Failing Forward

All of us desperately need to learn to fail forward.  The idea of failing forward is that through our personal weaknesses, shortcomings and failures that God teaches us about our need for Him, that He is sufficient in all things and that He uses our weakness to grow us.   

The Psalmist reflect on this truth with these words, "The LORD is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit."  (Ps 34:18)   If you want to go deep in your relationship with God you need to learn this along the way in life.  For it is on the rocks of personal failure that we learn the very important lesson of humility.  And without humility it is an impossible to experience the grace of God as I Peter 5:5 teaches us, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”

Peter is the Bible’s gift to us of a man who was mightily used by God, but a man who also experienced deep personal failure.  In Mark 14:29, after Jesus tells the disciples that they will all leave Him after He is stricken down, Peter boasts, “Even though they fall away, I will not.”

Then after Jesus tells Peter that that very night He would deny Jesus three times after the rooster crows twice, Peter gives yet another claim, “If I must die with You, I will not deny you.”  And of course we know just in a few hours from that empty boast, Peter in cowardice and fear, did just what Jesus predicted, Peter would deny Jesus three times.  

Peter's life teaches us how failure and weakness can lead to be a better man of God.  And we know that Peter was not only used by God as the Apostle who led 3000 to Christ at the very first day of the church on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2), but he was a man who was used in many other ways by God. 

It was his weakness that taught him that through God and God alone, one could be used mightily. Peter teaches us how God can change a man and use a man when he is willing to humble himself under God’s mighty hand. God is not interested in those who are strong, sufficient, and able, He is only interested in those who are willing to learn the hard lessons in life that only through the person of Jesus and His strength we become useful to God. 

No wonder Peter at the end of his life wrote this in his second letter, "God's divine power has given us all things pertaining to life and godliness through our knowledge of Him (Jesus) by His own glory and excellence."  (II Peter 1:3)  Let us remember always that our weaknesses become God's opportunity for His strength, "for when we are weak, than we are strong."  (II Cor 12:10)