“Most Bible characters met with failure and survived. Even when the failure was immense, those who [rebounded] REFUSED to lie in the dust and bemoan their tragedy. In fact, their failure and repentance led to a greater conception of God’s GRACE. They came to know the God of the second chance, and sometimes the third and fourth.”
Oswald Sanders, Spiritual Leadership
Fear of Failure
Winning is the best feeling. Losing is the worst. No one wakes up in the morning and says, “I hope I lose today.” That’s just crazy. Everybody everywhere loves to win. Winning means you’re the best, the strongest, the winner. It means you are special—more special than those other losers! And so we all want to win because being a loser is unimpressive and even embarrassing. Our failures are humiliating, for the most part, and that’s why we fear failure. The fear of failure can keep you from doing all kinds of things and from even trying, because failure just hurts too much. It’s like you can’t get over even the thought of failing, so you don’t even try.
But failure isn’t as bad as all that. In fact, in the life of faith, failure is foundational. After all, it was your failure that led you to the cross. If you hadn’t failed, then you wouldn’t have needed him. So hooray for failure! It led you to salvation. See, failure, when looked at in the right light, is actually a stepping-stone toward success. In fact, faith without failure is a charade. Where there are imperfect humans, there will inevitably be failure. For the believer, weakness and failure are meant to be not feared but embraced (see 2 Cor. 12:9).
It’s a topsy-turvy world we live in where self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-promotion are the normal, healthy choice, thinking low enough of yourself to confess your need for a Savior is weak, and walking humbly is unsafe and even ridiculous. In this world where winning is everything and weakness is to be feared, it’s no wonder that we can’t get over our failure and accept our inability to do life on our own and our need for God. But what looks like failure and weakness to the naked eye might just be success and strength in the spiritual realm. See, when you are totally independent, successful, and strong, what need do you have for a Savior? Why would you look for God to guide you, to help you, or to comfort you when you’ve got that all covered your own strong self?
We have a relative who thinks like this. He’s so rich that he can do anything and buy anything he wants, and so in response to the gospel he says, “Why do I need God when I can buy anything I want?” His success makes it hard for him to kneel before the throne, and your success can do the same to you. It makes it tough to devote your time to God and to learning what pleases him and what he wants from you. But failure reminds you of your real need for him by bringing you to the place of knowing that you are in no way big enough, wise enough, or smart enough to do this thing called life on your own. So yippee for failure and for weakness! As the apostle Paul says, “If I must brag, I will brag about the things that show how weak I am” (2 Cor. 11:30).
But getting all happy over your failure isn’t a natural or an easy thing. In fact, it’s a painful and disgusting thing for the most part. But in the process of learning to get over it, taking a look at your failure and the way you think about it is foundational to your holiness. It’s like this: without an accurate understanding of who you really are and why you need a Savior, you won’t be drawn to his righteousness, you won’t salivate for his presence, and you won’t dream of his perfecting humility. Accepting your own weakness so that he can be your strength will not only help you to get over your failure but set you free from the bondage to this world and let the power of heaven loose in your life.
The Humiliation of Failure
Let’s face it: it’s humiliating to fail. From tripping over one of those invisible cracks in the sidewalk in front of a few strangers to missing a game-winning free throw in front of hundreds of (former) fans, failure makes you feel and look bad. But all is not lost. Nope, the power of failure for the believer is actually found in the humiliation that comes from it. For the believer, the act of being humiliated is really just about finding the ability to look at your life from God’s perspective and not your own. Humility is the opposite of pride. And while humility is the foundation of all righteousness, pride is the root of all sin. Pride says, “I can do it on my own. I don’t need God. I am important. I am more necessary than you can imagine—even irreplaceable.” Pride leads angels to challenge God to a duel. It leads humans to want to have thousands of online friends, followers, and fans. And it keeps you from getting over the stuff in your life that you need to get over.
But humility is the opposite of pride and sets you free to worship the Creator instead of his creation. In humility you find strength in your weakness and hope in your failure. For the humble, the way up is the way down and the way down is the way up. Jesus puts it this way: “Those who honor themselves will be humbled, but people who humble themselves will be honored” (Luke 14:11). It’s a spiritual fact of life that makes no sense to the nonspiritual: being last makes you first with God, and insisting on being first puts you last—or haven’t you heard it said, “The last will be first, and the first will be last” (Matt. 20:16)? It’s not that you should make it your goal to lose or to suffer—that’s not it at all—but that you should know that pride, honoring yourself, and putting yourself before other people denies the life of Christ in you. But putting yourself after others and thinking less highly of yourself immediately identifies you with Christ.
If this all seems too unnatural and complicated, you’re right, it is. But while it’s unnatural to your flesh, it’s natural to your spirit, and while it’s complicated to your pride, it’s simple for your humility. Fact is, your failure is God’s training ground for humility. It goes like this: When you fail you show your weakness, and showing your weakness makes your pride freak. Your pride wants to impress; it wants the applause of people and the glory of feeling good about yourself. But God wants to strip off all that binds you to this world. He wants your eyes on him and your heart open and ready to act when he commands. The only thing keeping you from the powerful life of faith is your pride, and so when your pride gets bruised, hurt, or even sliced up, why do you worry?
Learn to think about failure differently. Think about it like a good workout. Sure, it hurts, but the pain means your muscles are growing. Or think about it like a potter molding a big, gooey pile of clay into a useful vessel. He pounds it into a ball, then throws it down on his wheel and starts the wheel spinning. Then he squeezes and yanks the clay, pushes it down and lifts it up—all this effort and strain just to make a complete, unbroken, useful vessel for himself. Each time you fail, you are being shaped, molded, and made better. And holding on to your pride as if it’s a part of you that you can’t bear to part with hurts you more than it helps you.
There was a time when Hayley hated to be wrong or to mess up. She was obsessed with knowing it all and being it all. Her nature was to be the star, the center of attention, and she loved it. But when she met her match in Michael, the world started to fall apart. She started having her mistakes and failures pointed out, and it hurt like salt on an open wound. She hated it. At first she argued a lot, trying to prove that she was right and he was wrong. She refused to say she was sorry when she hurt him or messed up. After all, when she was wrong it was just an accident and nothing to apologize for. So she went on in her prideful certainty that she never did anything wrong and everyone else knew nothing. But when she finally came to a point where she saw her own sinfulness in the mirror—when she stopped fighting for herself and started living for truth—an amazing change happened. Suddenly all the fighting, anger, frustration, bitterness, depression, and stress she’d been living with was gone. When she decided to stop fighting for herself and to start living for God, she was set free.
In this case failure was Hayley’s doorway to peace, to hope, and to faith. By not continuing to fight off humiliation but letting it do its work, she was able to let it all mean something good and not something destructive. Failure in the eyes of others or even in your own eyes hurts, but it is not the end of the world. It might just be the beginning of something amazing! If you have failure in your life or weaknesses that seem to be your downfall, take heart—you can get over it and get on to a life that can’t be destroyed or shaken by anything this world could throw at you. Your failure is about to become your success, so let’s get this show on the road.
The Purpose of Failure
We talked about the purpose of pain in chapter 3, and failure, being a lot like pain and sometimes actually leading to pain, has a purpose as well. While a lot of the same stuff that applies to pain applies to failure, there is something more, something amazing that can come when life is no longer about you but about the One who made you. The Tyndale Bible Dictionary defines humility as “an ungrudging and unhypocritical acknowledgment of absolute dependence upon God.” As we’ve said, humility is what first brought you to your knees. It was your realization that you needed God because you couldn’t do this life without him. And so humility is the foundation of it all. But what do you really know about humility? And how do you handle it when it comes in the form of humiliation from your failures and your weaknesses? How you answer that will determine how well you will get over the bad stuff in your life.
When you fail, you feel like every ounce of pride in you has been scorched with a hot iron, and it makes you recoil in an effort to protect yourself. Your heart races, your blood rushes to your skin, you blush, you get sweaty palms, you feel sick to your stomach—death can seem like a better option! And all you want to do is run and hide in order to make it stop. This sensation of humiliation is painful because it is attacking the part of you that needs acceptance and adoration in order to survive. Humiliation hurts the part of you that counts on something other than God to be its hope and its salvation. It hurts your pride and can damage the things that you rely on to make you feel like a unique, special, important, and valuable individual in the eyes of the world. But while all of these things may sound really good, when they don’t have their foundation in the One who made you, they are a barrier between you and your Savior. When you find your worth in anything other than who you are as a child of God, eventually you are going to be humbled, you are going to suffer, and you are going to hurt. Sure, you’ll suffer and hurt when your worth is all wrapped up in him too, but your suffering and hurt will be of such great value that you will feel no need to complain or worry—you will only count it as essential to your faith.
See, the problem comes because pride puts you at the center of it all. Pride makes life all about you, when it really isn’t all about you at all. And that opens you up for pain and anguish by perpetuating the myth that your life ought to be this way or that. Pride says things like “I deserve this or that,” “I’m better than him,” “But she started it,” or “He had no right to say that to me.” Pride is all about your rights and position compared to other people and never about your position in relation to God. It majors on complaint and offense, as if you were some kind of little god that needs to be honored and worshiped. Pride is ultimately at the root of every problem you have, and it can only be overcome with humility. As you start to understand that humility, as commanded by God’s Word, has to do with putting up with injury and offense with patient endurance and without bitterness or resentment, you start to see areas in your life where pride, acting in complete rejection of this truth, rears its ugly head.
When you fail and turn to humility instead of pride, you are able to put up with it all. None of it can destroy you or depress you because you’re trusting God with all of it. Humility puts all the pain and suffering, failure and weakness into God’s hands and trusts him to deal with it. Jesus, our perfect example of a humble human being, lived his life this way. First Peter 2:23 says about him that even in his weakest moment, while hanging on a cross for all to mock, “he didn’t make any threats but left everything to the one who judges fairly.” See what he did? He could have been prideful and arrogant, but he wasn’t; he was meek and humble. And he is the one we are to model ourselves after. The goal of all believers is to become more like Christ (see 1 Cor. 11:1). Humility is the opposite of self-assertiveness and self-interest, and that means that if you were to act in humility in the midst of your failure, you would no longer feel the urge to crawl away and hide in order to protect your image. You would no longer need to do all you could to prove to yourself and everyone watching that you weren’t a failure, and you would be set free to let your weakness become your strength.
And that’s how it happens—in the hands of a powerful and loving God, all your failure and weakness become your sanctification, your progressive movement toward holiness. Nothing ever slows you down or pushes you back, but instead your soul advances in every circumstance toward the goal of becoming more like Christ. After all, if it was good for Jesus to experience weakness and failure in the eyes of the world, why wouldn’t it be just as good for you? Hebrews 5:8 says that his suffering taught him obedience. So how could your failure, your weakness, and the suffering that comes from it not also teach you obedience?
Pride and Failure
If you have trouble getting over your failure, living with your weakness, or handling criticism, then this might come as a shock, but your pride is getting in the way of your happiness. Before you freak out and throw this book on the floor, just let us remind you that pride is something we all struggle with. It’s the source of all sin, right? And since we all sin, no exceptions, we can say that we all struggle with pride; we just struggle with it in different areas. We aren’t trying to condemn you or call you an arrogant jerk. Our goal is to show you the pride in your life so you can kick it and get on with the good life. Because anywhere you can find pride and kill it, you accept your failure to be perfect and make huge strides toward the life of grace, faith, hope, and love.
So let’s just take a quick look at some of the ways getting over your pride might actually be the ticket to getting over your failures. No one is looking or listening, so be brutally honest with yourself as you read them. That’s the only way to break the habit of pride and get through to the grace of humility.
We’ve already talked a bit about self-pity, but let’s just say again real quick that it’s a sign of pride because it’s all about how you feel, and how horrible your life is, and how ugly you are, and how bad you did . . . and as you can see, it’s all about you! You see, pride doesn’t stop and think about God and what he wants for you but thinks only about you and what you want for you (see 1 Cor. 13:5). So self-pity is really another way of criticizing God for your lousy life, and it’s the easiest way to not get over things!
Indulging in the luxury of misery, or self-pity, is kind of a cultural norm. We all say things like “I just can’t get over it” or “I’m a total failure,” and we convince ourselves that we are a particularly hard case, removed from the loving hands of God. But that is a lie. Failure can serve a great purpose in the lives of those who take God at his word. Failure can serve as a reminder that God is in control, not us. It can bring you to your knees and put the unessential things of this world into a better perspective. Fearing failure, or what failure says about you, shows an arrogant belief that who you are is defined by what you do rather than what God has done for you. But there is freedom from the fear of failure when you put your hope and your worth in the one who is worthy.
Another thing about pride that makes failure so unbearable is our need to complain. Do you complain a lot? “I should have won,” “I’ll never get things right,” “I’m sick of being a loser.” While your complaining might be focused on your failure, it is really backhanded blame of God himself. Sure, it’s not what you’re thinking when you’re complaining, but complaining is really saying, “I deserve more than this” and “Where is God when I need him?” Really? Do you really deserve more than the eternal life that God gave you absolutely free? Do you really deserve more than the complete and total salvation that can never be taken away from you and assures that you will spend eternity with the most amazing being of all? Has your holiness really been so great that your life should be better than it is right now? Or has your sin been so deceitful that you deserve worse than any other human who has ever lived? Complaint is a sign of who you think you are and what you think about God and his gifts. Your failure as a human being can’t be blamed on God through your anger or complaint. All your actions have consequences, and the quickest way to get over the outcome of failure is to stop complaining and start praising God. Stop the complaint and break through to contentment!
A lack of thankfulness is another way that pride keeps you from getting over your failure. Everything good in your life comes from God (see James 1:17), and being unthankful is making the dangerous assumption that you got whatever you have, success or failure, on your own. It’s so not true! God decides if it’s gonna rain or shine and if you are going to make it or break it. Ultimately he’s the giver of all that is good in your life. Proverbs 20:24 says, “The Lord is the one who directs a person’s steps. How then can anyone understand his own way?” Knowing this can help you with your failures in life because you can’t be depressed when you are thanking God. You can’t hate your life when you are thankful for your life. And failure will be seen not as the end but as the beginning when thanking God, even for the bad stuff in life, is your practice.
We hope none of this hurts too much, but if it does, don’t freak, because not being able to take criticism is another form of pride (and we don’t want to be responsible for you getting your pride on). Criticism is one of two things: either it’s the truth and there is some area in your life where you’ve messed up, or it’s wrong and the critical person is making up stuff. Either way, it can hurt. And while hurt might be your first reaction, if you are smart you won’t let it linger. If the criticism is wrong, then you have to trust God to fight for you. Trust him to answer for you, to be powerful enough to speak to other people, even critical ones. And if the criticism is true, then thank God that he can use another human being to help get you back on track by pointing out something you might not have seen that might make failure less of a possibility in the future. Wisdom allows criticism to be used by the hand of God to shape you and polish you into the image of Christ (see Prov. 9:8; 15:31; 27:5). We’ve never met a truly humble person who said, “Man, I can’t get any more humble!” Living in humility means that you don’t waste anything on useless pain and suffering, but you let it all mean something so it can bring glory to God! When you think like this, failure and the criticism of that failure can’t damage you but will only make you stronger.
Let’s face it: no one is perfect. We are all gonna fail, but the perfectionist has a hard time coping with that fact. So if perfectionism is your tendency, then listen up, because your need to be perfect is messing with your ability to get over it. You wanna be good, you wanna do what is right, but making “being good” or perfect your god or something you need in order to be acceptable to God is a lie—and not only a lie but a sin. There is nothing you need to do to get God’s love. You accepted it from him the moment you made Jesus Lord of your life. If perfectionism could save you, then all we’d need would be the Old Testament law, and Christ would have died for nothing. And we all know that ain’t true. Galatians 2:21 confirms this with these words: “If we receive God’s approval by obeying laws, then Christ’s death was pointless.” So, yep, you’re gonna mess up. You’re gonna fail. You’re not gonna live up to other people’s standards or your own, let alone God’s perfect standard, but that’s okay, because God wiped out your sin, your failures, your imperfections by the blood of his perfect Son. When you can see the pride in your perfectionism—or the thought that you, unlike every other human being on earth, ought to be without fault or failure—you can see it for how ugly it truly is. The world would have you believe that perfectionism is just another acceptable personality trait, when in reality it is a sin of pride. When you refuse to make sin an acceptable part of your personality, you step away from the fear of failure and the inability to get over it when you do fail.
But sometimes it’s not so much your failure you can’t get over but someone else’s success. If what you are hung up on is not just that you failed but that someone else didn’t, your real problem is jealousy. And jealousy is a sign of pride. Again, it’s all about you and what you deserve that they have or they took from you. It makes you out to be the one who should be honored, and it also smacks of unthankfulness and resentment toward God. Remember, God is sovereign, meaning nothing gets away from him. If you’ve failed at doing or getting something you want, you can still know that you only have what God wants you to have (see Exod. 20:17; Col. 3:5). And why would you want more than God has determined is best for you?
On another note entirely, kindness is good. Caring about people, good. Doing good, good. But being a people pleaser is bad because it means you need the approval of others to feel good about yourself. In fact, without their approval you can become a total mess, as if their approval proves your worth. Getting over this kind of obsession has to do with priorities. When people pleasing is your number one goal, then you are going to fail more than you succeed. You weren’t meant to please everyone; you were meant to please God! He’s the judge of your life, not them. So in order to get over your people-pleasing tendencies, you have to see what Paul nails right here in Galatians 1:10 when he says, “Am I saying this now to win the approval of people or God? Am I trying to please people? If I were still trying to please people, I would not be Christ’s servant.” Doing what is right or good (or even bad) in order to get the approval, love, or attention of a human being can quickly make your life a mess. You should feel no guilt from disappointing someone; guilt should only come from your sin, and that sin has forgiveness in Christ. So in order to get over your people-pleasing ways, you have to give people less power to judge than you give God. Let go of pleasing them and look to please God, and the people who love God will be well pleased, as will God.
One of the most obvious things pride does in a person is make them think better of themselves than they think of others. This might not sound like it has anything to do with getting over failure, but let us see if we can’t change your mind. Think about the person who thinks they are the best singer ever or who thinks that their sin isn’t as bad as everyone else’s. When people think like this, failure can come as a terrible blow. It cracks their perfect image of self and threatens to destroy who they are. But failure shouldn’t surprise us. Truth is, the more you get to know God and his Word, the more you realize how horribly sinful you are. Take a look at the words that Paul wrote. Early on in his faith he called himself the least of the apostles (see 1 Cor. 15:9), but over time he started to view himself as the worst of all sinners (see 1 Tim. 1:15–16). The closer he got to God, the more he saw himself as sinful, not holy. Paul discovered in his growth as a believer that pride deceives you and keeps you from taking a sober look at the sin in your life that has to go, and it convinces you that failure is unnatural and something to be avoided at all costs. But failure isn’t the end but is confirmation that what God says about humanity is right (see Rom. 3:10–12). This should encourage you.
Pride can also show up in the form of impatience with failure. Becoming impatient with your own failure or the failure of others can lead to anger, resentment, and even bitterness. Failure slows down life; it gets in the way of your goals and plans, and the last thing you want to do is to be patient. But patience is a fruit of the Spirit (see Gal. 5:22–23), and its opposite is pride because pride makes your pace, your needs, your wants more important than everyone else’s, including God’s. If you don’t know what to work on next in your spiritual life, try praying that you may become more patient. And just watch what God has you tackle in your life!
A lot of times people can’t get over failure because they refuse to even admit failure happened. In this case failure is something so unthinkable and inconsistent with their idea of what it means to be successful that they refuse to even see the truth that failure happens. No one is perfect; everyone messes up, and pretending you won’t only sets you up for a major bummer once you do mess up. Pride and the inability to admit failure are about covering up sin and pretending to be what you aren’t. The opposite of that is transparency, and in the life of a believer it’s crucial. Pretending we’ve got it all under control is what makes people call Christians hypocrites. Acting like you never make a mistake or have it all together is a total lie, and trying to keep up that image can break you.
Here’s another symptom of pride: fear of admitting you were wrong or of saying “I’m sorry.” If you can’t say “I was wrong,” then pride is in the house. People who can’t say they are sorry have a huge fear of failure because it leaves them feeling vulnerable, exposed. Saying you’re sorry really hurts the pride; it means you were, well, wrong, and for the prideful person, being wrong is unacceptable. Failure becomes less of an obstacle when you can swallow your pride and say you’re sorry.
And last but not least, consider the pride of isolation and its power to keep you from getting over your failure. When you fail in a really big way, the easiest thing to do is to disappear. You want to hide out so no one will see you, and that’s just what the enemy would have you do. See, isolation is the opposite of community. And God created us for community. In community we pray for one another, we bear one another’s burdens, and we love one another. In isolation the battle is a lonely and exhausting one. Failure holds on for dear life in the person who is alone, but being brave enough to walk into the community of believers and to accept the acceptance of others, even for your failure, often brings just the healing that is needed after failure. A lot of failure can be healed, or gotten over, in community in two different ways. Check out these verses and see how you can find healing where there are other believers:
So admit your sins to each other, and pray for each other so that you will be healed. (James 5:16)
Help carry each other’s burdens. In this way you will follow Christ’s teachings. (Gal. 6:2)
Sin likes darkness, but bringing our pain, our suffering, and our sin into the light of community can set us free from the painful symptoms that come with failure. If you have sinned, find a healthy community to speak God’s forgiveness over you, and if you have a burden, then let someone share it as you share their burdens in turn. When you do, getting over your failure will be a quick work.
See how good and pleasant it is
when brothers and sisters live together in harmony! (Ps. 133:1)
Remember, all of this talk about failure and pride is not meant to condemn you but to give you hope. See, those things in your life that you can’t get over that come from your failure and your weakness aren’t meant to destroy you but to make you stronger. But if you can’t spot them, then you can’t fix them, and all we want to do is help. It’s important you understand that all this is an exercise in grace and not in condemnation. God’s grace is offered to everyone, sinners the world over, as a hand up out of the mire and muck.
“But God chose what the world considers nonsense to put wise people to shame. God chose what the world considers weak to put what is strong to shame. God chose what the world considers ordinary and what it despises—what it considers to be nothing—in order to destroy what it considers to be something.”
— 1 Corinthians 1:27–28
If you believe that God is unwilling to help you, you are wrong; his Word says, “He will not always accuse us of wrong or be angry with us forever. He has not treated us as we deserve for our sins or paid us back for our wrongs” (Ps. 103:9–10). If you think that you are unworthy of his help, you are wrong; he is merciful: “We were dead because of our failures, but he made us alive together with Christ” (Eph. 2:5). If you’ve been in this pride rut for a long time, don’t freak; his Word says he is “slow to anger” (Num. 14:18 NIV). And if you think you are too bad because your sin is worse than anything anyone else has done, you are wrong; there is no sin he can’t forgive, except the sin of not believing in him (see Matt. 12:31–32).
You can get over everything in your life by trusting God and taking him at his word. Even if you’re stuck in the pit of weakness, your body is failing, and your mind is faltering—no matter how weak you might feel right now—know that it’s okay. In fact, it’s better than okay, because God uses the weak things of this world to shame the strong (see 1 Cor. 1:27).