Your Failure Is Not Final (Part 2)
“He also brought me up out of a horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my steps.” Psalms 40:2
There is a story in the Old Testament of David that is not very flattering. We tend to think of David as “the man after God’s own heart.” He was the young, courageous boy who defeated Goliath with his great faith in God. But although David was a great man of God, he fell into sexual sin. He committed adultery and then had the woman’s husband killed in order to have her. He was supposed to be God’s special, handpicked, chosen one, but he failed Him big time. David could have given up on himself, resigned as king, and lived the remainder of his life in shame. But in his despair and agony, he heard a voice that said, "It's not over. I'm not through with you. I know it looks bad, David, but if you will praise me in the middle of your sorrow and failure, I will restore you.”
You might have failed, but you're not a failure. You may have messed up and made a mistake, but you're not a mistake. David began to worship his way out of the depths of depression and darkness. He said, "He lifted me out of a miry pit and set my feet on the rock to stay." David wrote his greatest psalms after his failure. He wrote Psalms 23: "The Lord is my Shepherd. He makes me lie down in green pastures and leads me beside the still waters." One of the most powerful lines of that psalm is, "He restores my (broken, fragmented, messed up) soul." Despite this colossal mistake, God restored David and made him the greatest king of Israel because failure is not final.
In Acts 20 there is the story of Eutychus. The Bible said that Paul was preaching, and a young man was sitting in the window of a tall loft listening. And while Paul was preaching a long sermon, the man fell three stories out of the window and died. It looked like it was over for this young man, but Paul ran out of the temple, and with great compassion, he fell on him, held him, and then made a powerful statement. He said: "Don't trouble yourselves, for there is life in him."
It may not look like anything's left after you have a great fall, but there's still life in you. Even if you have been in church and used by God mightily and have a great fall, don’t think your purpose in God is over. There’s still life in you because the same power that conquered the grave lives in you. You have always had resurrection power living in you, even if you never knew it.
You may have messed up, but there's still life in your dreams. There's still life in God's calling for your life. There's still hope, so don’t you dare let guilt and shame keep you down. Hebrews 4:16 encourages us, “Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.”
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