Encountering God

None of us like to fail at things, but there will be times when we do. When this happens, we tend to feel 'bad' things like embarrassment, shame or possibly even anger. Most of us feel dirty or slimed by our failure and would like to crawl into a hole and hide. Encountering God in the midst of our failure is usually the last thing on our mind.

But God thinks differently than we do, and He wants us to run to Him in the midst of our apparent failure. If we do, He will meet us there. In fact, God is the great transformer, and He can turn our failures around and somehow manage to bring His glory into them.

Many of us feel "dirty" when we fail at something. As a result of that, it is easy to assume that God is disappointed or angry with us because of our failure. That type of thinking can make us want to avoid Him for a short while. That is why many of us have the tendency to run away and hide from Him instead of running into His arms for comfort. A part of us 'knows' that if we came to Him at these times, He will encourage and comfort us. But the sting of failing can make us feel so bad about ourselves that we feel the need to avoid Him until that sting wears down a bit.

The truth is that God wants us to encounter Him in our failure. He does not feel repulsed by us, and He wants to meet us there.

Let me give you an example from the Apostle Peter's life. Peter had a very major failure--probably worse than most of us will ever experience. He was one of Jesus' three 'best friends,' and he had just sworn his loyalty to Jesus, saying he was willing to die for Him. Then a few hours later, Peter was put in a position where that might actually happen. Jesus had been arrested and was going to be executed, and Peter was in the courtyard of the place where they were holding Jesus. Someone accused him of being one of Jesus' disciples--and he denied it. In fact, he denied that he even knew Jesus. He didn't just say the words, he cursed and swore while he did it (Mark 14:71). And just as Peter did that, Jesus turned His head and looked directly at him (Luke 22:60). Not only did he deny Jesus, but he was caught in the act and he realized that Jesus knew he betrayed him. Matthew 26:74b-75 tells us, "Immediately a rooster crowed. And Peter remembered the word of Jesus Who had said to him, 'Before the rooster crows, you will deny Me three times.' So he went out and wept bitterly."

This was a huge failure for Peter. He was ashamed and saddened at what he had done. He was probably really mad at himself for doing this. From Peter's perspective, he had let down his best friend in a way that probably ruined the relationship, and he also messed up his relationship with God at the same time. Peter might have believed that he lost his salvation, because he probably remembered what Jesus said in Luke 12:9: "But he who denies Me before men will be denied before the angels of God."

So, what was Peter's first response to his failure? He ran away from God. He had followed Jesus to the courtyard so he could be close to Him. But as soon as he failed, Peter ran away from that place--he ran away from where Jesus was. The sorrow and shame of his failure caused him to try to put some distance between himself and God. That is not an uncommon response. Many of us run away from God when we first realize that we failed.

Now, here is the interesting thing. Jesus was not repulsed by Peter's betrayal the way that Peter assumed He would be. Instead of pushing Peter further away, Jesus invited him back into intimate relationship with Himself the first change that He got. There was a time delay because Jesus was busy being crucified, dying, being buried, and raising from the dead. But when the resurrected Jesus first appeared to the disciples, He did not exclude Peter or treat him any differently than He treated the others. Then Jesus went out of His way to have a special one-on-one encounter with Peter, where He completely restored him from the denial. You can read the details of this encounter in John 21:15-19.

The point is that when we fail and feel miserable about our failure, this is a time when we feel like avoiding God for a season. But it is the time when we really need God's restoration and reassurance, and it is a time when God is very likely to give us an encounter with Himself. God is not put off by our failures and when we do fail at something, He wants us to come to Him instead of crawling off into some corner to "lick our wounds."

Along the same lines, there will be times when we think we have failed at something, but we really haven't. For example, we may do what He tells us to do, but the results turn out drastically different than what we expected them to be. We don't understand what went wrong, and we assume that we have somehow messed up. (Sadly, if others happen to be watching, they may make the same negative assumption about us). It reality, we haven't failed, but it feels like we did. And that type of situation can make us just as miserable as an out-and-out failure.

Moses had one of those when he first started out in ministry. You can read the full story in Exodus chapters 5 and 6, and I will give you the "abridged" version. God drafted Moses as His spokesperson, and sent him with a message to Pharaoh to "Let My people go." Pharaoh heard the message, but he did not respond to it the way everyone expected. Instead of letting the people of Israel go, he increased their work load.

Moses and all the people of Israel expected things to get much better, but they got much worse instead. We see their reaction in Exodus 5:21. Basically, they bawled Moses out and suggested that God should punish him for what he did to them. They said, "Let the Lord look on you and judge, because you have made us abhorrent in the sight of Pharaoh and in the sight of his servants, to put a sword in their hand to kill us."

Moses felt terrible about this and he thought that his leadership effort was a failure. But instead of running away from God in shame, he ran to God and asked Him about it. God met Moses, and explained what He was doing. In fact, God explained his strategy to Moses in detail and instructed him to pass that information on to the children of Israel (Exodus 6:1-8).

Do you see what God did here? He gave Moses an encounter in the midst of apparent failure, reaffirmed him and sent him back to work. God did not disqualify Moses; He did not yank his anointing and calling. Remember that next time you fail--God met Moses and then He sent him back to work.

Failure did not disqualify Moses from his calling and destiny, and it will not disqualify you either.

If you think to yourself, "Yeah, but Moses is different. He didn't really fail, he just thought he did," then remember Peter. Peter did fail. He denied the Lord and swore that he didn't even know Him. But God did not disqualify Peter because of that failure. Instead, He restored him and set in place as a senior leader in the early church. God anointed him with all sorts of power, so that even Peter's shadow healed people when it fell on them as he walked by.

God does not hold our failures against us, and He does not want us to hide from Him when we fail. He is very gracious about failure.

Unfortunately, the children of Israel were not nearly as gracious in their response to Moses. Exodus 6:9 tells us, "So Moses spoke thus to the children of Israel; but they did not heed Moses, because of anguish of spirit and cruel bondage." I bet that made Moses feel like even more of a failure as a God-appointed leader. I personally believe that Moses through he was a failure and not a very effective leader, because the people he led were always complaining and inciting insurrection against him. I don't think he had any idea how well he did while he walked on this earth, and I bet he was in for a huge surprise when he got before God and got his "well done!"

The thing that made Moses so successful as a leader, despite all the apparent failures, was that he kept running back to God each time he thought he'd failed. He would bring the apparent failure back to the Lord and then get directions from Him on what to do next. The one and only time that Moses got in trouble in his entire leadership career was the one time that he handled things on his own instead of bringing them back to God for direction. (That was when he got angry at the people's murmuring and struck the rock with his staff instead of doing it the way God wanted him to do it.)

The point of all this is that God does not look at failure the same way we do. We see it as terrible, disqualifying and we feel shame when we fail. That shame makes us want to pull away from God, because we thing that He is disappointed or displeased with us. But the truth is that God wants us to press into Him when we have a failure, so that we might have an encounter with Him. He will set us back on track and He will not disqualify us, so long as we listen to His directions and do what He tells us to do.

Having said all that, I personally find that I am very hard on myself when I fail at something. I am used to succeeding at most things that I do and I really don't like to fail. I know (head knowledge) that God is not going to disqualify me or punish me. But my heart believes the lies and accusations that the enemy hurls at me, and they feel so real that I find it hard to press through them and run to God. It often takes me hours (sometimes even days) before I stop feeling that God is mad at me for failing at something.

I wish I did not have a recent example to pull out of my hip pocket and share with you, but I do. Something happened yesterday and it is the reason that God had me sit down and write this lesson. (The topic of 'encountering God in failure' wasn't even in my lesson plan until after yesterday's experience.) Let me tell you about it in our next lesson, and I will also share how God managed to turn my failure around into an encounter with Himself.