The Failure Weapon

How often do we feel like failures? How often should we feel like failures? Is there ever an appropriate time to indulge in failure? The truth about failure is that we have this insatiable desire to be successful. For pastors like myself success is full of pressures. The pressure to convert millions of people, the pressure to fill seats on Sunday morning, the pressure to produce messages that will make people want to stand and applaud upon its conclusion. So the real question is not should we ever feel like failures when we have obviously failed to measure up, but should we redefine the ideaology of success?

Failure and success though antonyms by nature march hand in hand as a weapon of the enemy. Neither should be a problem for Christians, and yet we daily, moment by moment, measure ourselves by some misguided sense of success and failure. Most of our encounters with failure seem to revolve around our goals. Sometimes we don't even realize that a goal exists in our hearts until we missed it and we are stricken by the failure seizure.

The realization of failure is like an epileptic episode where the individual it seems is frozen in time. Now endowed with the innate ability to perceive the past with crystal clear vision, the consequences that are so often associated with failure also start to come into view. This moment of suspended animation is a moment of complete terror longing for the chance to make it up and change the past in order to avoid the defeat and disappointement to come. Painful as it is, the failure seizure passes when reality strikes, goals are lost, and despair attacks full force. Failure is a weapon that the enemy uses to try to diminish self worth, and without self worth the indiviual is blinded from his or her purpose for living.

What we need to remember is that God knows we have already failed, it's how we were born. He also knows what needs to be done in order for us to defeat failure. So instead of us needing to be successful, He just takes all of our self worth, our goals, our dreams and puts them on his shoulders. He then holds out his hand and asks us if we would like him to carry our burdens. If we are ready to admit that we are failures He's ready to show us how to succeed.