Some Problems No.3 Failure

7th Chapter of Paul's Letter to the Romans. Paul has got a pleasure that having committed himself, he often breaks that law. By meaning purposely, that is why I felt, so you can see how cunning and deadly and damnable it is, for it uses God's good law for its own evil purposes.

The law is good then, and the trouble is not there but with me, because I am sold into slavery with sin as my owner. I don't understand myself at all, but I really want to do what is right, but I can't. I do what I don't want to, what I hate.

I know perfectly well that what I am doing is wrong, and my bad conscience proves that I agree with these laws that I am breaking. But I can't help myself, because I'm no longer doing it. It is sin inside me that is stronger than I am, that makes me do these evil things.

I know I am lacking through and through, so far as my old sinful nature is concerned. No matter which way I turn, I can't make myself do right. I want to, but I can't.

When I want to do good, I don't. When I try not to do wrong, I do it anyway. Now, if I am doing what I don't want to, it is plain where the trouble is.

Sin still has me in its evil grasp. It seems to be a fact of life that when I want to do what is right, I inevitably do what is wrong. I love to do God's will, so far as my new nature is concerned, but there is something else deep within me.

In my lower nature, that is at war with my mind, and wins the fight, and makes me a slave to the sin that is still within me. In my mind, I want to be God's willing servant, but instead I find myself still enslaved to sin. So you see how it is.

My new life tells me to do right, but the old nature that is still inside me loves me to sin. Oh, what a terrible predicament I'm in. Who will free me from my slavery to this deadly lower nature? Thank God, it has been done by Jesus Christ our Lord.

He has set me free, so there is now no condemnation awaiting those who belong to Christ Jesus. Amen. Let me read to you again a couple of verses from Romans 7, and then we'll have a prayer together.

From the 19th verse. When I want to do good, I don't. When I try not to do wrong, I do it anyway.

Then down to the last verse here. Oh, what a terrible predicament I'm in. Who will free me from my slavery to this deadly lower nature? Thank God, it has been done by Jesus Christ our Lord.

He has set me free. Father, we just come to you now. The warmth and the intimacy of this sanctuary.

We pray to you health and your blessing upon our evening meditation. Father, you know it's not too easy for some of us to concentrate. We don't live in a world that is terribly disciplined, and our mental faculties are often shown just to wander.

We're asking this night for your help. Pray for your spirit to do the time. Grant to us, whether we're young or old, a special ennobling of yourself, so that we may fully appreciate and respond to the challenge of your word, as we consider a very practical to each person in this tabernacle, a very relevant subject.

In Jesus' name, Amen. I want to talk to you this evening on a subject that I've been studying for many, many years. How to cope with failure.

How to cope with failure. And what I want to say, because it's the result of a great deal of reflection in my life, comes right from my heart, and is not just some homiletic outline which I want to share with you, in terms of spiritual exposition. I decided to encourage you, and also to challenge you, and therefore I'm asking Godly for your concentration.

I wonder if you're aware that really the whole of Scripture, Old Testament and New Testament, gives us an insight into men, and indeed women, who fail God. The Bible is a very, very honest book, indeed. It tells us not only of the successes of ordinary people, but it tells us of their weaknesses, of their failures.

And when you come to the Word of God, you discover that there are many men who became very anxious in their spiritual pilgrimage, because they failed to do at some time what God wished them to do. So you go, for instance, to such a book as the book of Genesis, and there you read of Abraham. And you discover that Abraham, this magnificent man of God, let the Lord down.

And one occasion he tried to pass his wife off as being his sister, because he didn't want the king of Egypt, who might have required her as part of his power, to put Abraham to death. Abraham failed. Go through to the book of Exodus, and you come across another character, his name is Moses.

And he's a most remarkable man. He's the deliverer of Israel. They were in bondage in Egypt.

They needed a captain to lead them, and God sent them Moses. And it was spectacular, his ministry. Then an occasion came when Moses was somewhat hungry, and he smoked in the wilderness a rock twice, and disobeyed God.

And it was as a result of his failing, on this occasion, he was refused permission to go into the promised land. David is a perfect example of a man who failed the Lord, the greatest king that Israel ever knew. The Bible refers to him as the sweetest psalmist that ever there was.

And yet, on one occasion, David let the Lord down terribly. And he writes a psalm which makes reference to this, the fifty-first psalm. David has taken another man's wife, because the commissive age is not just a child of the twentieth century, they just did years ago.

And David not only committed adultery, but he put to death the husband of Bathsheba, and brought disgrace upon the Hebrew community. And so, in the psalm, the fifty-first psalm, David, when he's been arrested about his sin, by God sending the prophet Nathan, he confesses that he has done something awful. And he says, Lord, it's against you.

You only that have sinned and done this evil in your sight. You move on to the seventy-fourth psalm, and there you find a man, whose difficulty is in a different passage, which is that of David. David has sinned morally.

But this man, spiritually, feels that, well, he's no Sanchez. He's no giant. He says, truly, God is good to Israel, but as for me, my steps is almost done, my feet is well now slipped.

God's good, good man. And I look round, those people who are in it, let's come to them. And they're so successful, but not me.

I'm a failure. Jonah, he was the man with a submarine experience. He was committed by the Lord to go to Nehemiah.

He was going to be the sort of Billy Graham of that day. In universal, it means that, Jonah wasn't too happy about the thought, and so he got a ticket, travelling in the wrong direction. God took him to the depths of the sea.

Placed him in the stomach of a fish. Then called the fish to vomit him back up on the shore. And even then, after fishing in Nineveh, Jonah came to the conclusion that his life wasn't worth living, and he wished that God would take him out of this world.

He wanted to die a failure. Elijah? Elijah had a spectacular ministry, a charismatic figure, whatever that was. He really kept the mind.

But there was an occasion, which Chips refers to, when Elijah finds himself in the wilderness of Judea, and he flops down in front of a tree, and he says, Lord God, I don't want to live anymore. I just can't take it with the face of it. That woman, Jezebel, she really scares me.

Take my life from me, Lord. What about Samuel, just going back in history a little. You would say that Samuel, if you have knowledge of the Old Testament, was one of these men who was tremendously successful.

And as a prophet, as a pastor of Israel, he certainly was. But as a father, he was pretty hopeless. You read about Samuel's children.

They didn't go on to know the Lord at all. And there is an implied criticism of Chips about Samuel's handling of his household affairs. Time would not allow me to tell you about men in the New Testament, such as Thomas, and John Mark, and Venus, but just a moment to reassure the people, the fishermen, because he was a failure if ever there was a man who warranted that description.

You know, Jesus said he wouldn't. Lord, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter who leaves you.

You can't bank on this, Jesus said. I'll be by your side. But the day came, you remember, he was warming his hands by the fire in the high priest's courtyard, and a couple of servants, and a lady also, came alongside, and the huge people were seeing an accomplice of Jesus, and he said, Mark.

And when Jesus appeared to Peter, he rushed out into the darkness of the night, and he cried, and the Bible uses a very strong word to describe this crying. It was weeping, it was wailing. It was a man, broken-hearted, sobbing at the depths of his being.

And it's very, very interesting that when Jesus is brought back from the dead, and he appeals to the disciples, he first, in his resurrection appearances, tells the woman to go back to the disciples, and tell them that she has risen, and particularly to inform Peter that he wants to see him. Why does Jesus want to see Peter? Because to see Peter was a failure. And Jesus deals with failure.

I'll repeat the comment I made five minutes, I've hardly been speaking that time, that I made a few moments ago. The Bible records the stories of men and women who failed. And you know, I thank almighty God that that is the case.

Because when I tell you that I've been steadily subject to failure for many years in my life, I tell you the truth. But alongside these characters who were strong in some areas, and failures in others, there stands out by way of contrast the Lord Jesus. Our Savior is the opposite.

He's not a failure. He's absolutely successful. It doesn't matter where you find the Lord Jesus as you read the story of his life in the pages of the Gospels, you discover him always acting in accord with his ministry.

And like me, everything he teaches, he captures. And like all of us, when Jesus engaged in a relationship, he was always kindly to the person who was involved. He was never cruel, he never played with anyone's emotions, never played with anyone's affections, never needlessly caused anyone grief at all.

He'd been entrusted with a ministry from God his Father, and he spent all of his time and invested all of his time in securing that objective. He taught to ordinary people, he told them about God. He went down the streets of Palestine, visiting the villages and the cities, and he said that people had to ensure that they were right with the Lord because he knew that they were sinners, and that ultimately they would pay the consequence of their sin unless they were forgiven.

And he knew that forgiveness could only come if one day he was to be offered as a sacrifice for their sins. And so the day came, and it was a terrible day, when Jesus was arrested. They took him in the Garden of Gethsemane, cowardly thugs that they were, those Roman officers and the assailants from the high priest.

They took him during the night and they hauled him back to the high priest's palace. They tied him, they put him in front of Pontius Pilate, they took him to the Tertullian Guard, that was the front regiment of the Roman troops in the forces of Antonia, and they're those men. They did terrible things to Jesus, yet he didn't flinch.

In fact, even when he was nailed to the cross, he offered no resistance, except when it predicts the ministry of Jesus. He went to Jerusalem like a flint. That means there was no one who could dislodge him from doing what he wanted to do.

He was a flint man, the granite man. They couldn't stop him, because he had one objective, to perform the will of his father. And in this, I argue, he was 100% successful.

Do you know what the last words of Jesus were on the cross? He looked down from that vantage point, his body relapsed with pain, and he let out what is one word in the original language, finished. How do you mean? Well, not that he was finished, but that the work his father had given him to do, that was finished. What was that work? Well, Jesus had been incestuous, was preaching the gospel, warning men and women of the consequences of sin, preserving his purity, his own sinlessness, and then dying, as an atonement, as a means whereby others who trusted him should inherit the benefits of his sinless life.

And so he looks back, down 30 odd years and more, of his earthly life, he can't find anything that's incomplete, and he says to his father, I've done it. It's perfect. There is not one thing that you asked of me that I haven't achieved.

Success. Absolute success. And it stands out in relief when compared with all the failures of many of these nonetheless great men whose stories are recorded in the Old Testament and the New Testament.

Now let's move on to something else. Let's hold those two things in mind. Briefly, the fact that the people in the Bible were failures, and the second fact that Jesus, by contrast, was an absolute outstanding success.

Now this new thing that I want to bring to your attention. What is a Christian? What is a Christian? Well, a Christian is a person who has trusted Jesus as saviour. Let me express that a little more clearly.

A Christian is someone who believes that when Jesus died on the cross of Calvary, he died for them, so that they would no longer fear death and ultimately their spirit going before God for judgment. But how does all that come about? I mean, how do you feel that you're a Christian? Because feeling does come into it. It's not just a mental and intellectual thing.

Now there's a lovely statement in the epistle which Peter wrote, which says that those who trusted Jesus as saviour become partakers of his nature. That means to say, something of what Jesus is enters their life. How does that come about? Well, you've heard reference to the Holy Spirit, haven't you? The Holy Spirit is a third person of the Trinity.

And when a man, woman, boy, girl becomes a Christian, the Holy Spirit enters into their heart. And he brings with him the benefit of all that Jesus has achieved. There's another way to describe this.

It uses the expression, which has been made popular by Jimmy Carter, of being born again. He was a man and he's been a sinner all his life. He's never asked for his sins to be forgiven.

And then he hears about Jesus. And he says, yes, I want to know the newness of life. And he goes through an operation, a spiritual operation, akin to that of a hospital where maybe a new heart is implanted into somebody's body.

Well, he offers himself to the Lord and he says, take me and bring your spirit into my life. Make me again. I want to participate.

I want to have a share in the nature of Jesus. Well, that's a marvellous, brings with it tremendous benefit. One day, Jeffrey Wednesday, will move into the first division and will be the first club in that division.

And they will also win the football league championship. And the whole city of Sheffield will go mad with delight three years' time when it happens. And people in the tracks here in Worthing, assuming I'm still around at that time, will whisper with admiration to their friends, our pastor comes from Sheffield.

And they will know that as a North Countryman, I will be basking in the glory of the triumph of the Owls as they shot from third division to second division to first division to the top and also got the cup. I will share and I will remind you in three years' time of what I predicted before. Share in the glory.

I use the illustration just to lighten the address but also to make the point. Christians share in the glory of Jesus. They share in the victory that Jesus achieved on the cross.

And part of Him enters into them. You got it? Part of Jesus enters into them. And that is really where the trouble starts.

Not with Jesus entering into their life but the fact that there's part of the old nature that existed before they were Christians that continues to live. And here you see the dilemma which is outlined by the Apostle Paul when he said, The good that I want to do, I don't always do. But the evil which I would not do, that I do.

He talks about two aspects of his personality. The old and the new. The aspect where the Lord Jesus is in control.

The old nature which is sinful and has a bias towards wrongdoers. I wish I could say, my dear young friend and older friend too, that when you become a Christian, sin is completely eradicated in your life. I wish I could preach what theologians would call the idea, the teaching of absolute sanctification that once you trust Jesus, you never, never sin again.

As God is my judge, that's what I want in my life. I don't want to sin anymore, but unfortunately I do. I fail.

And I'm constantly failing because I've got the old part of my nature which declares war on the new nature. And this really is what causes me and what causes many, many people to feel that they're failing. Have you got the point? I try to make it as clear as I can.

The Bible talks about men who are great men that fail God in some way. It gives us the example of Jesus who never failed at all. And it tells us that sinners like us can ask Jesus into our hearts.

And by the power of His Holy Spirit, He comes in. But there's still that old Adamic nature, that old person that we used to be, that still exists. And it wars against the new.

And the apostle tells us that this is going to last the whole of our lives. That's why he uses military metaphors. He talks about wrestling.

He talks about buffeting his body. He talks about being the soldier of Jesus Christ. He tells a young man by the name of Timothy to endure hardness.

You see, the Bible is so honest. The Bible is absolutely truthful when it says that to be a Christian is to be a very, very difficult being in the East. Because not only is there hostility in the world to the Christian way of life, but within our own personality there's still an evil bias towards things.

Well then, bearing that in mind, that we are prone, even as Christians, to fail, perhaps I should get out, and I don't have an awful amount of time to do this. What is the particular climate which cultivates failure? And then I'll talk to you about some ways in which you can cope with it. What's the particular climate that cultivates failure? As Christian people.

Can I tell you this? And I hope you understand me. In fact, I'd be so bold as to say if you don't, please ask. And if you ask me seriously, I wouldn't be put out by taking a question.

If you've got a wrong understanding as a young person as to what the cross really is all about, you'll fail. You see, there are some people who don't realise that the cross is as ugly and as rotten as it really was. For Jesus, his death was a terrible, terrible danger.

Now, I could spend some time trying to describe that death to you. Could never convey the picture as adequately as it did to them. But I begin to fail in my Christian life when I forget the enormous cost that Jesus paid for my salvation.

There are people today who I think have got a wrong idea as to the message of the cross. It's not preached properly, according to A. W. Choser. But listen to what he has to say.

He's talking really about the challenge to Christians to put their life in the control of Jesus and to realise just how much pain he went through for them to have been forgiven. If I see it right, says A. W. Choser, the cross of popular evangelicalism is not the cross of the New Testament. It is rather a new bright ornament upon the bosom of a self-assured and carnal Christianity whose hands are indeed the hands of Abel but whose voice is the voice of Canaan.

The old cross bloometh. The new cross entertains them. The old cross condemns.

The new cross amuses. The old cross destroys confidence in the flesh. The new cross encourages it.

The old cross brought tears and blood. The new cross brings laughter. The flesh, smiling and confident, preaches and sings about the cross.

Before that cross it bows and towards that cross it points with carefully staged histrionics. But upon that cross it will not bow. Under the throat of that cross it stubbornly refuses to bear.

What's Choser saying in the works? Choser says that unless I appreciate the terrible nature of the death of Jesus on my behalf, unless I regret that he suffered as much as he did for me, then I'll always fail. I'll always fail. I must bear in my mind each day what Jesus did for me.

The cross was our ease again. And the Christian who realises what Jesus has done is very often stopped from letting the Lord down when perhaps he's placed in a situation of temptation. Don't cling to the wrong cross.

Cling to the cross of Jesus who died to save us. But another area in which failure grows is not through misunderstanding the cross, but it is through what I would call indolence. You know indolence means laziness.

You go into the book of Sovereigns and there's a man referred to in terms of a slugger. And he's so lazy, that person. He just won't do anything.

You ask him to engage in an action, he says, a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the arms, and he locks himself back in the chair. He doesn't want to do any work at all. And a person who's indolent and who doesn't realise the awfulness of the cross is a person who's prone to fail.

What do you do for Jesus? What do you do for him? I remember my pastor back home years ago bullying me as a 17-year-old lad to be a Sunday school teacher. Telling me that it didn't matter how many books I read, whatever pursuits I engaged in, that unless I was working for Jesus and was doing something in the ministry of the local church, I'd become lazy, and I'd grow no spiritual muscles at all. I mean, is that right, you know? You fail when you're an artist.

How many people put up what happens to be bubbles in the form of excuses when they're asked to do something for Jesus? Come and help us with our boys' work on a Wednesday. Well, I can't do that. I mean, I'm corny.

I'm all of 14, and unless I look after my lady friend here, I might be left on the shelf. So many absurd reasons. Indolence, laziness, being a spiritual failure.

I put the illustration form humorously, but I don't mean it humorously. I believe that you fail when you're not working for the Lord Jesus Christ. When you let other people... You see, I believe, just to be a little bit more personal, that in this tabernacle, too few people are doing too many things.

Because such a large number of people, and particularly in the ranks of our younger friends, are not volunteering for what they ought to be doing. And as a result of that, they too suffer spiritually, because you fail so often when you're doing nothing for Jesus, because it's true, as the Proverbs said, the devil finds work for idle hands. Failure, spiritually, grows out of a wrong understanding of the cross, and it grows out of plain laziness.

Shall I tell you another way that failure comes? It comes through superficiality. That means something that's a veneer, something that's a show. If I was bald and I was wearing a toupee, then that would be superficial.

I would be covering something up. And that's really what that word means. You can be so superficial, and everybody else thinks you're spiritual, but God knows you're not.

Oh, how superficial some of us are in the area of repentance. Lord, I didn't really mean to read that book, You Know Full Well, I didn't. Apologize.

You should have watched that program, Lord, where you sort of took your cap to the God of Heaven in Samsara, two days later. Same magazine, different kind of program, that You Know Full Well, that what you're watching, and what you're reading, was not helpful to you spiritually. And as a result, you fail.

But you sponge on faith because you've heard them preach at the tabernacle that God soon forgives sins, and He does. But He doesn't forgive sins that are superficially confessed. He only forgives sins that come in the repentance of a being, of a person, who is absolutely convicted and hates his sin.

Superficial repentance leads failure. What about superficial worship? Oh, I love to worship the Lord. And I'd be the last person in the world to argue for pure rigidity in a church service.

I believe in a theology of revival. I believe that God can come upon us and do extraordinary things within us. But don't tell me when you have a sort of glazed look in your eyes, and you're staring towards heaven, and your hands are outstretched, that you're living for Jesus Christ, as you're saying, Abba Father, let me be Yours and Yours alone.

And when we're looking for the nitty-gritty work to be done in the tab, and you're not around, don't tell me that you've had a genuine spiritual experience. Because anything that's genuine results in activity. And superficially, to sing hymns, not to mean what you're singing, leads to failure.

Well, that's the climax. I could go on emphasizing this a lot more, but let me close that. How do you cope? How do you cope with failure? Well, by recognizing what I call the Micah Principle.

Let's assume, for everyone in this congregation this evening, what a tremendous assumption it would be that you really want to get right with God. All right. The Bible tells us through the book of Micah that when we fall, we can arise.

When we sit in darkness, the Lord can be a light unto us. In other words, God acknowledges that spiritually we have failed Him on many an occasion, but there is the tremendous possibility of starting all over again. All right, Lord, I've made a mess of it in my life.

I've made a mess of it in my marriage. I've made a mess as a Sunday school teacher. I've made a mess as a deacon.

I've made a mess as an elder. But Lord, I believe that You can lift me right up and give me a new start. And He can do that.

That's the beginning of coping with failure, to realize what God can do for you by His grace. And the second thing is, remember how God's feet confess sin. You see, there are some of us who have never forgiven ourselves for sins done years ago that God has forgotten completely about.

That is so, you know. But God's got an extraordinary mental ability. He not only forgives, He forgets.

Remember the story of the person who keeps coming to the Lord about the same sin. Says, Lord, will you forgive me for that sin that I committed? And the response from heaven was, What sin? I don't know anything about such a sin as that. Because it's already been confessed and it's been forgiven.

Remember, as you cope with failure, the Micah principle, and remember also how God in His grace wipes away all trace of your sins from His recollection. And finally, in dealing with spiritual failure and trying to curb it in your life, remember the force of the old nature. Remember the tendencies that you've got towards evil and don't see them.

Discipline yourself. The Apostle Paul talks about profiting his body. I've got a friend who's meeting me at 10 o'clock tomorrow.

I'm just reminding him to go jogging after the church meeting. Disciplining the body physically. But what about disciplining the body spiritually? I know that I've got weaknesses in my personality.

I could write a PhD thesis just on my weaknesses. And I'm the most qualified person in the tabernacle to do it. Because I know myself.

Know yourself. The areas you weakness, don't see them. Take strong guard over it.

And come back to that tremendous thought that Jesus has made you to be a partaker of the divine nature. And as you discipline yourself before the Word of God, and as you come to Him in prayer, He'll give you victory. And if you fail on Monday, confess your sins from the depths of your being and get up again.