Following God through Failure

One of the great obstacles for people when they get a direction or word from the Lord is this fear: If you don’t succeed, you’ll be labeled the failure, and you’ll lose credibility.

If God calls you to do something and he says to cross over that Jordan, you go over the Jordan, no matter what the price is. When you get over there and things seem to fall apart and the success that you had imagined or thought isn’t there, that can be incredibly discouraging. If you take a step of faith and you don’t succeed, some people around you are going to ridicule you and laugh at you.

You know what? Who cares? You didn’t cross the Jordan for personal gain, merit or glory. You crossed it to be obedient to Jesus. The results are up to him.

If you put your eye on the results, you’ll lose heart. If you keep your eye on Jesus, you’ll never lose heart even if the circumstances change. Sometimes you get halfway across the Jordan, and God says, “Stop! I only wanted you to go halfway. Turn around and go back.” In those moments, you might be tempted to cry out, “But we’re almost there!”

We live in a culture that is saturated with this idea that God is there to assist you with your dreams, desires and ambitions. That’s totally backwards. You are here on this earth to obey God, not to fulfill your own plans, dreams and desires. You are here to obey God, to walk in the Spirit and to move where God has called you.

This is the hardest part for me to understand because I know that God has called me into some things that — by all indications and in all ways that you can measure it — were a failure by human standards. In those times, I have to trust in what the Bible instructs us, such as “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths” (Proverbs 3:5-6, ESV).

There are certain parts of life that I thought failed, but now when I look back in history, it was a great success in God’s kingdom. That success was not because of the effect it had on others but because of the change that God was working in me.