Have you ever wished that everything you tried would be successful? Of course you have! None of us likes to fail, but the thing is, we all do. At some time or another, we all fail. And the question is: What do we do when we fail?
At the church I pastor, LifePoint Church, we have two worship services; one at 9 a.m. and one at 10:30 a.m. About nine months ago, in the 9 a.m. worship service, we had just finished praying and we were going to sing one more song.
The musicians were playing the song and I was listening for the right place to begin. I heard the spot, and jumped right in, bringing the other vocalists with me.
The problem was, I was singing in the wrong key. My daughter Melody teaches music theory at Drake University, and when I told her about it the following Monday she explained that the chord structures are why I started in the wrong key.
And that’s all fine and good, but at that moment, it was irrelevant. We sang that entire song in a different key than the musicians were playing it in. It was horrible. It was ugly. Every one of us knew something was wrong, but we didn’t know what, so we kept going.
The next Sunday, as the musicians and vocalists were gathering for rehearsal, I said, “Guys, I am so sorry about last Sunday! When we started that song we were in the wrong key and I couldn’t figure out what was wrong, but I knew it was wrong. It was horrible and it was all my fault and I am so sorry!”
Don Billington was sitting there with his guitar, and he looked at me and said something that was so powerful and so liberating. He simply said, “Nobody remembers but you.”
Here’s the thing: You will fail. No one besides Jesus ever got everything right. You will fail. And not only will you fail, you will fail many times. C. S. Lewis wrote, “Satan gets Christians to become preoccupied with their failures; from then on, the battle is won.”
And that’s exactly how the devil works on you. When you fail — and you will fail — you can’t let the enemy get in your head and cause you to become preoccupied with that failure. If you do, it will consume you and keep you down.
But check this out: As Jesus walked alongside His disciples, He was in a constant mode of encouragement.
Yes, He corrected them — sometimes strongly — and He taught them, but all this came wrapped in a big box of encouragement.
If you have ever had a good coach or teacher, you know what I’m talking about. The best coaches make sure that regardless of how much they correct you, you know they believe in you.
When you make a mistake, they don’t kick you off the team — they give you another chance to get it right. Christ has given all of us a second chance, and a third and fourth and He gives us chance after chance. That’s called grace.
Look at Peter. His failure was so monumental that we are still talking about it today, yet his response to that failure was to get back up and go again, and in doing so, the truth about the resurrection of Jesus has spread around the world.
When we fail, we can be tempted to give up our faith altogether because no one wants to be a hypocrite. But listen, failing doesn’t make you a hypocrite. What makes you a hypocrite is pretending you haven’t failed.
When you’ve been forgiven for great sins and failures, you can become a great encouragement to others to not quit.
About six weeks ago, the early service worship team, once again, sang that song that I so gloriously messed up. But this time we got it right. It wasn’t perfect, but that’s OK. I failed nine months ago, but I knew it wasn’t final. And your failures, whatever they may look like, aren’t final either.