How you view your failures and successes depends on your perspective. It is really easy to look back on your life and judge every moment and every decision as a success or a failure. But I believe we do ourselves a disservice if we constantly judge ourselves or even others in these rigid terms. Let me elaborate.
Success is easy to identify. You tried something, and it worked. There we go, SUCCESS!
Failure is more vague. If you try something and it does not work, it would be easy to say, “I failed.” But if you try something and you learn from what you tried and how you failed, that can be viewed as a success.
When you sin and fail yourself and God. Don’t give up never to try again. When you make mistakes and fall into temptation, give yourself the opportunity to learn from the experience and try to overcome that sin or temptation again the next time you are faced with it. To me, that is a success because, in Christ, we are not perfect, but we can be made perfect. Being perfect is not doing everything right all the time. Being perfect is a mindset level of maturity, knowing that even with our mistakes, we can learn to be better than we were. It is a struggle and fight as long as we are willing to stick it out. Then, we are and will be successful. Therefore, true success is not perfection; true success is the struggle to learn from mistakes and grow from the experience.
Paul was well aware of that struggle as he writes,
“For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want. But if I am doing the very thing I do not want, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me. I find then the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wants to do good. For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man, but I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, on the one hand I myself with my mind am serving the law of God, but on the other, with my flesh the law of sin” (Romans 7:19-35).
He then states,
“Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”(Romans 8:1).
Even when we sin and make mistakes, we are not failures if we learn from them. We can still be saved and remain in Christ. If we work to identify those sins and mistakes and learn from them, we can be successful.
A failure is someone who sins and never repents or who refuses to learn from mistakes. This is easy to identify.
The challenge for all of us is to be successful failures of Christians who learn and make changes in our lives as we try over and over again to be faithful to Jesus. If we are faithful, we will receive a crown of life (Revelation 2:10). It does not say he who is “perfect” but he who is “faithful.” Learning from failures is someone faithful.
For the Lord,
Alex Mills