Welcome to Day Four of the devotional series taken from the book, “Taking It to Our Knees – Rigorous Prayers for Life’s Greatest Challenges.”
Today’s Theme is “Wrestling With the Discouragement of Failure.”
 
The Quote for Today Is This:
“…for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.’”

Romans 3:23

Failure.  It’s having set out to do something, or not do something, and having failed to achieve the goal either way.  It’s falling short.  It’s having missed the mark, or having pulled out of the race long before we came anywhere close to the mark.  It’s the dream that we couldn’t breathe life into, or the fear that we couldn’t breathe the life out of.  It’s the relationship that we couldn’t hold because we were not worth being held.  It’s the thing that puts us in our place because we foolishly thought that we might be better than that place.  It’s falling down and finding no reason to get back up.
Failure is a stark message regarding our ability or lack thereof.  It is the undeniable evidence of what we feared might be true, that we are in fact inadequate or incompetent or whatever we feared that we might be.  It reminds us of our misdirected efforts to elevate our place in life, and it assigns us the very station that we worked so hard to avoid.  It tells us that our dreams are bigger than our ability to achieve them.  That mediocrity is our lot in life, so we’d be wise to settle there and at least do that well.
But we forget that failure is the refusal to try.  Trying and not succeeding is the very place where God has placed the richest cache of learning opportunities available to us.  It’s a chance to try again, but to try differently.  It’s an opportunity to become everything that failure says we cannot become because it is failure itself that has taught us how to outflank it.  Falling short, missing the mark, or pulling out of the race are nothing more than events packed rich with learning opportunities that set the stage for greater things…possibly great things.  It is not the fact that these things happened.  It is what we do with the fact that they happened.  And if we seize the opportunities for growth that God has graciously planted within each of these, failure will fall to a life rich with success.
“Failure is the prerequisite to success, not the elimination of it.”

Craig D. Lounsbrough

 
Prayer
Dear God:
I know that failure is the lie told by men without vision.  For I know that You have placed growth opportunities in everything.  And I pray that I can be wise enough to seek them out until I find them, learn from them until I know their lessons well, and then apply them until I have forcefully drawn every morsel of growth out of them.
My failures are many.  Many.  And maybe the most painful ones are those that I walked away from without harvesting the bountiful lessons that You had embedded within them.  I confess that I have failed here.  But where I have probably failed the most is believing that You will never fail me.  Despite the fact that I’ve given far less than I should, that I’ve compromised my values in order to bypass the work involved in defending them, that I’ve chosen the easy road which never runs to You, and that I’ve betrayed others including You in order to advance myself…if I have failed You, it is here.
But it is not my failures that are Your focus.  It is my redemption.  It is my pursuit of You that is enlivened by Your pursuit of me.  It is your relentless commitment to salvaging what I’ve made of my life, and then constructing something wildly phenomenal out the wreckage.  Despite it all, You’ve never failed me.  Not once.  Not ever.  May I become what You are.  May I become faithful, trustworthy, ever reliable, and always obedient.  “Help me overcome my unbelief,” so that I might be empowered to do these things so that I will never fail at doing great things.
In pray all of this in Jesus’ Name.  Amen.
 
A Thought to Carry With Me Today
“Failure is opportunity.  As such, I am never surrounded by a bunch of failures.  Rather, I am engulfed by a mass of opportunity.” 

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