's just the way it is. And God's Spirit does not exempt us from the human learning process.

God's Spirit works with us. It works with our minds. But we continue to go through that human learning process. So the question I have for everyone today is, how is it that you feel about failure? What is it that you have in your mind when you even hear the word failure? And how should we feel about failure? In fact, there's a lot of people associate a lot of fear with the idea of failing. When I was in college, I worked for a performing arts center. I actually drove a limousine and would be backstage while these performers, mostly classical music performers, big band singers, and some of those types would be on stage. And what I found really interesting to watch was how nervous, incredibly famous household name type of people would be before they walked out on stage. Because there's still, no matter how accomplished they were, a sense of nervousness, a fear of, in some sense, failing, making a mistake, that even at their very highest level of what they did in the world still impacted them. Let's look at one scripture here related to fear of failure and the proposition that it can harm us in terms of our spiritual growth.

This is from Matthew 5. There's a parallel version of the parable of the Talents in Luke 19, I believe it is. And I'm not going to rehearse the whole thing or read the whole thing, but I think most of us have probably heard this or seen this parable before. Servant is going to leave, go on a trip. I'm sorry, Master is going to leave on a trip. Calls his servants. There are three servants. He gives one five talents. He gives one two, and he gives one servant one talent. So just like Jesus Christ, out of his grace, calls us, gives us spiritual gifts of differing types and in different amounts, Jesus Christ did this. And I think we know that the one talent servant had an issue, and that's what we're going to read here. Then he would receive one talent, came and said, Lord, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you've not sown, gathering where you've not scattered seed. And I was afraid and went and hid your talent in the ground, and look, just giving you back what's yours. And what is it that the master said to this servant? Called that servant a wicked servant.

Said you could have even just gone out and given that money, that talent to the money lenders, received interest, and given me some sort of a return on what I had given you. But what is it that drove this servant to be unprofitable? As we read right here, it was fear. Now I would reckon it was probably fear of failure. If you're that servant, you're given one talent, and you see your buddy given five, you see your other friend or colleague given two, and you're given one. Right away you're saying, well, what is it? Did I not get trusted as much? What is it about me? What if I just go about and mess things up again? And what Jesus Christ was saying through this parable was the fact that we cannot fear. We have to take what we've been given, and we have to use it in a productive way. So learning to deal properly with failure, and by extension in our Christian lives, failure sometimes also includes sin, is a key to maturing as a Christian. How is it that we go about doing that? How do we deal with failure, even the sins that come on us? I'd like to talk today briefly just about three overall mindsets. We're not going to go into painstaking detail on these. My goal here is to prompt thought in everyone's minds as we think about failure, how it is that we approach it, how it is we deal with it, and what we do to get through it, and to think about how it applies in our own individual lives, and how we use it to live productive spiritual lives. So let's start with the first point here, which is simply expecting failure.

Now this might seem like a strange thing to say that we should expect failure, but again, it's a fact of life. And in fact, if you witnessed a scene like this, you'd probably think it was pretty strange.

Now we're not going to overanalyze humor because there's no point in that, but why is this so funny? It's funny because it's so incredibly absurd. Has anyone ever seen a baby pull itself up on its feet and start dancing? Of course not. So there's something that happens to us as human beings in the way that we deal with ourselves and the way that we deal with others in this whole idea of failure that changes very rapidly at a very young age, isn't it?

Because what is it that we usually tell a young child as they're taking those halting steps and falling? We're saying it's okay. We're saying you can do it. We're saying try again. I know you can take two more steps next time. But somewhere that pivots, doesn't it? Whether it's at age three, age four, whatever, and we all as human beings start to get this idea that making a mistake or failing is something a whole lot worse than a step towards learning. I took an interesting course at a meeting that I was at at work and I found it really revealing and what the instructor did.

It was a college professor and it was all about the idea of brainstorming about how we tend to shut down creative ideas because we judge them immediately. And we did this exercise, just a silly exercise, where we would sit up there in pairs and we paired off and he would say, okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to do this and say, clap twice, snap your fingers three times, and then point at the other person. Do it as many times as you can in a row until you mess up.

Go. And everyone was doing it. And then what you heard around the room at different points in time was, ah! Right? When people would mess up, immediately what would they do? They would crunch inward, they would drop their head, and they would make some sort of a grunt or exclamation because they messed up. And this professor said, okay, this time we're going to change it up. When you mess up, I want you to laugh. Now, it seems kind of strange because we're not used to doing that. And that was the entire point that he was making as we went through this exercise, was we are so used to, as human beings, when something doesn't go the way we want it to, the way we intended to, we're trying to learn something, we can't do it right, we're like, ah!

I messed up. And we don't view it as a step in the process that's taking us somewhere. And his point in this seminar that we were doing was around generating ideas and how when you're trying to generate ideas, you're just putting things up there, and you're judging them, sifting them later, and that we tend to stifle the creative process by immediately somebody comes up with an idea, we say, well, you can't do that.

That's stupid because of x, y, and z. And we sort of shut it down, and it removes the whole process. So why is it in our own lives that we focus so hard on our failures? How is it that we think about our failures? I love this quote, and I'll use a couple sports analogies. I hope you apologize if you don't like that. My defense is that Paul himself used athletic analogies, so if it's good enough for him, we'll use it here in church.

Michael Jordan, I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot, and I missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life, and that is why I succeed. Now there's a view towards failure. He knew that he could not hold himself up to an unattainable standard, and that he wasn't going to reach perfection every time.

He wasn't going to reach his goal with every single shot. He missed free throws. He missed jump shots. These games where he had the ball in his hand for game-winning shot, and he missed them, and he viewed it as part of his journey towards success. This is not at all unbiblical as a concept.

God tells us one of the promises that's made in the Bible, probably not a promise that we like to go out there and claim. People talk about claiming promises in the Bible. Jesus in John 16 says, Jesus Christ was telling his disciples by extension setting out for us the expectation that there were going to be times of difficulty in our lives, whether those are things we bring on ourselves because of mistakes we make and failures we have, whether it's things that happen in the external environment that impact us by extension, whether you think about persecutions that came on the early church because of Rome and its political situation. But he said there is going to be trouble in life. There are going to be difficulties. We will fail at things. Things will happen to us because of external factors, and it's an expectation that we have to build in so that we're not focusing on something that's completely unattainable.

Paul went on in 2 Corinthians, writing to the Corinthians, chapter 12, verses 9 and 10, he said, talking about how he went to God and prayed to be relieved of some of the things that he had ailing him, he said, Paul says, So what Paul experienced in his life was human weakness, whether it was his physical frailties and illnesses he was dealing with, or other things that Paul reveals about himself, talking about his struggle with sin in his life, he says, That's why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties, for when I am weak, then I am strong. And so what he was looking at, from a spiritual sense, was the fact that it's our human weaknesses that God uses to show his strength in our life. God doesn't call us because he looks down and says, hey, that guy's got some really special attributes that I need. I don't have those. I need him, or I need her because of those special attributes. You know, God looks down on us and extends grace to us, and he gives us that opportunity through his spirit to become a part of his family and to know him.

And through our weaknesses, he shows his glory, he shows his strength in what he does through his spirit in our lives.

So as we wrap up this first section of expecting failure, I just want to add one postscript to it, which is expect failure, but don't accept failure. You know, we hear terms out there about coming to God. We hear, God wants you to come as you are. Actually, 100% true. God wants us and is willing to accept us coming to him as we are, but he doesn't want us to stay that way. That's what repentance is about. That's what conversion is about. That as we come to him, we start to look at him. His spirit works within us. We see Jesus Christ as our model in front of us, and we start to see the things within us that are whatever you want to call them—failures, mistakes, flaws, sins.

And through his spirit working in us, we have a motivation to be something different than those things. And we know that as human beings, we have to expect to fail, but it's not something that we accept. We say, well, you know, I'm a failure. I'm sinful.

God will take care of it. He wants us to continue to focus on changing, repenting, coming before him and moving forward, whether it's in our spiritual lives or in the things that we do in our day-to-day life. So failure is part of the human learning process, and it's something we should realize and accept and be realistic about. We also experience failure or sin in our spiritual growth process, and I want to be careful because we can't be trivial about sin. You know, there are companies out there that their whole motto is to go out there and let's fail fast. And that makes sense in a corporate situation, right? You go out, you try something new. If it doesn't work, you look at it in the cold light of day, you say, it didn't work, we're going to shift, and we're going to do something else. In our spiritual lives, we don't go out there and say, I'm going to sin fast. Sin is something that we avoid. We know that it's part of our human condition. We're sinful as human beings, but it's not something that we ever go out to attempt to do. At the same time, as we see here in Hebrews 4, we won't read it if you want to note it for later, Jesus does understand our weaknesses and he gives us grace. So he knows that we are sinful human beings. He knows the things that pull on us. He knows the challenges that we face and that we sometimes give into. And he is willing, as we come before that throne of grace, to extend forgiveness. So while we expect failure in our lives, we shouldn't be surprised when there are failures, shortcomings, even sins in our lives. It's not something that we accept, something we continue to try to move through and move past.

For our next point, developing a short memory. Now, most people aren't focused on developing short memories in their lives. As someone who has some family members dealing with Alzheimer's, I hope to maintain a long memory for a long period of time. But let's go back to another athletic analogy. Please don't try to lip read too hard on this. It might not be appropriate.

The point I want to make here is professional athletes, especially quarterbacks, learn something very quickly in life. And that is that you focus on your mistakes long enough to learn from them, and then you leave them behind, and you take the lessons forward.

Now, if any of you watched the game, it was the Jaguars game, I think last Saturday evening, there was a record set by Trevor Lawrence, right? First quarter, first drive, he's got the ball. I think it was his first playoff game as a professional quarterback through an interception. Okay, it happens. Second drive, Trevor Lawrence gets the ball, throws another interception. First time in history, I think, that a quarterback first playoff game has ever thrown an interception. The first two drives that he had the ball. Before the end of the first quarter, he threw a third interception. I was starting to wonder if this was even a game worth watching at that point in time. And I think the Chargers probably got pretty happy as they went up, whatever it was, 17-0. But what is it that athletes do? You see the quarterbacks, they go to the sideline, they get their little tablet in front of them, and they look at it. They analyze what it is that happened in the play. But mentally, once they figured out the lesson of what is it that they did wrong, what did they miss, they file that away. But they can't stay in that mistake for the rest of the game or they will fall apart. And the same thing happens in any other avenue of life that we want to think about. Now, Trevor Lawrence last weekend was able to do that successfully. Football teams, they go in, they go to the locker room. What does the team do? They always talk, the announcers talk about making adjustments. They analyze what happened during the first half of the game. What do I need to change so those results that happen in the first half do not recur in the second half? And what they carry with them out of the locker room is the focus on changing things, not the focus on how badly they messed up in the first half. Because if they live in that place, how awful they failed, and how they got jumped on and they were down by 20 points, it's going to sap them of all their energy. And so they focus on the lessons and they forget whatever else comes along with it. Again, this is a biblical concept. If you want to turn to Philippians 3, Paul lays out this very same sentiment as he looks at his life. He looks at his spiritual life. He says, I pressed to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I don't consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do, forgetting what's behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. So Paul verbalizes this exact same thing. We know that through Jesus Christ we are forgiven of our sins. We're told that he forgets them and takes them as far away from us as east is from the west. We need to learn our lessons.

We need to repent. We need to focus on what it is that we can do differently in our lives and our connection with God following his ways that these sins don't recur. But we leave that behind just like God does and we focus on moving ahead in our spiritual lives. This is born out further by Paul in Romans 6 where he lays out the fact that through Jesus Christ, it's not just that we move past our sins, he uses a very stark analogy, one of death. Death of the old man, birth of a new man, walking in newness of life. Romans 6 verse 3, do not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death. Therefore we were buried with him through baptism into death. All of those things that we were, all of our human self without the Holy Spirit, without the benefit of the knowledge of God's way, is put to death. It's buried symbolically in a grave. That's why we go through water baptism. That's why we immerse ourselves in the water fully when we're baptized. We're symbolizing the death of the old man and then being raised just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father so we should walk in newness of life.

When we're baptized, when we face the Passover and start thinking about it, we think back to this time, the commitment that we made, what it was that we symbolically put to death in our lives and need to every day continue to take and push under that water and leave behind as we focus on the newness of life. So as we think about this second element, in mindset, as we think about failure and not giving in just a fear of failure, developing a short memory, we should reflect on our failures. We should reflect on our sins. Just like a football team goes in at halftime and analyzes what it was that went wrong, we need to spend that time thinking about our own lives, where it is that we don't match up, where it is that we tend to fall down or sin. And then, once we've reflected on them, we've taken them before God, we've asked for His forgiveness, we've internalized the lessons from it, we need to leave that behind, take the lessons with us, and walk forward in newness of life. Because when we repent, God promises He'll forgive us our sins.

And after repenting, our focus is on walking in that new way of life, not in continuing to think about all the ways that we sinned or didn't measure up, but taking those lessons forward and walking as a new man or a new woman. Last point here is we think about mindsets and avoiding falling prey to this fear of failing simply to bounce. Now, what in the world do I mean by bouncing? There's a scripture that comes to my mind that probably all of us have heard at some point in time. Proverbs 24 verse 16, I find it an encouraging scripture, For a righteous man may fall seven times and rise again, but the wicked will fall by calamity. It stands for the proposition that when bad things happen to us, when we sin, we make mistakes, whatever those shortcomings might be, we need to get up. And through God, through His Spirit and the power He gives us, we get back moving forward, again walking in that newness of life. There's a video I want to show you that, to me, is really powerful symbolically of how this can work in our lives.

So that's a French performance artist. His name is Joanne Bourgeois. I hope I pronounced that sort of right. But I could see it on your faces as he was falling down there at the end and getting lower and lower. I could see the hopefulness on everyone's face, right? Is he going to be able to bounce himself up higher again and get back up to the top? But I don't know about you, but to me, that signifies all kinds of different struggles and adventures and learning experiences and things that happen in my life. And that's really the way life is. Life is not linear. When we're figuratively faced with this uphill climb up the steps, we don't just climb up one step at a time and reach the top and, hey, made it to the top. We go up, we go down, we fall off, we land again, we go down a few steps exactly like we saw there. And again, these expectations of what it is that happens in our life, what we're like as human beings, whatever it is. If you've had to ever recover from an illness, right, you're told by the doctors, this is not going to be a linear thing. You're going to have good days, you're going to have bad days. Some days you're going to feel like, you know, you never actually got cured as you're in your recovery. But the longer term overall trajectory is going to be upwards. That's the focus here, the one on resilience. Though a righteous man falls seven times, he'll rise up. God gives us the power to do that. Another scripture that comes to my mind in this context is Psalm 37, verses 23 and 24, where we're told that the steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord and he delights in his way. Though he fall, he will not be utterly cast down, for the Lord upholds him with his hand. If you're looking for a prayer to take before God when things are particularly difficult, when you're struggling, whether it's with failure or with sin, this is a great psalm to take before God and to think about as you pray to him and to ask him to uphold you, to not allow us to be utterly cast down, but to be upheld by his hand, because that's what he promises he'll do. Let's turn to one more scripture in this context. I've mentioned to you before that Romans 8 is my favorite chapter of the Bible, and it's because of this section at the end of Romans 8 that I'd like to read in this same context. When we think about resilience as human beings, but especially as Christians, as sons and daughters of God, Romans 8 will read verse 35 and then verses 38 and 39, again focused on this very thing, the fact that though we fall, there's nothing that's going to be able to keep us down. God's given us his spirit. We're his children. He wants us to succeed. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Asking that rhetorical question, knowing, Paul knows, right away the answer is nothing. That's the point that he's making, is nothing can separate us from the love of Christ. Shall tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword? Think of whatever flavor of failure, mistakes, external circumstances you want to. None of them can separate us from the love of Christ. For I'm persuaded that neither life nor death nor angels nor principalities nor powers nor things present or things to come nor height or depth nor any other created thing. In case he forgot to mention something, to throw in that any other created thing shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

We think about resilience as Christians. We think about falling in whatever way that might mean, whether it's into a habitual sin that we struggle with, whether it's just mistakes that we make in daily life or the way we deal with things, whether it's at work or in our neighborhoods or in our families. There is always hope because we have God, we have his spirit, and we have the power that he gives us to get up and to continue to make progress through him and through his power.

So as we reflect on the end of this last mindset or thought of bouncing to avoid the fear of failure, resilience, it's an essential element of our Christian lives. God gives us life. We might think it's long if we're young, we probably think it's short if we're starting to get older, but he gives us a number of years in order to learn and to spend our time bouncing back, learning the lessons that we have in life. God's forgiveness gives us the ability to bounce back from even our greatest sins. You know, we think about David, the example in the Bible, and all of the sins that would get him whatever, 10 years to life if he was in our modern legal system, maybe successive life sentences, and David's mentioned as a man after God's own heart.

Due to the grace of God, due to the forgiveness that God extended to him. I think it's also important to point out here the fact that mistakes impact other people. We impact our families, we impact the people around us with the mistakes that we make. An important thing, in addition to seeking repentance and forgiveness from God, is to seek reconciliation with the people that we might have hurt in our sinful or mistaken acts. And that's incredibly important, too. You've probably known people like this. I've had people within my circle, friends, even my family, who will come up and say, you know, I finally learned to accept myself, and I'm not perfect, and I'm finally happy with myself. Period. And you listen to that, and you think, wow, but have you thought about the impact that those actions had on the other people around you? And do you think maybe there's another sentence that comes after that that says, and I think I might have hurt you as well and impacted you by those things, and to apologize for it? And those are the things we need to think about as well, because mistakes, sins, failures often have collateral impacts. And we can read all through the Bible, we can see the mindset of God is one of reconciling with other people, acknowledging our sins not only before God, but acknowledging to other people when we've hurt them, even if unintentionally, so we can make those relationships right in the way that God would have them be. So, fear failing. It's one of the things we all deal with as human beings in one measure or another. The goal today, again, was just to get us to think about it a little more. It's going to mean something different to each and every one of us, based on our lives, our experiences, the things that we struggle with, things that we've accomplished. But I think these three elements of expecting failure, developing a short memory, always bouncing back through God and His power are things that can serve us well as we move through these experiences with life. Learning to deal properly with failure, not giving in to fear and curling up and being an unprofitable servant, and also dealing properly with sin is a key to maturing as a Christian. We're moving into a couple of months' time now as we move in to Passover. It's a time I'd like to encourage all of us to think about these things and what they mean in our own lives as we reflect on our journey with God, the calling that we have, the Holy Spirit that He's given us, and how it is that we're walking our Christian lives. God created us as fallible human beings, and failure is part of our learning process, as painful as it might be sometimes. Thankfully, through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and His Spirit, we can use our failures as a springboard for growth.