Failure: The First Step to Victory - Part 1

Welcome to the In Touch Podcast with Charles Stanley for Wednesday, August 16. Have you ever considered that failure could be the first step to victory? Today's podcast shows you how mistakes and disappointment can be God's greatest means for developing your faith. I don't know of anyone who enjoys defeat or failure. Most of us will do everything we can to ward off defeat and to avoid failure at any cost. Yet I think all of us have heard of people whose disastrous failure was the beginning for them of real success in life.

Some of the biggest businesses ever built in this country were born out of previous failure in the life of a single individual. The same thing is true in every facet of our life. Failure and defeat can either bring destruction and ruin, or it can bring within it the seeds of success and victory. When you and I bring that over to the Christian life and the spiritual realm, sometimes we feel the same thing.

That is a sense of defeat and failure. And what appears to be on the surface, the worst thing that could happen to us has within it the first step, the seeds to victory and success in the Christian life. So as we look at this subject today, failure, the first step to victory, I want us to examine what God is doing in our life. And it just may be that you may discover today that the very thing that you have fought against and have resisted and have done yourself as best you could to manipulate your way out of may be the very thing that could have within it the seeds of real success and victory in your Christian life. Many people are suffering defeat and don't understand why.

Many of you who've been a Christian a long time, you've asked yourself the question, Lord, you said in your word that you would supply all of my needs according to your riches in glory by Christ Jesus. Why is it that you don't supply that when I'm undergoing this tremendous temptation or this tremendous struggle in my life? Why is it I continuously suffer one defeat after the other? Is it that God somehow has himself involved in your defeats? Are these defeats the result of Satan or is God involved in this?

What is it that God is up to in the life of that person who continuously finds themselves struggling with God? Now, in the Garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve sinned against God, they sinned against God by acting independently of God. God said, of all the trees in the garden, you're free to eat, but of this tree of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you must not eat of it because in the day that you do, ye shall surely die. Acting on their own, independent of God, having their way, doing their thing, they chose to eat the fruit.

As a result, sinned into their life so that all of us who've been born since then have done the same thing. We've chosen to act independently of God. Now for a while, maybe in your life, you didn't even know what God's purpose and plan was. But since you became a Christian, all of us have had times wherein we deliberately, willfully acted independently of God. Somehow having the strange idea that God being the all wise God that he is and knowing what's best for us, that acting independently of him, we would come out better in a given situation than being obedient and submissive to him. Now if we sat down and talked about it, we know it just never works out that way.

It's never right, but we are tempted in a way. So when we think about defeating the Christian life and failure, the fact that we should shun that and avoid defeat, what I want you to see for just a few moments is I want you to see a principle here that failure and defeat are not always bad. Failure and defeat are not always the worst thing that has ever happened. Failure and defeat in the life of the believer can be the first step to the best days of your life as a victorious Christian. Now I do not mean by victorious sinless.

I do not mean by victorious that you'll never make a mistake. I mean by that of coming to the position in your thinking and in your conduct whereby you recognize your absolute and total dependence upon God through his Son, Jesus Christ, and that on a continuing basis you endeavor by trust, not in efforts and in works, but in simply trusting in the Lord Jesus Christ who lives within you to live his life in and through you in such a fashion that God is glorified, that your life, which is continuously being conformed into his likeness, is a reflection of the presence of God on this earth. Now in order for that to happen, God must work in your life and my life in total contradiction to the direction in which the world's going. Here's what we teach our children from the very beginning. We teach them that to try hard, that to work hard, that to be good stewards, that there to be, that to do well in school, and all of that is right and good. But in the process of teaching that, something else gets mixed up in that. What gets mixed up in that is that by determination and self-will and by concentration and by the right schedule and by having a goal and working at it and being persistent and being self-confident and believing in yourself and getting other people to cooperate with you, and we put all of what the world considers essentials to success together, and a man will put those principles of success together, oftentimes leaving out the basic one, which is dependence upon God, but a man will put those principles of success together in the business world and he will succeed to some degree, to a great degree, even to his own satisfaction. He turns right around and employs the same kind of principles in the Christian life, and all of a sudden he realizes, wait a minute, this thing's not working.

There's something not working here, because you see, you and I are living in a humanistic world that is man-centered. Man is sufficient within himself. If he puts the right principles together and the right schedule together, he can do it. He can achieve it. He can make it work. He can accomplish it.

He can do thus and so. On the other hand, in the Christian life, the sign of maturity is not independence. The sign of maturity is dependence upon God. So here you and I, having grown up the way that we all grew up as far as learning that, then we get into this world system, and the world system's going this way.

If you want to make it, here's what you've got to do. You've got to keep on doing it, keep on being determined, keep on being persistent, keep on believing, all of these things. And then, in the Christian life, we discover that we've tried, and we keep on trying, and we tell God we're not going to commit this sin anymore. We tell God that we're going to be persistent reading our Bible. We're going to give. We're going to do the things we ought to do, and we tell him that, and we promise him that. We promise him that on our knees. We do our very dead level best, and what happens? We continuously are defeated. So somebody says, now, wait a minute, God, you know I'm doing the best I can.

Where are you? Well, he's where he's always been. He's just in there waiting, waiting for us to learn a basic principle which this world is opposed to, works to avoid at all possible cost. And what I want you to see is this, that failure and defeat are not always bad. That in some people's lives, now listen to me carefully, God does not work in every person's life the same way. We all don't have the same personality. We all don't have the same drives. We all don't have the same perspective on life. We're not all built alike. But there is this within us. We come into this world with a sense of independence, very shortly, independence from God.

We're going to do it. We'll do it our way. And God has purposed, he says in Romans 8 29, to conform us to the likeness of his Son. He has predestinated that. He has predetermined that even before you were born, God Almighty predetermined that you and I would be conformed to the image of his Son. He's already made up his mind what he wants to accomplish in our lives, that we are to glorify him and to be conformed to his likeness.

But we have a world system that is opposed to that. We've learned principles. We have been programmed to act opposite of the very things that bring about this conformation and this total dependence upon God so that we experience failure and defeat. Many of us could testify today that out of our defeats, out of our desperate failures, out of our continuous defeats, God has brought to birth the greatest sense of freedom, the greatest sense of liberty, the greatest sense of victory, the greatest awareness of spiritual success in our life that was born after continuous over and over and over again, attempting to ward off spiritual defeat and spiritual failure. It's when finally we gave up in utter desperation, threw up the white flag of surrender and said, God, I can't try any longer.

I quit. That was the first day of the beginning of the best days of our life. So I want to say to you, my friend, that failure and defeat can be the beginning of success and victory in your Christian life. So I want you to jot a few things down, if you will, and turn, if you will, to Romans chapter 7. You'll recall that Paul gives us in Galatians, in those first two chapters there, he gives us a little biographical sketch of what happened to him when he was saved. And you know, his experience on the Damascus road, how suddenly God struck him down, blinded him, humiliated him. And then the scripture says that he says in Galatians chapter 1 verse 15, but when he who had set me apart, even from my mother's womb and call me through his grace was pleased to reveal his son in me, that I might preach him among the Gentiles. I did not immediately consult with flesh and blood. Now, did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I went away to Arabia and returned once more to Damascus.

Then after three years later, I went up to Jerusalem to become acquainted with Cephas of Peter and stayed with him 15 days. And then he tells about how he began to relate to those apostles. What I want you to see here is a number of things. And the first one is this concerning our spiritual defeats that we oftentimes experience. Number one, that is that these defeats sometimes are engineered by God. Can you blame it on Satan?

They're engineered by God. When you think about who the apostle Paul was and you read Corinthians and Galatians and see his background and the heritage he had, let me tell you something. The apostle Paul, Saul of Tarsus was very proud of his heritage, of his background, of his accomplishments and of his achievements. He was on his way to drag more Christians out of their homes and put them in jail when God finally brought about the ultimate defeat of this self-will determined, sincerely wrong man. God had to absolutely shatter him and destroy his pride. And here he was, the leader, the captain lying in the sand, talking to somebody and his soldiers standing there listening to him thinking, what in the world has happened to him? Can you imagine how humiliated he had to become?

It took defeat, failure, humiliation, embarrassment, pain to bring him to the beginning of the first best days of his life. The seventh chapter of Romans. How long Paul had been a Christian when this takes place?

I don't know. Some people say that Paul here was unsaved. And so there are two different viewpoints here. But look, if you will, beginning in Romans chapter seven, verse 15, because so many of us having been saved, have felt the same way. Paul says, for that which I am doing, I do not understand for I'm not practicing what I would like to do, but I'm doing the very thing I hate. But if I do the very thing I do not wish to do, I agree with the law confessing that it's good. So now no longer am I the one doing it, but sin, which indwells me for I know that nothing good dwells in me that is in my flesh for the wishing that is the wishing to do right is present in me. But the doing of the good is not for the good that I wish I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not wish.

But if I'm doing the very thing I do not wish I'm no longer the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me, I find them the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wishes to do good. Now, if you think for just a moment, when Paul was saved, and you think about when you were saved, and you think about this very principle, the more successful a person is when they're saved, the more determined, the more consistent, the more persistent and the more those principles apply in their life, it is just natural and normal that once that person becomes a Christian, what do they do? They are so excited about Jesus Christ and so excited about this new faith, what do they do, but they naturally just pick up the same principles and they begin to employ them in the Christian life.

They begin to work and work and work and work and work. Not only that, but in this working process, this working process in order to do what? Well, God has saved us and when you and I are saved, we're like diamonds in the rough, a lot of sanding has to go on and sifting and God begins to show us things deep down inside, roots that need to be dealt with. Well, so what we want to do, our first impression is we want to improve what God just brought to birth and so we try to improve ourselves and we work hard at improving ourselves, not realizing that all of our self-improvement and all of our efforts to do better and to be better, all of these are working against God. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that I'm to do better and to get better and to improve myself. It isn't self-improvement that God is after, it is death, not improvement. So you see what God does in order to bring us to the realization of what he wants us to realize and that is we to live in absolute dependence upon him. He has to bring all of our self-efforts and our fleshly attempts to not. God is after bringing his servants and his children to utter defeat and failure on the basis of self-effort because what is the Christian life?

It is, listen, it is a new birth. That is the forgiveness of my sin, the pardon of our sin and the receiving into this body of ours, the person of Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit who will begin at that moment to live through us his life so that it is no longer self-effort. It is no longer self-attempts.

It is not my works. It is not trying to please God and trying to get God's acceptance and to get God's approval. It is living by faith, trusting in the Christ who lives within me moment by moment and day by day to conform me to the likeness of his son. Bringing us to defeat, my friend, is a principle of God. Now, what I want to say to you, my friend, is this, that defeat and failure oftentimes are prerequisites. They are essentials to what God wants to accomplish in our life. So number one, God oftentimes engineers our defeat.

He engineered Paul's defeat here. And if you'll study the lives of God's saints in the Old Testament as well as the New, you'll discover how many times it was defeat that brought them to the place they were then willing to listen to Almighty God. Secondly, I believe that defeat is oftentimes essential to God fulfilling his great purpose in our life.

He engineers it. Secondly, it is essential to God accomplishing his great purpose in our life. What is God's purpose for your life? You say, well, how can anyone know what God's purpose for my life is? Now, my friend, we may not know the details, and none of us would know the details of God's purpose, but we do know this. According to the Scriptures, as we said in Romans 8, 29, his overall purpose is to do what? It's to conform us to shape us in the likeness of his Son, because he says for eternity, throughout all eternity, what is God going to be doing? God is going to be holding up the body of Christ, the church.

He's going to be holding us up as demonstrations to his angelic host of his grace and goodness and love and power demonstrated in our lives. God has chosen as one of his great purposes to demonstrate his grace through us, his power through us, his love through us. You see, grace is God's undeserved favor, but it's his favor that not only is undeserved, it is unattainable any other way than as a gift. The only way we're going to get into heaven is by the grace of God. And the only way you're going to live the Christian life victoriously is the same way you got saved, that is not by human effort and human help, but by what? By Christ Jesus, living through your life by faith, what you cannot live, our defeat, and our failure, our coming to the end of our human resources spiritually, bringing us to defeat and shattering us and Christ Jesus becoming our life. Not only is it a new beginning for us, but my friend, you and I become the stepping stones, the multitudes of other people who need to discover the same liberating, freeing truth that we've discovered. And that is that Jesus Christ wants to be your everything, not your somethings.