How we perceive God will dictate how we live our life. Just as importantly, how we see ourselves, in relation to Him, will orchestrate all that we are and do in this world.
We live in a success-driven world. So, knowing how God sees and feels about failure is absolutely vital.
“For you see your calling, brethren, that not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called. But God has chosen the foolish things of this world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty; and the base things of the world and the things which are despised God has chosen…”
It’s official. God loves a failure! He, apparently, did not want the beauty of His nature and the glory of His Kingdom solely to be represented by the great, the good and the clever. He did not want a Who’s Who of humanity to portray His own magnificence. He chose and continues to choose people who have a history of failure.
I believe He chose them because He wanted to love them in such a way that they would always be safe and whole, whether they were successful or not. He chose them so that His love could heal their foolishness.
He has a plan to make us successful by using failure for us and not against us.
A big part of that plan is to love us in exactly the same way that He loves Jesus. We are not loved only because we succeed in Christ. We are loved fully because we are in Him.
God loves me for me — not for what I can do. This is the single most empowering thing we can internalize in life. In my weakness, I am lovely to God. He allows us to fail when He could have prevented it — maybe because He wants us to see how much we are loved when we can’t do anything right. He gives us freedom to fail and His intention is to show us that we are still His beloved. His love for us is not based on how well we do!
In the love of God, we cannot fail; we can only make mistakes and mistakes have already been covered by the cross.
This kind of love helps us to relax about ourselves and our lives. In mistakes, we understand how lovely we are to the Lord. That is what empowers us to overcome failure as a negative construct and wield it into a weapon that propels us into developing our destiny.
Everything God does is relational. He’s bent on turning every circumstance around so that we discover the height, depth, length and breadth of His love.
We are a work in progress. No one condemns the artist of an unfinished picture. Instead we look at it, like God does, loving it for what it is today and picturing what it could become. We wonder, we imagine and we are excited by the possibilities!
PS) If interested in learn more about how to wield failures into catalysts for growth, pick up a copy of Prophetic Wisdom. I think it speaks to this process well.
