kenny silva
H C N U LA E F I L R U O Y f or the P U ING W O R G D E to I UP U G N A W O ST GR O M L A
A V L I S Y N N E K
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© 2013 by Thomas Nelson All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc. Thomas Nelson, Inc., titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected]. Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are taken from THE NEW KING JAMES VERSION. © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked ESV are taken from THE ENGLISH STANDARD VERSION. © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www. zondervan.com. The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™ ISBN: 978-1-4185-5011-0 Printed in China 13 14 15 16 17 RRD 5 4 3 2 1
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5
G N I L A E E R D U L I A F H T I W “Sign me up!” The words left my mouth with a level of enthusiastic ignorance that only an eighteen-year-old getting ready to sign his life away could produce. I was sitting in a cold, sterile office in the local Air Force recruiter’s office. A smooth-talking recruiter with thin-rimmed glasses and one heck of a sales pitch had just set the following job description before me: Performs, plans, leads, supervises, instructs, and evaluates pararescue activities . . . Provides rapid response capability and operates in the six geographic disciplines: mountain, desert, arctic, urban, jungle, and water, day or night, to include friendly, denied, hostile, or sensitive areas. Provides assistance in and performs survival, evasion, resistance, and escape (SERE). Provides emergency trauma and field medical care, and security. Moves recovered personnel and material to safety or friendly control when recovery by aircraft is not possible.
In high school, I was an emergency medical technician (EMT), so going to school and becoming a paramedic was the next step for me. My best friend had stumbled upon this Air Force pararescue
59
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thing, which was essentially an amped-up version of what I wanted to do. I decided joining would be infinitely cooler than going to community college, getting a paramedic certification, and sitting around the ambulance corps watching I Love Lucy reruns while waiting for some action. Without my parents’ approval or any kind of direction from God, I signed my life away to the United States Air Force. I signed the papers in April, finished up high school in June, and shipped out in August of 2002. I spent the months between April and August boasting about my altruistic awesomeness and telling everybody about the amazing Hollywood-style adventure I was getting ready to set out on. I’m sure I wore my family and friends out as I built up this massive identity around my future as the proverbial American hero. In my mind, I was already an Air Force commando and everybody else needed to recognize my awesomeness. Humble, I know. In addition to tooting my own horn, I spent most of my free time in the pool, on the track, or in the gym. Pararescue training was incredibly demanding. If you’ve ever seen the movie G.I. Jane, then you get the idea. The attrition rate at that time was about 90 percent, which meant I had a one in ten chance of making the cut. I didn’t care about that statistic, however. I was better than one in ten. I was in the best shape of my life. I had gotten so good in the pool I could literally spend two and a half minutes underwater. I was ready to go to Texas and take on the world. After saying goodbye to my family and friends, and following some processing and a few medical exams that I’d rather not talk
60
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DEALING W ITH FAILUR E about, I boarded a plane to sunny San Antonio. I remember getting off the plane at about midnight and being rounded up with hundreds of other kids just like me. A line of Greyhound buses was parked out front waiting to escort us to Lackland Air Force Base for basic training. I can still see the absolute mayhem as six of us got off the bus, lined up on a concrete pad, and proceeded to be cussed out for thirty minutes by a seven-feet-two-inch monster named Sergeant Johnson. The next six weeks were a bit of a blur. What I do remember well, however, are the weeks following basic training. After our carefully executed graduation ceremony, it was time for the real training to begin. Basic training was kids’ stuff. Pararescue was where the men went to become supermen. The next couple of weeks would be pure hell on Earth. We endured six-mile runs with eighty-pound rucksacks in the Texas heat, hundreds of consecutive push-ups in a shallow creek, and a fun little exercise called drownproofing where they would bind your hands and feet and throw you into a twenty-foot deep pool for an hour at a time. I lasted about two weeks. Be it physically, mentally, or emotionally, I just wasn’t cut out for that line of work. That was a bitter pill to swallow. I had spent the previous six months training my butt off and had told everyone I knew about what I would be doing. Even worse, I had committed the next six years to the Air Force as a pararescueman. Since I couldn’t complete the training, they reclassified me into another career field of their choosing. I ended up in a job I had not chosen, doing work I had no interest in, and in a location that had nothing
61
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to offer me. I had entered the Air Force as a would-be action hero, a commando of the highest caliber. Within twelve months, I was an electronics “geek” working on radar systems in Mountain Home, Idaho. In every sense that mattered to me, I was a complete and utter failure. If I could take a brief step out of my story right here and invite you to join me, I’m sure you could relate in some way. Perhaps you applied for your dream job, completely botched the interview, and were left to face your own demons of self-doubt and shame. Maybe you had a relationship you poured your heart and soul into, only to come out brokenhearted and lonely. Whatever it looks like for you or me specifically, we all experience failure in life. It’s one of the great equalizers in this world. There will be times when your own lack of ability, talent, or preparation will be to blame. There will be other times when you do everything perfectly but still fall flat on your face. In the ultimate sense, we simply can’t control when we fail. We can, however, control how we view our failures and move forward from them.
FIVE LESSONS IN FAILURE 1. FAILURE IS NOT YOUR IDENTITY When I washed out of pararescue training, I felt defeated in every sense of the word. My willpower had deserted me. My body had failed me. My dream job had eluded me. That trumped-up identity I had been boasting about dramatically vanished before my eyes. I had not simply experienced failure, I was a failure. I had no idea how
62
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DEALING W ITH FAILUR E I would ever recover and live any sort of a meaningful life moving forward. But that’s how this sort of thing plays out in all of our lives. We experience a failure and for that day, week, month, or year, we wallow in it, thinking we’ll never come out the other side. If you’re not convinced, think about the last time someone broke up with you and how you were convinced the world was coming to an end. Did it? Failure is a sneaky little liar. When it happens, we forget it’s only a temporary situation and it should not define us in any way. Embrace your identity in Christ, because before you even had the chance to fail, He became a failure for you in your place on that cross. Fall flat on your face one thousand times if you have to; He’ll be there to pick you up each and every time. 2. IF YOU EXPECT FAILURE, YOU’LL ALWAYS GET FAILURE One of the biggest obstacles I see people struggle with in life and business is a self-defeating attitude. They think they are unworthy of success. Somewhere along the line, someone told us we weren’t old enough or smart enough and we actually believed them. From that point on, every little failure in life became an affirmation of that belief. Over time, we not only let failure become an identity but we embraced it as something we deserved to walk in constantly. When you refuse to accept failure as the norm in your life, you make room for success to break in and show you what you’re truly capable of.
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3. FAILURE AND FAILING ARE NOT NECESSARILY THE SAME THING Successful people and organizations fail. They fail often, actually. The average Hollywood production company puts out one blockbuster per untold numbers of flops. A hall of fame–caliber baseball player fails to get a hit seven out of ten times he goes up to bat. Henry Ford, the demigod of American manufacturing and innovation, blew up two automobile companies and went broke several times before he changed the world with the Ford Model T. These folks were able to accomplish great things because they understood the difference between failing and failure. Successful people know failing is inevitable when you’re out taking risks and doing important work. They mentally prepare themselves for the possibility of failing, do what they can to minimize the risk, and continue to move forward when it happens. The key is to take each failure in stride and keep pressing forward. Failing only becomes failure when you let it defeat you. Failure, in that sense, becomes a death sentence, when it can actually be an amazing opportunity for growth. 4. FAILURE IS A STEP FORWARD With every failure comes a valuable lesson. If you don’t get your dream job due to a botched interview, then you know you need to work on your interview skills. If a relationship falls apart because you didn’t do your part, then there’s another opportunity for you to grow in your view of what you should contribute to your relationships. Each of these instances is a chance for you to learn something
64
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DEALING W ITH FAILUR E new and vital to your future success. The key in this process is humility. Our natural tendency in failure situations can be to seek an outside cause for our failure. It’s our nature to seek out a scapegoat, someone or something we can blame for our lack of success. If we ever want to overcome failure and learn from our mistakes, we have to look for what we did wrong and what we could do better. For the longest time, I wanted to protect my pride and blame my Air Force failure on the fact that I got sick during the training, but at the end of the day, I had to take responsibility for my situation. 1
I had not counted the cost.
1
I had not trained as extensively as was necessary.
1
I had not considered if this was truly my calling.
1
I made a hasty decision without consulting the people closest to me.
When I admitted those things and accepted responsibility for my own decisions, I was able to move forward and take important life lessons from my experience. I now see that failure as one of many necessary bumps in the road on the journey to where I am today. 5. FAILURE IS NOT OUR DESTINY Many of us are familiar with the story of Peter in the Bible. A former blue-collar guy, a fisherman, Peter was called by Jesus Himself to be one of His apostles. In fact, Peter led the apostles as a first among equals. For an average Joe fisherman to be chosen by a rabbi and
65
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made leader of his disciples was like a first-century Jewish Cinderella story, never mind this Rabbi was the Christ Himself. Peter’s parents must have been so proud. Surely, this super-apostle of the early Christian faith would go on to live a holy and blameless life marked with blessings and success, right? Sadly for him yet incredibly instructive for us, Peter’s story would not go down that way.
A HOLY FAILURE As we read through Peter’s life as it is recorded in the Gospels, we see him fail over and over again. Here are a few of the notable instances . . . 1
Peter failed to trust Jesus and nearly drowned (Matt. 14:29, 30).
1
Peter rebuked Jesus to His face (Matt. 16:22).
1
Peter fell asleep while Jesus prayed . . . twice (Matt. 26:38–42).
Terrible as those incidents were, not one of them was Peter’s most glaring failure. Just prior to their trip out to the Garden, Jesus had spent His last supper with His apostles. At this dinner, He told them He was leaving and they could not follow Him where He was going (John 13:36). Peter, true to form in his ignorance, vowed to follow Jesus to the bitter end, even to death (John 13:37). Jesus responded with convicting foresight: “Will you lay down your life for My sake? Most assuredly, I say to you, the rooster shall not crow till you have denied Me three times” (John 13:38).
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DEALING W ITH FAILUR E When Jesus had been arrested and was led into the city to face the high priest, Peter followed behind at a safe distance. While looking on, Peter was accused by a young servant girl of being one of Jesus’ disciples. Peter flatly denied the charge and walked away (Matt. 26:69, 70). Another servant girl approached him with the same accusation and he denied it again. This time, he swore an oath saying he did not know Jesus (Matt. 26:71, 72). Finally another bystander, having heard Peter’s Galilean accent, accused him once again of being one of Christ’s followers (Matt. 26:73). The frightened apostle denied Him one last time, the rooster crowed, and all that was left was for Peter to run outside and weep bitterly (Matt. 26:74, 75). Peter failed miserably. His Lord and Savior had walked faithfully beside him for three years, loving him, ministering to him, and teaching him all about the mysteries of God. Jesus was not only Peter’s Savior, He was Peter’s friend. All He asked for was Peter’s devotion to Him before men. Can you imagine the deep, dark sense of shame in Peter’s heart when he realized what he had done? He was utterly broken. This is where you might find yourself in the story. Maybe you’ve experienced so much failure you are absolutely broken and there is no end in sight. Ultimately it makes little difference whether your failure is in the moral realm like Peter’s or in the material/circumstantial realm surrounding a job or a relationship. At the end of the day, the same feelings of insignificance, doubt, and weakness capitalize on any kind of failure and make war against our hearts, minds,
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and souls. Thankfully for you, Peter’s story does not end here, and neither does yours.
A SOVEREIGN GOD AND PETER’S ETERNAL SUCCESS The absolutely breathtaking thing about our God is He is faithful, even when we are not, and He will always be at work in our lives. Even in the midst of our darkest failures, God is completely in control and is working in and through every little detail. As we come to a close, let’s take one last look at what Jesus said to Peter (who was also called Simon) just before He foretold the three denials: 3
And the Lord said, “Simon, Simon! Indeed, Satan has asked for you, that he may sift you as wheat. But I have prayed for you, that your faith should not fail; and when you have returned to Me, strengthen your brethren.” LUKE 22:31, 32
Before He created anything, God knew Peter intimately. He knew every single detail about him. He knew every success He would work through Peter’s life. He also knew every single time Peter would fail. Still, God chose to work in and through Peter as a small character in His big story. Satan himself could not frustrate God’s plan for Peter’s life. That’s what it means for God to be sovereign. Jesus knew this well. He knew the enemy would overcome Peter, and here’s the mind-blowing part: Jesus not only knew Peter
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DEALING W ITH FAILUR E would deny Him, He was banking on it! God used that failure to bring Peter to a place of absolute brokenness, a place where God could reshape and rebuild him into the man he needed to be in order to lead the early church. God spun Peter’s failure into divine success, a fact confirmed throughout the book of Acts.
NOT JUST PETER, BUT US AS WELL Just as Jesus prayed for Peter in the midst of Peter’s failure, He prays for us in the midst of ours. God knew His children before the foundation of the world, and He promises to never give up on us until we are with Him in glory. Wherever you are in your journey, whether pre-failure, post-failure, or in the midst of failure, God is working. He is building and shaping you into the person you need to be in order to accomplish His purpose for your life in this world. Your failures, though rightly painful and grievous, are all important steps in your journey. Don’t waste them. Will you allow your failures to defeat you, or will you allow God to redeem them? In the end, your failures are not your problem. They belong to the One who can and will use them to accomplish His will for His glory and for your perfect, everlasting joy. Trust Him and He will take your jumbled mess of a life and build something beautiful out of the rubble.
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NOTES
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A V L I S Y N N E K
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© 2013 by Thomas Nelson All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc. Thomas Nelson, Inc., titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected]. Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are taken from THE NEW KING JAMES VERSION. © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved. Scripture quotations marked ESV are taken from THE ENGLISH STANDARD VERSION. © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www. zondervan.com. The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™ ISBN: 978-1-4185-5011-0 Printed in China 13 14 15 16 17 RRD 5 4 3 2 1
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5
G N I L A E E R D U L I A F H T I W “Sign me up!” The words left my mouth with a level of enthusiastic ignorance that only an eighteen-year-old getting ready to sign his life away could produce. I was sitting in a cold, sterile office in the local Air Force recruiter’s office. A smooth-talking recruiter with thin-rimmed glasses and one heck of a sales pitch had just set the following job description before me: Performs, plans, leads, supervises, instructs, and evaluates pararescue activities . . . Provides rapid response capability and operates in the six geographic disciplines: mountain, desert, arctic, urban, jungle, and water, day or night, to include friendly, denied, hostile, or sensitive areas. Provides assistance in and performs survival, evasion, resistance, and escape (SERE). Provides emergency trauma and field medical care, and security. Moves recovered personnel and material to safety or friendly control when recovery by aircraft is not possible.
In high school, I was an emergency medical technician (EMT), so going to school and becoming a paramedic was the next step for me. My best friend had stumbled upon this Air Force pararescue
59
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thing, which was essentially an amped-up version of what I wanted to do. I decided joining would be infinitely cooler than going to community college, getting a paramedic certification, and sitting around the ambulance corps watching I Love Lucy reruns while waiting for some action. Without my parents’ approval or any kind of direction from God, I signed my life away to the United States Air Force. I signed the papers in April, finished up high school in June, and shipped out in August of 2002. I spent the months between April and August boasting about my altruistic awesomeness and telling everybody about the amazing Hollywood-style adventure I was getting ready to set out on. I’m sure I wore my family and friends out as I built up this massive identity around my future as the proverbial American hero. In my mind, I was already an Air Force commando and everybody else needed to recognize my awesomeness. Humble, I know. In addition to tooting my own horn, I spent most of my free time in the pool, on the track, or in the gym. Pararescue training was incredibly demanding. If you’ve ever seen the movie G.I. Jane, then you get the idea. The attrition rate at that time was about 90 percent, which meant I had a one in ten chance of making the cut. I didn’t care about that statistic, however. I was better than one in ten. I was in the best shape of my life. I had gotten so good in the pool I could literally spend two and a half minutes underwater. I was ready to go to Texas and take on the world. After saying goodbye to my family and friends, and following some processing and a few medical exams that I’d rather not talk
60
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DEALING W ITH FAILUR E about, I boarded a plane to sunny San Antonio. I remember getting off the plane at about midnight and being rounded up with hundreds of other kids just like me. A line of Greyhound buses was parked out front waiting to escort us to Lackland Air Force Base for basic training. I can still see the absolute mayhem as six of us got off the bus, lined up on a concrete pad, and proceeded to be cussed out for thirty minutes by a seven-feet-two-inch monster named Sergeant Johnson. The next six weeks were a bit of a blur. What I do remember well, however, are the weeks following basic training. After our carefully executed graduation ceremony, it was time for the real training to begin. Basic training was kids’ stuff. Pararescue was where the men went to become supermen. The next couple of weeks would be pure hell on Earth. We endured six-mile runs with eighty-pound rucksacks in the Texas heat, hundreds of consecutive push-ups in a shallow creek, and a fun little exercise called drownproofing where they would bind your hands and feet and throw you into a twenty-foot deep pool for an hour at a time. I lasted about two weeks. Be it physically, mentally, or emotionally, I just wasn’t cut out for that line of work. That was a bitter pill to swallow. I had spent the previous six months training my butt off and had told everyone I knew about what I would be doing. Even worse, I had committed the next six years to the Air Force as a pararescueman. Since I couldn’t complete the training, they reclassified me into another career field of their choosing. I ended up in a job I had not chosen, doing work I had no interest in, and in a location that had nothing
61
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FE U R LI O Y H C L AU N
to offer me. I had entered the Air Force as a would-be action hero, a commando of the highest caliber. Within twelve months, I was an electronics “geek” working on radar systems in Mountain Home, Idaho. In every sense that mattered to me, I was a complete and utter failure. If I could take a brief step out of my story right here and invite you to join me, I’m sure you could relate in some way. Perhaps you applied for your dream job, completely botched the interview, and were left to face your own demons of self-doubt and shame. Maybe you had a relationship you poured your heart and soul into, only to come out brokenhearted and lonely. Whatever it looks like for you or me specifically, we all experience failure in life. It’s one of the great equalizers in this world. There will be times when your own lack of ability, talent, or preparation will be to blame. There will be other times when you do everything perfectly but still fall flat on your face. In the ultimate sense, we simply can’t control when we fail. We can, however, control how we view our failures and move forward from them.
FIVE LESSONS IN FAILURE 1. FAILURE IS NOT YOUR IDENTITY When I washed out of pararescue training, I felt defeated in every sense of the word. My willpower had deserted me. My body had failed me. My dream job had eluded me. That trumped-up identity I had been boasting about dramatically vanished before my eyes. I had not simply experienced failure, I was a failure. I had no idea how
62
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DEALING W ITH FAILUR E I would ever recover and live any sort of a meaningful life moving forward. But that’s how this sort of thing plays out in all of our lives. We experience a failure and for that day, week, month, or year, we wallow in it, thinking we’ll never come out the other side. If you’re not convinced, think about the last time someone broke up with you and how you were convinced the world was coming to an end. Did it? Failure is a sneaky little liar. When it happens, we forget it’s only a temporary situation and it should not define us in any way. Embrace your identity in Christ, because before you even had the chance to fail, He became a failure for you in your place on that cross. Fall flat on your face one thousand times if you have to; He’ll be there to pick you up each and every time. 2. IF YOU EXPECT FAILURE, YOU’LL ALWAYS GET FAILURE One of the biggest obstacles I see people struggle with in life and business is a self-defeating attitude. They think they are unworthy of success. Somewhere along the line, someone told us we weren’t old enough or smart enough and we actually believed them. From that point on, every little failure in life became an affirmation of that belief. Over time, we not only let failure become an identity but we embraced it as something we deserved to walk in constantly. When you refuse to accept failure as the norm in your life, you make room for success to break in and show you what you’re truly capable of.
63
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3. FAILURE AND FAILING ARE NOT NECESSARILY THE SAME THING Successful people and organizations fail. They fail often, actually. The average Hollywood production company puts out one blockbuster per untold numbers of flops. A hall of fame–caliber baseball player fails to get a hit seven out of ten times he goes up to bat. Henry Ford, the demigod of American manufacturing and innovation, blew up two automobile companies and went broke several times before he changed the world with the Ford Model T. These folks were able to accomplish great things because they understood the difference between failing and failure. Successful people know failing is inevitable when you’re out taking risks and doing important work. They mentally prepare themselves for the possibility of failing, do what they can to minimize the risk, and continue to move forward when it happens. The key is to take each failure in stride and keep pressing forward. Failing only becomes failure when you let it defeat you. Failure, in that sense, becomes a death sentence, when it can actually be an amazing opportunity for growth. 4. FAILURE IS A STEP FORWARD With every failure comes a valuable lesson. If you don’t get your dream job due to a botched interview, then you know you need to work on your interview skills. If a relationship falls apart because you didn’t do your part, then there’s another opportunity for you to grow in your view of what you should contribute to your relationships. Each of these instances is a chance for you to learn something
64
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DEALING W ITH FAILUR E new and vital to your future success. The key in this process is humility. Our natural tendency in failure situations can be to seek an outside cause for our failure. It’s our nature to seek out a scapegoat, someone or something we can blame for our lack of success. If we ever want to overcome failure and learn from our mistakes, we have to look for what we did wrong and what we could do better. For the longest time, I wanted to protect my pride and blame my Air Force failure on the fact that I got sick during the training, but at the end of the day, I had to take responsibility for my situation. 1
I had not counted the cost.
1
I had not trained as extensively as was necessary.
1
I had not considered if this was truly my calling.
1
I made a hasty decision without consulting the people closest to me.
When I admitted those things and accepted responsibility for my own decisions, I was able to move forward and take important life lessons from my experience. I now see that failure as one of many necessary bumps in the road on the journey to where I am today. 5. FAILURE IS NOT OUR DESTINY Many of us are familiar with the story of Peter in the Bible. A former blue-collar guy, a fisherman, Peter was called by Jesus Himself to be one of His apostles. In fact, Peter led the apostles as a first among equals. For an average Joe fisherman to be chosen by a rabbi and
65
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made leader of his disciples was like a first-century Jewish Cinderella story, never mind this Rabbi was the Christ Himself. Peter’s parents must have been so proud. Surely, this super-apostle of the early Christian faith would go on to live a holy and blameless life marked with blessings and success, right? Sadly for him yet incredibly instructive for us, Peter’s story would not go down that way.
A HOLY FAILURE As we read through Peter’s life as it is recorded in the Gospels, we see him fail over and over again. Here are a few of the notable instances . . . 1
Peter failed to trust Jesus and nearly drowned (Matt. 14:29, 30).
1
Peter rebuked Jesus to His face (Matt. 16:22).
1
Peter fell asleep while Jesus prayed . . . twice (Matt. 26:38–42).
Terrible as those incidents were, not one of them was Peter’s most glaring failure. Just prior to their trip out to the Garden, Jesus had spent His last supper with His apostles. At this dinner, He told them He was leaving and they could not follow Him where He was going (John 13:36). Peter, true to form in his ignorance, vowed to follow Jesus to the bitter end, even to death (John 13:37). Jesus responded with convicting foresight: “Will you lay down your life for My sake? Most assuredly, I say to you, the rooster shall not crow till you have denied Me three times” (John 13:38).
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DEALING W ITH FAILUR E When Jesus had been arrested and was led into the city to face the high priest, Peter followed behind at a safe distance. While looking on, Peter was accused by a young servant girl of being one of Jesus’ disciples. Peter flatly denied the charge and walked away (Matt. 26:69, 70). Another servant girl approached him with the same accusation and he denied it again. This time, he swore an oath saying he did not know Jesus (Matt. 26:71, 72). Finally another bystander, having heard Peter’s Galilean accent, accused him once again of being one of Christ’s followers (Matt. 26:73). The frightened apostle denied Him one last time, the rooster crowed, and all that was left was for Peter to run outside and weep bitterly (Matt. 26:74, 75). Peter failed miserably. His Lord and Savior had walked faithfully beside him for three years, loving him, ministering to him, and teaching him all about the mysteries of God. Jesus was not only Peter’s Savior, He was Peter’s friend. All He asked for was Peter’s devotion to Him before men. Can you imagine the deep, dark sense of shame in Peter’s heart when he realized what he had done? He was utterly broken. This is where you might find yourself in the story. Maybe you’ve experienced so much failure you are absolutely broken and there is no end in sight. Ultimately it makes little difference whether your failure is in the moral realm like Peter’s or in the material/circumstantial realm surrounding a job or a relationship. At the end of the day, the same feelings of insignificance, doubt, and weakness capitalize on any kind of failure and make war against our hearts, minds,
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and souls. Thankfully for you, Peter’s story does not end here, and neither does yours.
A SOVEREIGN GOD AND PETER’S ETERNAL SUCCESS The absolutely breathtaking thing about our God is He is faithful, even when we are not, and He will always be at work in our lives. Even in the midst of our darkest failures, God is completely in control and is working in and through every little detail. As we come to a close, let’s take one last look at what Jesus said to Peter (who was also called Simon) just before He foretold the three denials: 3
And the Lord said, “Simon, Simon! Indeed, Satan has asked for you, that he may sift you as wheat. But I have prayed for you, that your faith should not fail; and when you have returned to Me, strengthen your brethren.” LUKE 22:31, 32
Before He created anything, God knew Peter intimately. He knew every single detail about him. He knew every success He would work through Peter’s life. He also knew every single time Peter would fail. Still, God chose to work in and through Peter as a small character in His big story. Satan himself could not frustrate God’s plan for Peter’s life. That’s what it means for God to be sovereign. Jesus knew this well. He knew the enemy would overcome Peter, and here’s the mind-blowing part: Jesus not only knew Peter
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DEALING W ITH FAILUR E would deny Him, He was banking on it! God used that failure to bring Peter to a place of absolute brokenness, a place where God could reshape and rebuild him into the man he needed to be in order to lead the early church. God spun Peter’s failure into divine success, a fact confirmed throughout the book of Acts.
NOT JUST PETER, BUT US AS WELL Just as Jesus prayed for Peter in the midst of Peter’s failure, He prays for us in the midst of ours. God knew His children before the foundation of the world, and He promises to never give up on us until we are with Him in glory. Wherever you are in your journey, whether pre-failure, post-failure, or in the midst of failure, God is working. He is building and shaping you into the person you need to be in order to accomplish His purpose for your life in this world. Your failures, though rightly painful and grievous, are all important steps in your journey. Don’t waste them. Will you allow your failures to defeat you, or will you allow God to redeem them? In the end, your failures are not your problem. They belong to the One who can and will use them to accomplish His will for His glory and for your perfect, everlasting joy. Trust Him and He will take your jumbled mess of a life and build something beautiful out of the rubble.
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NOTES
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