I was listening to a podcast with a successful entrepreneur who gave what I thought was interesting advice. He told young entrepreneurs that they needed to get started early because they would likely fail several times and it was best to get those failures out of the way. He implied that there would likely be important lessons in those failures, and treated them almost as if they were a necessary part of ultimate success. I was struck by the simple wisdom of this advice. Although he was talking narrowly to the field of entrepreneurs, I immediately realized there was some truth here that is broadly applicable.
You are going to fail at some point in your life. You will probably fail at many things at many points in your life. The question is not whether you will fail, but what you fail at and how you will handle your failure. Believe it or not, failure can be valuable if we think about it and respond to it rightly. After all, if you’re going to fail, you might as well get something out of it.
Different Kinds of Failure
One of the difficulties of talking about the value of failure is that not all failures are the same. Some people try to build a new company and they fail. Others set out to serve God, and they fail. Still others seek to kill some deadly sin habit in their life and they fail. Obviously, these failures are not all the same.
Some failures are the result of sin, and we must repent and forsake that sin. Some failures are the result of mistakes and flaws in our plans or in our character. In such situations, we don’t necessarily have sin to confess, but we might have an area where we need to grow. Still other failures are the result of God sovereignly deciding that something we set out to do would fail. Perhaps we had been proudly self-dependent, and God knew that we needed a reality check. It might be that He had an important task for us and to get us ready or put us in the right place, we needed to fail at something.
The Bible is filled with different kinds of failures. David no doubt felt like a political failure, running for his life from Saul. Eventually David got so low that he was befriending the Philistines and lying to them about who he was attacking. Elijah felt like a spiritual failure after he failed to lead the nation in a revival away from Baal and back to Yahweh. Peter felt like a personal failure after denying the Lord three times. But God used all of these men. He used them mightily in spite of their failures and at times because of their failures and the way they responded to them. So how should we respond to failure?
Handle Failure with Humility
Our natural human pride doesn’t like failure, which isn’t surprising. We like winning and succeeding, not losing and failing. The result is that often when we fail, we find ourselves reacting to our failure in ways that only make things worse. Some people make excuses. Rather than drilling down to what went wrong or where they could have done things better, they begin explaining all the factors (outside of their control, of course) that explain why they really failed. Others ignore failure. Rather than learning what they could learn from their mistakes, they refuse to think or talk about failure. Better to cut that chapter out of their life completely, they decide, than to face the ugly truth of their failure.
Proverbs often connects wisdom with humility, for the simple fact that in order to be wise you have to be humble enough to realize when you are being not-wise. Proverbs reminds us that wise people listen to correction (Proverbs 15:31-32), that they are willing to listen to their counselors (Proverbs 9:9), especially their father (Proverbs 13:1; 15:5). In Scripture, wisdom generally leads to success, and wisdom is inseparable from humility. When we fail, we are being given a great opportunity to be humble, and God will exalt those who humble themselves (James 4:10).
Growing from Our Failures
If we are able to be humble and evaluate ourselves honestly when we fail, if we will listen to others when they come with corrections and critiques, and if we will be willing to admit we were wrong, then we put ourselves in a position where we can grow from failure. Sometimes we get so narrowly focused on our current situation that we lose sight of the big picture. We think that this failure here and now is the end because this failure is as far out as we have planned. But failure is rarely final. Your life will go on, and maybe that lesson you learn from failing this time will help make you a success in the future. Maybe God has something in store for you and He’s trying to teach you lessons now that you will need then.
A few days ago SpaceX launched their largest rocket yet. On its way down, the rocket went up in a ball of fire, exploding as it landed on the Indian Ocean. Yet that was always the plan. This was a new prototype, and so the team decided they would simply allow it to blow up and collect data. They knew that they would learn a lot from the failure, so they planned on it. The result was that SpaceX’s valuation went up ahead of its initial public offering. Savvy investors didn’t see the explosion as an ultimate failure, but rather recognized what the company saw: that this was an opportunity to grow and learn and improve.
As Christians, we need to have the same mentality. Now, some failures are simply sin and rebellion against our Creator. Those failures we must repent of and turn from, and yet even in these cases God often makes it so that in His infinite goodness He can use our sin to His glory. But many of our mistakes and failures are not the result of outright rebellion, but rather of immaturity, inexperience, or arrogance and pride. In these cases, we must humble ourselves and be willing to learn from what we have done wrong. We must do the awkward and difficult task of looking in the mirror and seeing what we could have done differently. Sometimes the answer is nothing, but often the answer is at least something. Yet if we are willing to humble ourselves, listen to God and others, and learn from our failures, we might just find that failure can become a launching pad for future success.
Ben Hicks is the Associate Pastor at Colonial Hills Baptist Church in Indianapolis. This article originally appeared on his Substack.
Photo by Eastman Childs on Unsplash
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