Failing Should Never Be Fatal, Part 1

Today on Fellowship in the Word, Pastor Bill Gebhardt challenges you to become a fully functioning follower of Jesus Christ. In the light of Joshua's failure, there's that one word right in the middle of that verse. That's the word he used twice in chapter 7. Arise.

Kum. He said it twice to him. Get up. Stand up. Get going. Arise. Don't wallow in self-pity. You see, don't be dismayed. You've got to get up and get going, even in the context of your failure. Thank you for joining us today on this edition of Fellowship in the Word with Pastor Bill Gebhardt. Fellowship in the Word is the radio ministry of Fellowship Bible Church located in Metairie, Louisiana.

Let's join Pastor Bill Gebhardt now as once again he shows us how God's Word meets our world. The word for the day is the word failure. I can still remember 1986 watching on TV as the Space Challenger shuttle, 73 seconds after launch, exploded, losing everybody on board. Cataclysmic failure. History is marked with the failures of man. From the Leaning Tower of Pisa to the Hindenburg Zeppelin. From Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg to the nuclear failure at Chernobyl.

From the building of the Edsel in the 1950s to blind referees in last year's NFC championship game. Failure dogs the past of all humans, including you and me. In fact, failure is part of the biblical narrative for some of the great characters of the Bible. Noah got drunk and exposed himself. Abraham lied twice about Sarah being his sister in order to save his own skin. And Isaac, his son, did the same thing with his wife.

Jacob deceived his father and cheated his brother out of a birthright. David sinned with Bathsheba and then Uriah the Hittite murdered. The disciples of Jesus Christ abandoned him during the crucifixion and they even doubted his resurrection. Peter denied Jesus. And later, much later, even waffled about the gospel when the Judaizers showed up in the Book of Acts.

John Mark bailed out of the first missionary journey. Think of Moses. He murders an Egyptian and then he's rejected by his fellow Jews and he flees for his life. And he hides in the desert for the next 40 years. DL Moody said Moses spent his first 40 years thinking he was somebody. He spent the second 40 years learning he was nobody.

And then he spent the third 40 years discovering what God can do with a nobody. That's a very important thing for all of us. Failure visits all of our lives. All of our lives are marked with failure. But just like with Moses, our failures should never be fatal.

Not ever. I want you to think this morning about the worst failures in your life. The worst things you've ever done. The greatest failures you've ever had.

I want you to think about those because I want you to understand that it's very important that you don't think about those. I think it's a very important thing for you to understand how do you deal with failure in your life. I believe God uses our failures for the building blocks of our success. And I think the scripture will back that up. I want to start and springboard from Psalm 37 verses 23 and 24. Psalm 37, 23 and 24. It's a psalm of David. He knows failure.

He's done it. On many occasions, as a matter of fact. And yet this failing man, David, is called a man after God's own heart. Not because he was so always right.

Not because he always did the right thing. But because he had deep faith in the Lord. And here David writes in verses 23 and 24, he said, the steps of the man are established by the Lord.

He delights in his way. God is involved in our lives. And then he says this, and when he fails, he shall not be hurled headlong because the Lord is the one who holds his hand. The assumption of David is and when he fails, the living Bible, I think, is really good here. The living Bible paraphrase says if they fail, it isn't fatal for the Lord holds them with his hand. When you and I fail, it isn't fatal. Well, we have to understand that because when we start failing, we start thinking, don't we? We get a lot of self-doubt. We have a lot of condemnation. We feel a lot of guilt and we keep thinking about ourselves as a failure.

But God says that's not the case at all. I want to use the failures in your life. You don't get much help outside these walls with dealing with failure. Think of all the books that are written on success.

I mean, hundreds. You can go to success seminars. How many of you have been to a failing seminar?

Really? How many books have you read on failing? Failing for dummies, an idiot's guide to failing. You see, they don't write books on failing and yet all of us fail and we allow our failures sometimes to define our own lives. And God says, look, it's real simple here.

I just want you to take two steps, two things to deal with the failures of your life. So now let's go to Joshua Chapter 8. Joshua Chapter 8.

We've been in Joshua for some time. Chapter 7 is a chapter dedicated to failing. There's a lot of failure in Chapter 7. Achan fails. He's not supposed to take any of the booty and he takes it and he hides it in his tent. He gets in a whole world of trouble and it cost him his life. Joshua fails. Joshua's own faith fails. And he says, Lord, why did you ever have us cross the Jordan? Maybe we should have just lived in the wilderness.

Why did you do this? Why did you bring us over here? And his faith becomes very weak. And then we come to Chapter 8. And God is going to deal with Joshua's weak faith, his failing faith. And God's going to say something here in this verse that he said twice in Chapter 7. And it's a very important first point of the message. He says, now the Lord said to Joshua, do not fear or be dismayed.

That's interesting. That word dismayed. Self-condemning.

See, Joshua now knows he failed. And he says, no, I don't want you to start condemning yourself. Oh, boy, I'm just not what I ought to be. I didn't do what I should have done.

All those kind of things. He said, don't do that. He said, take all the people of war with you and arise. Go up to Ai. See, I have given into your hand the king of Ai, his people, his city and his land.

God says here what he said in the beginning of the book. He said, past tense, I've given it to you. Ai is yours, go take it. It's yours, just go get it.

They haven't even gone there yet. God said, yeah, when I told you I'd give you the promised land, you hadn't even crossed the Jordan. I said, it's yours. But there's interesting, in the light of Joshua's failure, there's that one word right in the middle of that verse. That's the word he used twice in Chapter 7. Arise.

Kum. He said it twice to him. Get up. Stand up. Get going. Arise. Don't wallow in self-pity. You see, don't be dismayed.

You've got to get up and get going, even in the context of your failure. He says that in Verse 2, he said, you shall do to Ai and its king, just as you did to Jericho and its king. You shall take only its spoil and its cattle as plunder for yourselves.

You'll set an ambush, he said, for the city behind it. And they do. And you can read the rest of that in that category. But there's something different about Ai. God said this time, when you get to Ai, by the way, the plunder is all yours. You take Ai, take all the plunder. Now, he told them with Jericho, don't take any of the plunder. The plunder is mine. Now he says, you can take it all.

You can take their cattle. Just go and do it. And there's an ingenious plan that God sets up, and you can read the rest of the story. But what I'm interested in is this idea of failure here. We have to get up from our failures. That's what he is saying.

We have to be able to use this. And I want you to think about being Joshua at this time. He had buried 36 soldiers. He thought it was because somehow he misunderstood the Lord or didn't have enough faith. He also, I'm sure, sensed the stares of all the people. How many times do you think Joshua walked through the camp of two million people and they said, he's no Moses. He's not Moses. You see, he's already brought failure here.

And then from Joshua's inward part on his own, he does what we often do. This is all my fault. I must have done something wrong here.

It must be my fault. And failure, if you dwell on your failures, you are living in quicksand. You can't get out. You just sink deeper and deeper in it, and you'll start defining yourself on the basis of your failure.

You can't do that. God knows exactly what to say, and God uses Joshua's failure to bring about success, real success. You see, what God is saying there is, I've already given it to you. He says to you and me. That's what he has said.

It's already done. It's called grace. I want you to think about that. What is grace? Why do we have grace? Because we're failures.

That's why. Am I good enough to save myself? Nope. Am I religious enough to save myself?

Nope. Well, how am I going to be saved? Grace? God says, I'll save you. Failure is built into the gospel. All sin falls short of the glory of God.

That's us. You see, and God says, but my grace is sufficient here. My grace will get you through. It's my grace that will work here. God's grace is greater than our failures. If it weren't true, none of us would have eternal life. That's how we came to Christ.

The question now is, but how do we respond? And so when I try to figure out, where is the greatest case of feeling I kind of know in the scriptures? And there's probably a greater one, but there's a lot of them. But I want to now look at Luke chapter 15 in the New Testament. Luke 15, a very, very famous chapter.

It's the lost chapter. You got lost things in Luke 15. And Jesus has got an interesting audience. The context of Luke 15 is in the first verse. It says, now all the tax collectors and the sinners were coming near to listen to him. All the tax collectors, everyone hated them. The sinners are publicans and prostitutes.

These are the lowest level of society. And they're all coming to get to come to Jesus. And then there's another group. Both the Pharisees and the scribes began to grumble.

That's the other group. The Pharisees and the scribes see themselves a success and see the publicans and the sinners as failures. But Jesus says that's not really the case. In fact, the publicans and sinners are failures that can become a success, but you're successful people who are a failure. You see, that's what you see lay itself out here in this chapter.

And so he uses two analogies that doesn't offend anybody. Even the scribes and Pharisees would say, well, that makes some sense to me. The first one he uses is the lost sheep. He said, who among you if you had a bunch of sheep and you lost one? Leave the flock.

Go and find the one who is lost. Put them on your shoulders and bring them back. And when you bring them back, there's going to be great joy and celebration.

Everyone's going to be happy. And even the scribes and Pharisees would probably nod and say, yeah, that makes sense. A really good shepherd would go after a lost sheep. The second one was a woman who had a lost coin, likely part of her diary. And she lost the coin, and they have dirt floors, and she couldn't find it. So she goes diligently after that lost coin. She's going to find that lost coin, and she finds it. And then she says, rejoice with me.

Let's celebrate together, because I found this coin that was lost. And he says, that's the way it is in heaven when any lost person comes to saving faith. But this third analogy really, really bothers the scribes and Pharisees.

Everything about this story is repugnant to them. And that's why he uses the story itself. He starts out then, and he says in verse 11, a man had two sons. The younger of them sent him to his father. Father, give me the share of the estate that falls to me. Now, you and I would just read that.

But boy, you have to understand something here, the culture. First of all, he had two sons. According to the Mishnah, the Jewish writing, the oldest son gets 2 thirds of the estate. The youngest son will get 1 third of the estate. He'll get 1 third.

The oldest brother will get 2 thirds. But there's something else about this culture, this Middle Eastern culture. Everything that you do in the culture comes down to two words within the culture. The two words are honor and shame. Either what you do brings honor or what you do brings shame. This story is laden with shame.

There is shame everywhere in this story. And the scribes and the Pharisees hear it, and that's the way they would interpret what Jesus is saying. He says, the younger son says, give me what's mine. The Pharisee would be like, that's unthinkable. No Jewish boy would do that. That's shameful.

That's an insult to all of us. You can't do that. First of all, you can't inherit anything until the father's dead. But no one would go while his father's alive and say, give me that. And what's interesting about it, he said, Father, give me the share.

That word share is tas usios in Greek. It means the good and property. You remember, they didn't have currency, too much currency on hand.

They had a lot of goods and property. He said, give me that. You're going to find out in a moment because I'm going to sell it.

I'm going to sell it fast. There were some things you couldn't take. The younger son knew there were some things he couldn't take because it only could occur with the death of the father. But he said, give me my share. And all of this is like an outrage to them. This is an outrage.

No one would ever do such a thing. This is a cataclysmic failure of the young son. But it gets worse. He then says, so he divided his wealth between them. What?

Now there's what? No Jewish father would do such a thing. No Jewish father would give. You don't do that. You tell them you're going to have to wait till I'm dead like everybody else. There's honor at stake here.

You're not giving it to them. But remember, the father here is a picture of God. And God often lets us have what we want, even when he knows it's so terrible for us. You see, God will often do this. And so he says, no, the father was going to give it. And it's like, wow, that's just awful. And then it says, and not many days later. A few days later, he took all the goods and the property. And within a few days, he converted it all to cash. What is that? That's a fire cell.

You see, that's a fire cell. I'll sell everything, a dime on a dollar, whatever. I'll sell everything I have quickly.

Take a long time to sell these goods. What you're going to find out, because this family is wealthy. This family is really wealthy. This family has all kinds of assets.

And it becomes clear in the story when you see it, all the things that this family has. It has servants. They have hired men.

They hire musicians. They have a fatted calf. Not many Jewish families would have a fatted calf. It's usually only for a season and for a reason. And yet this young man sacrifices the whole future and the honor of the family for the immediate. You ever make a stupid mistake like that? You ever do something you thought was going to be a good idea for an evening, turned out to be one of the worst failures of your life? See, that's what happens here.

It's interesting. It says, and not many days later, the younger son gathered everything together. He went on a journey into a distant country. And there he squandered his estate with loose living. Spent it all. He went to live among the Gentiles.

Good Jewish boy went to live among the Gentiles. And it says he squandered everything that he had in a very short time. He sounds like a lot of lottery winners, doesn't he? You read those stories all the time. Someone wins the lottery. And within just a couple of years, all the money's gone.

And you wonder, how in the what happened? And that's what he did. And that was his intention from the beginning. The only reason I want my money is so I can go live with Gentiles and I can squander everything. And he does.

Wow. We find out in verse 30 when his older brother speaks that he squandered a lot of his money on prostitutes. His older brother apparently had found out about that. It says, now when he had spent everything, he had nothing left. Severe famine occurred in that country. And he began to be impoverished. So now they have a severe famine.

And he is impoverished. When you read about famines in that part of the world in ancient days, it's incredible. Remember, they couldn't store food very well. When they had a famine, people starved to death. I was reading this week that a common practice from people would be they'd eat garbage. Some people would eat their own sandals because they were so hungry. Any stray animal that they found, they ate.

It didn't matter what it was. They're going to eat it. And among the Jews, when a Jewish woman gave birth to a child, they ate the afterbirth. That's how hungry they are. That's a severe famine.

That's what this guy is saying. And so it says, after he became impoverished, it said, so he went and he hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country. A Jewish boy becomes a hired man of a Gentile. You know what that is? Shameful. And then it gets worse. Next phrase. And he sent him into the fields to feed swine. He's got to feed the pigs. Unclean animal to the Jews.

They can't touch them. He's an unclean animal. What you see in this story is shame. And you see it everywhere. There's shame everywhere. There's failure at every level. There's shame in approaching his father that way. There's shame in the father funding the rebellion. There's shame of selling everything for his estate cheap, the shame of turning it all into cash, the shame of funding your gross immoral living, the shame of becoming a beggar attached to a Gentile, and now the shame of feeding pigs. It's shameful.

It's failure at every level. Jesus is trying to make that point. Now, notice what happens to him then. It says, and he would have gladly filled his stomach with the pods that the swine were eating.

And no one was giving him anything to him. He would have loved to just eat what they ate. They were eating carob pods.

The carob pod comes off the carob tree. And it's like a long bean with peas in it. They've got these little dark brown black kind peas in it. They're pretty nutritious. They're unbelievably bitter. Humans can't really eat it.

It's too bitter for them to eat. And notice, he said he would have been glad to eat those. But he didn't. But he said he would have been glad to. But he couldn't eat it.

It was so bad. And so consequently, what you find here is he wanted to eat these carob pods. His failure is at a catastrophic level. And everything changes in verse 17. What do we do when we fail like this? First step. Notice what he does. And when he came to his senses, that's the first step of repentance. You come to your senses. Like, what am I doing?

Why did I do that? You see, he comes to his senses. He starts thinking about it from that point of view. He said when he came to his senses, he said, how many of my father's hired men have more than enough bread?

I'm dying here of hunger. Now this says a lot, by the way, about the father because he talks about the father's hired men. Now remember, the father's wealthy. He's a landowner. One of the things he'd have in that culture is he has tenant farmers who work his land for him. And they get a percentage of it.

They give him a percentage, and they get a percentage. So he has tenant farmers. He also has indentured servants.

And we'll run into one of them later. He runs into indentured servants. These are people that owe money and become slaves or indentured servants to pay it all off.

They're treated more like family. But after the tenant farmers and the indentured servants, then you have hired men. A hired man is just like a guy who goes to Lowe's or Home Depot every morning and waits for someone to pick him up and take him off in a truck and get a day's work. A hired man works for one day.

According to the book of Leviticus, once you finish your day's work, you have to be paid that day. They needed the money immediately, so when you hired a man, you paid him at the end of the day. He said, I'd like to be like one of my father's hired men, a day laborer. Notice what he said about him, though. It's really intriguing because he said, how many of my father's hired men have more than enough bread?

What's that tell you about his father? He's generous. He's a very generous man. He's representing God here, but he's very generous.

He gives them more than enough bread. Wow. And then it says, next step, I will get up and go. There it is. Arise. Stand up. Get going. Move. Do something.

You see, whenever you and I fail, get up and go. You've been listening to Pastor Bill Gebhardt on the Radio Ministry of Fellowship in the Word. If you ever miss one of our broadcasts, or maybe you would just like to listen to the message one more time, remember that you can go to a great website called oneplace.com. That's oneplace.com, and you can listen to Fellowship in the Word online.

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That's fbcnola.org. At our website, you will find hundreds of Pastor Bill's sermons. You can browse through our sermon archives to find the sermon series you are looking for, or you can search by title. Once you find the message you are looking for, you can listen online, or if you prefer, you can download the sermon and listen at your own convenience. And remember, you can do all of this absolutely free of charge. Once again, our website is fbcnola.org. For Pastor Bill Gebhardt, I'm Jason Gebhardt, thanking you for listening to Fellowship in the Word. .