The Failure Behind Our Failures

Which Way Lord? - Chapter 12 - by Dr Chandrakumar

The Failure Behind Our Failures

Napoleon Hill said, “There are three kinds of people in the world- The wills, The wont’s and The cant’s. The first accomplish everything, the second oppose everything and the third fail in everything.” Failure is one of the negative aspects of life. We deny it, run away from it or upon being over taken, fall into permanent paralysing fear.

Probably our reluctance to face it is the failure behind our failures. I strongly feel that failure of some kind is common to all of us. George Bernad Shaw said, “When I was a young man I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures, so I did ten times more work.”

There was a young man who was intelligent, gifted, well adjusted and who began his career with every advantage imaginable. He did not have the physical and moral defects that inflict so many of us. He could blame neither his heredity nor his environment if he made wrong decisions. Yet for all this, there was one other word that described him, that is “Failure.”

He could have gone down in history as a hero; but he is remembered primarily for a gigantic mistake. This man’s failure became the basis for our failure. Who is this man? He is Mr. Adam. He was created perfect by a direct act of God. God put him in a beautiful garden and provided everything that he needed. Then God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.” (Gen. 2:18). So, more than anything Adam was given a beautiful madam as his wife. Adam and madam became the first couple in the world.

Our young people face a difficult situation in choosing their life partners and finding God’s will for the same. There was no need for Adam to find God’s will in choosing his wife. Eve was custom-made for Adam. Further more he had direct communication with God. But inspite of all this Adam failed.

So, remember that Failure did not start in you or in me but in Adam.

There are two questions that plague us 1. What is Failure? 2. Why do we fail?

I. What is Failure?

It is living a life with perverted values. It is being hooked on one or more of the three worldly motivations namely the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life (1 Jn. 2:16). These are the three components of failure.

1) Three Components of Failure

As said above, these three expressions describe our perverted drives. First of all there is the Pride of life - self-exaltation. Instead of obeying God, we by nature want to be our own God. Adam chose to eat the forbidden fruit precisely because he wanted to be like God; he wanted to be his own God. Whenever we substitute our own desires for God, we are guilty of pride. We are secretly pleased with ourselves. We consider ourselves superior to others and we try to influence people to accept that. Our pride blinds us to the deep emotional and spiritual needs of others. We too often become victims of pride, which becomes inverted. If pride cannot produce a superiority complex, it will often turn inward and become an inferiority complex. The symptom of such a psychological attitude is usually depression, a very common word used by believers today. We sometimes withdraw from others because of the fear of failure. Our excuse is inferiority, but the root of it is pride.

Secondly, there is the Lust of the Flesh - the craving for sensual desire. God has set prescribed limits for sexual conduct. But in every age, God’s restrictions have been largely ignored. The world is today characterised by hedonism - the love of pleasure. The sexual revolution has made sexual purity a rarity, if not an oddity. If pride is the most universal cause of failure, surely sensuality has the most devastating consequences.

Thirdly, there is the Lust of the Eyes - Covetousness. Adam was supposed to work in the garden while recognising that it belonged to God. If God gave Adam a job to do, he was to be merely a steward. Adam was accountable because he owned nothing. Today we covet the things of this world - things that belong to God alone. Covetousness is the hallmark of the sales industry.

Once the top sales executive of Coca - Cola went to the Pope and asked him for a favour. He said, “Your Holiness, I humbly request you to please do a slight alteration in the Lord’s Prayer. In the portion where it reads, ‘give us this day our daily bread,’ I want you to please alter it as ‘give us this day our daily Coca -cola.’” The pope very hesitantly requested this man to ask for any other favour except that. But the sales executive sadly turned and walked a few steps and then came back and said in a whispering voice, “Your holiness, please, tell me how much the ‘Daily Bread’ man gave you, I’ll give you more than that.”

In the sales industry there is no limit for covetousness and to be content with what we have is a cardinal sin. If we are satisfied with our present car, we will not get a new one. So we are bombarded with advertisement designed to make us dissatisfied with our black and white T.V, and some even with their colour T.V would desire for a video set and so on. Many people have an inner compulsion to possess everything they see. Such people are failures.

2. Two Types of Failure

There are two types of failures: One physical and the other moral or spiritual.

i) Physical Failure

Physical failures are usually unrelated to sinful motivations; a student might fail in school, a runner might fail to win the race, a businessman might fail in his business and so on. I don’t rule out the fact that sin can also cause physical failures, but more often it is due to lack of abilities. However God often uses this kind of failure to remind us how desperately we need him. But let us not singly pass the buck to God without working hard to be successful.

A college student who did not prepare for his economics exam just before Christmas vacation wrote on his answer sheet, “Only God knows the answers to these questions... Merry Christmas.”

The Professor graded the paper and wrote this note, “God gets 100 percent and you get Zero... Happy New Year.”

ii) Spiritual Failure

Our main concern is with moral and spiritual realms, which bring guilt, defeat and depression. Spiritual failures often permanently affect our children, our friends and of course, ourselves. Spiritual failures are directly the result of our own sinful choices.

II. Why Do We Fail?

There are three main causes of failure or in other words three major failures behind all our failures namely (A) Lack of love for the Lord (B) Life without power and (C) Luke Warmness.

A. Lack of Love for the Lord

We read in Revelation 2:1-7, Christ’s message to the church in Ephesus. Ephesus at that time was a large Metropolitan city and the most prominent city in the Roman Province of Asia and this city already had a long history of Christian witness. (Paul had ministered there for three years as recorded in Acts 19). The effectiveness of his ministry is stated in Acts 19:10, “All who lived in Asia heard the word of the Lord both Jews and Greeks.”

The preaching of the Gospel had affected the worship of Diana, in whose honour the temple of Diana had been built in Ephesus, a structure considered one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The reduction in the sale of idols of Diana and the Christian teaching that these idols were not worthy of worship resulted in riots (Acts 19:23-41). The resulting riot forced Paul’s departure from Ephesus, but the incident is a remarkable testimony to the power and effectiveness of early Christian witness in this important city. It was to this church and to the Christians living in Ephesus at the close of the first century, some thirty years after Paul, that the first of the seven messages is addressed from a church to which so much was given and from which much would be required.

Christ says, “I know thy deeds.” This has another intention than to express either praise or blame. It declares the omniscience of him who walks up and down among the candlesticks of gold from whom nothing escapes. “And there is no creature hidden from his sight, but all things are open and laid bare to the eyes of him with whom we have to do.” (Heb. 4:13). Here, we see Christ’s commendation of doctrine and diligence of the Ephesian church. He mentions that their labour or trial, their patience or stead fastness, their abhorrence of those who were evil, and their ready detection of false teachers who claimed to be apostles but who were not. These remarkable characteristics establish the fact that the church had served the Lord well.

But inspite of these most desirable traits, Christ declared that the church at Ephesus had failed in an important matter, namely, “They had left their first love.” In the Greek language, the order of the words is especially emphatic in that the object of the verb is before the verb “Your first love you have left.” In Greek, the word for this love is Agape, which is the deepest and most meaningful word for love. Though the Ephesian Christians had not departed completely from love for God, their love no longer had the fervency, depth or meaning it once had.

Those words of Christ, “I have this against you” is the language used to blame a failure. Also we need to observe that he does not merely say, “You have Lost your first love,” as it is so frequently misquoted. But he says, “You have Left your first love,” some thing more serious. One may lose a thing involuntarily, but to leave it, is deliberate action and it counts as sin. So, the failure behind all our failures is our lack of real love for the Lord. Do we have a burning love fo

Get your free registration and log in to view entire article