Invest Your Failures
“We are pressed on every side by troubles, but we are not crushed. We are perplexed, but not driven to despair. We are hunted down, but never abandoned by God. We get knocked down, but we are not destroyed. Through suffering, our bodies continue to share in the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be seen in our bodies.Yes, we live under constant danger of death because we serve Jesus, so that the life of Jesus will be evident in our dying bodies. So we live in the face of death, but this has resulted in eternal life for you.” 2 Cor 4:8-12
The language we speak matters and it is imperative to a believer to speak only the language of the kingdom of God where their citizenship is. Jeff Goins recently post an article in Leadership which he titled Failure is not an option. He did a good job of encouraging believers to not look at failure as a scary incident but rather a launching pad to greater heights. In this piece, I want to corroborate his ideas and posit further that believers, in fact must fail in this worldly system of things for them to be successful in Kingdom matters. God could and always do oversee some of these failures.
It is not unusual to notice that when one becomes a believer then his life, which may have been a smooth one before, takes an abrupt turn and start to have bumps. Then he becomes a good example of failure no matter how much he desires to use “positive confession” to cover the reality. The truth is that when God apprehends you, He has to lead you to a point where you must become very thirsty for Him (through a path of righteousness for his name’s sake). His purpose is to empty you and then fill you with himself so that your overflow will begin to fill other peoples’ lives. You are saved to serve. But you cannot be thirsty for the Lord when you are sated with the world and all it has to offer. So God lays his heavy hand on you and begin to perform spiritual surgery on your heart, cutting the fatness off so the heart can be percolated by his word. I think Jesus also called it pruning. Pruning of vines is done with a knife or cutlass and that connotes pain. Stated clearly, when you are under the training of the Lord the world sees you as a failure, and you are in fact, a failure in the things of the world. In his letter to the Corinthians, part of what is quoted above, I see Paul reeking failure by the world’s standards.
God must slow you down to a tempo suitable for you to discern his moves and hear his voice. Oh how it pains. Noah must have looked like a failure to the entire world of his days when he started building a ship on a dry land in anticipation of the deluge, yet nobody has ever witnessed rainfall before. He must have been a failure to have invested all of 120 years preaching repentance while his contemporaries were advancing their careers and accumulating wealth. Abraham was instructed to leave his native land, everyone and everything familiar, to go to a place he was not even told where. To the people he left behind in the Ur of Chaldees, the man was a failure for closing his farms and yielding to the voice of a God that no one knew. Moses, once a heir to the throne of Egypt, must have reeked all failure to Jethro as he signed up for a job of shepherd after all the education and princely living. These heroes of faith had worldly failures to invest to yield good profits in the Kingdom of God. God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise.
Now coming to prosperity and the the scripture which says God delights in the prosperity of believers ” Let the LORD be magnified, Who has pleasure in the prosperity of His servants Ps 35:27 (NKJV). Prosperity, in the language of the kingdom means making a profitable investment of the gift of life God has given us, first and foremost, and making good use of the additional dividends (finance, position, work, contacts, property, education and persecutions etc). I believe most people have no problem about the first aspect but they tend to overlook the second. Our sorrows are also part of the investments and God is interested in seeing them yield good profits as well. That’s when we can say we prosper in all things. Many Jews believed in Jesus when they witnessed Lazarus coming out of the grave. But the miracle came after Mary and Martha went through four days of sorrow upon the death of their brother Lazarus who also had to endure the pains of sickness and the hopelessness of death even when his friend Jesus could have healed him. Within those four days they were a pitiable lot as the Jews saw their ministry as a failed one.
I read through the account of the birth of Samuel again. Why was Hannah in such pains? Why was she such a failure in her marriage? Did the Devil attack her? Was it a medical condition? No. 1 Sam 1:5 says that “….the Lord has closed her womb” In other words, the Lord led her to a point where she became very thirsty for Him. Her prayer indicated that she became burdened with the same thing in the mind of God. In Sarah’ family the success of the world was persecuting the kingdom success. And so it is till this day. You cannot have both.
Between a believer and the world, there is a language difference. A believer may fail in things of this world so as to be well prepared for God’s call upon his life. The believer may taste of failure in the world so as to be cured of the tendency to be self-sufficient. The believer may taste of failure so as to be cured of his tendency to doubt God. And a believer may taste of failure so as to get the experience and patience necessary to minister to others who go through such failures. Through the pains of these failures, the believer becomes prosperous in things of the Spirit.
Have you suffered setback in career, family, relationship and in ministry because you won’t comply with the world standard? I believe you are in the right place where God wants to set a table before you, anoint your head with his own oil and fill your cup to overflow. Hang on, but let Jesus invest your failures and sorrows for you. He is the stockbroker par excellence. When the trials seem to hide HIS lovely face, hold on to your faith. HE is faithful who promised. The promises of God may tarry but it won’t be late. The world will always face economic meltdown and will soon pass away and the lust of it, but the Kingdom of God is ever yielding profits.
