Most people that have achieved some level of greatness have a story that goes this way: Born in obscurity and with little means, with the whole world against them, they kept striving toward the goal, finding new resolve after every failure, to finally push through and… get into the Guiness’ Book of World Records for baking the largest donut. Or joking aside, maybe it was changing local politics, or opening a homeless shelter, or any number of noble pursuits. Everybody has stories about disappointments and failures. Sometimes they come at us from such unlikely sources and from so out of the blue that you would almost think they were planned….
The truth is, they are. And no, you can’t blame the devil. He’s pretty much a mad dog on a rope that God gives some slack from time to time. It’s the Lord who plans our little downfalls. And it’s love that drives him to it. What people don’t realize is that God is always trying to shut down our efforts, and frustrate our attempts at making a life for ourselves, so that we will simply take from him the life he offers. He will eventually let us have our way if we continue pushing his hand away. You may have heard many a motivational speaker talk about setbacks and tell you that they are simply opportunities in disguise. No they’re not. The disappointments we face in life are simply the Lord saying, “No, don’t go that way.” They are divine stop-signs that you really shouldn’t drive through.
Too often there is this idea in our heads that we need to do something great for God, when all the while God has done something great for us that we simply ignore. King David is a perfect illustration of this. In 2nd Samuel chapter 7, we find David sitting in his lovely cedar home, telling Nathan the prophet that he would like to build a similar house for the Ark of God. You see, the Ark symbolized the presence of God on earth. It’s actually a wonderful picture of Christ. Inside it was Aaron’s rod that budded, the tablets of stone the commandments were written on, and the jar of manna. Those three things are each symbols of Jesus as “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” But David is moved to do something for God, and even Nate thinks it’s a great idea. The trouble was, God didn’t.
We are dreamers. Our imaginations can run wild and we can conjure up such wonderful ideas. But no matter how wild they are, they are never as wild as God’s. David was thinking too small. He was thinking of building a material, earthly house for God’s presence to dwell in. God was thinking so much bigger. He envisioned a house, but one that would outlast the earth. He was going to make a house out of us, not out of cedar or stone. Reborn, new creations in Christ are the very temple of God, that is presently being built. When David was told this, he gladly traded his dream for God’s. It left him speechless.
There are two paths in life. You can either take the life you’ve been given, or you can make one for yourself. “Life is what you make of it” the world says. Well, it can be what you make it, or it can be so much more. The Lord has put a staggering amount of thought into our lives. The apostle Paul said it this way when he was in Athens,
“God, who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands. Nor is He worshiped with men’s hands, as though He needed anything, since He gives to all life, breath, and all things. And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us.” Acts 17:24-27
Notice that God determines when and where each of us lives. Each of us. Each of the 6 billion souls on the planet have been carefully planted right where God wanted, and right when God wanted. That shows his incredible sovereignty, doesn’t it? But there is more. Paul also said that the purpose of this meticulous people-planting by the Great Gardener, is “so that they should seek the Lord.” The events of our lives are designed to raise our eyes to our Maker.
And the Lord uses hard times to do it. Good times just don’t work. God graciously gives sun and rain, harvest after harvest, blessing and peace, prosperity and health, and all the while we pat ourselves on the back thinking it was all us. Isn’t it amazing that when something good happens we take the credit for it, but when something bad happens it’s the thing we put to God’s account? God gets blamed for the catastrophes of life with fists shaking in the air. Well, it’s staggering how close to the truth we can be and still not see it. It IS God’s fault. All of it. Blame Him. He wants you to. Give Him credit for toppling your house of cards. Thank Him for it while you’re at it.
How often do bad things happen in life? Every day? Every hour? Every second? Yes, yes and yes. Just how badly do you think God is trying to get our attention? Every disturbance, every tragedy, every failure, every minor setback and every catastrophic event is a wake-up call from the Lord. But we just keep blowing stop-signs. I once heard someone call them “Stoptionals.” The Lord lovingly brings us to our knees so that we can acknowledge that we need Him. We first discover our need for God when the guilt of our sins has crippled us. It’s then that we find Christ as the gracious gift that He is. There are more discoveries to be made. There are uncharted waters for each of us. Failure reveals our deep needs. We wouldn’t know them otherwise. God is always trying to reveal them to us, but we think it’s either bad luck or that we are being punished in some way. Wrong on both counts. The Lord is to be praised for the very things he is most often jeered for.
For those of us who have our sins forgiven – who have God’s money in the bank, in the currency of the blood of Christ, to pay for any and every debt still to come – failure still has a new lesson for us. We need to learn that sin is too big for us to handle on our own. Initially, it seems that God gives us easy victories over certain vices. New Christians seem to be able to quit smoking, give up alcohol, stop gambling, etc… cold-turkey. Excitement is there at the new birth. But it doesn’t last. Christians are still capable of gross sin. You hear about it all the time. It’s heart-breaking, but it needs to happen. The Lord who saved us, wants us to know what we have been saved from. We really have been saved from sin.
Many come to know Christ at an early age. Four and five-year-olds can truly receive the Lord as Saviour. Have they sinned? By the time they are four, they have lied, stolen, and been disobedient enough to have a wheelbarrow full of guilt over it. But at the same time, they would not know anything compared to a teenage sinner. A fifteen year old can be real monster. I know, because I was one. I had the mouth of a sailor and the eyes of Samson. The thing to remember though, is that both the four year-old and the teenager have the same sin nature. A murderer and rapist who comes to Christ is not more forgiven than a child who comes with a stolen cookie in his mouth. Sin is the same in everyone. Sins differ, but they come with opportunity. A shark in a cage, is a shark that would eat a whole tank of dolphins if it could. Jesus taught this when he talked about anger being equal to murder, and lust equal to adultery. “It is what comes out of a man that makes him unclean” he said. But no matter how awful your sins are, you still don’t know what you are fully capable of.
Sin often plays it safe. It will make a glutton of someone rather than a murderer, because it is less conspicuous. It doesn’t seem so bad. But sin needs to be exposed for what it is. It is the very heart of the devil. And it’s in you and me. It would rather you think it under control than for you to look at Jesus on the cross and see that it took the death of the Son of God to beat it. Nothing else could do it. It’s that bad. We need God’s stop-signs to alert us to the danger of trying to go toe-to-toe with Sin. It will win every time if we do. We’ve been to Romans Six, but we need to turn the page. Romans Seven tells us that even though we want to do good, we can’t. And the thing we don’t want to do, we do. Allow those failures to turn your eyes to the Lord Jesus who has already beaten Sin.
I’ve penned much about failure in general. But for the Believer, failure to become Christ-like is the means by which God points us back to the cross. The greatest lesson any Christian can learn is that they cannot live the Christian life. It’s not something to be imitated. It’s not about being Christ-like. It’s about Christ being himself through you. The life of Christ is in you, and it is intended to grow and produce fruit. The Christian life is not a skyscraper to be built, but a tree to be watered and exposed to the sun. When our failure to make ourselves more like Christ becomes painfully apparent, we then have the wonderful opportunity of looking to Jesus himself and finding that he doesn’t need or want you to try. He wants to live His life through us. We get in the way far too often.
Failure is our friend. Stop-signs are gifts. Pay attention. If it looks like God is telling you to cease and desist, put your hands up and let Him arrest you. In the Book of Acts we find Paul and Silas in a Philippian Jail, and ecstatic about it. They were singing at midnight. They knew that God was saying, here is where I want you. God has put you right where he wants you, and is waiting for you to simply resign yourself to it. Even Jesus said, “Not my will, but yours be done.” Don’t just slow down – come to a complete stop, and wait to see if the way is clear. You may even need to turn around.