bible and theology on Failure

Failure is a gift. When we are forced to drink the dust of our idols, we can begin to turn our sights toward home.

Triumph and failure always go together in the wait of faith. They are the head and tail of the same coin. Show me a person who has had no struggle with waiting, whose faith has known no swings between...

Brother Lawrence, a 16th-century Carmelite monk, spent his days scrubbing pots and mending shoes. Largely uneducated, he filled his free time writing letters and notes that, after his death, friends g...

Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.

Sometimes our successes can be more devastating than our failures. We fight, strain, and struggle in pursuit of something or someone that looks to be good, and after days or months or years, we obtain...

But all at once I realized that it was not my success God had used to enable me to help those in this prison, or in hundreds of others just like it. My life of success was not what made this morning s...

The truth is, that more spiritual progress is made through failure and tears than success and laughter.

The focus of the author since the beginning chapters of Genesis has been both on God’s plan to bless humankind by providing them with that which is “good” and on the human failure to trust God and enj...

In God's world, for those who are in earnest, there is no failure. No work truly done, no word earnestly spoken, no sacrifice freely made, was ever made in vain.

The Benedictine nun Joan Chittister recounts a story she once heard by a communications professor, which she said fundamentally changed the way she thought about success and failure: A young boy was...

As the darkness began to descend on me in my early twenties, I thought I had developed a unique and terminal case of failure. I did not realize that I had merely embarked on a journey toward joining t...

It turns out the Christian story is a good story in which to learn to fail. As the ethicist Samuel Wells has written, some stories feature heroes and some stories feature saints and the difference bet...

The genius of the biblical revelation is that it refuses to deny the dark side of things, but forgives failure and integrates falling to achieve its only promised wholeness.

Heavenly Father, we confess that our sinfulness gives us fear and keeps us from pursuing your will. We live with ideas of safety and failure that do not make room for your call to set our lives aside ...

Hear the good news: For the joy set before him, Jesus Christ endured the shame of the cross, taking all our weakness and failure. Jesus went to the cross for the joy of having you as part of God’s Kin...

Sometimes what seems like a failure is actually the seed of God’s work. As Mark Batterson tells the story, it started with David and Svea Flood. Sent to the Congo by a church in Sweden, they helped es...

Had it not been for a confident wife, Sophia, we might not have listed among the great names of literature the great name of Nathaniel Hawthorne. When Nathaniel, a heartbroken man, went home to tell h...

Worship is a meeting at the centre so that our lives are centered in God and not lived eccentrically. We worship so that we live in response to and from this centre, the living God. Failure to worship...

In The Last Arrow, Erwin McManus shares the story of Mark Floyd, a businessman who convinced investors to place $20 million dollars in an investment that ultimately failed. Instead of crawling into a ...

That we ought not to be weary of doing little things for the love of God, who regards not the greatness of the work, but the love with which it is performed. That we should not wonder if, in the begin...

We find hope in the ancestry of Jesus that no matter what we’ve done or where we come from, we too can be included in Jesus’ family. Jesus does not look for people who are perfect and have never faile...

Holy God, we realize that You know us more intimately than we know ourselves. We come before You now asking You to show us our sin, to make us aware of our failings, to open our eyes to our brokenness...

Accept, O Lord, our thanks and praise for all that you have done for us. We thank you for the splendor of the whole creation, for the beauty of this world, for the wonder of life, and for the mystery ...

Gracious God, can I truly say that you’re my glory? In a way, yes. I do derive my sense of worth from you, at least in part. And I do seek to live for your glory, at least some of the time. Yet, I’m a...

Failures are divided into two classes — those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought.

Idolatry is not just a failure to obey God, it is a setting of the whole heart on something besides God.

To fail to pray, then, is not to merely break some religious rule—it is a failure to treat God as God.

Nearly everybody knows of at least one sin habit in their life that they wish to leave behind them. Yet, no matter what they do, it seems impossible for them to be free of this habit, character flaw, ...

One of the fascinating features of the Gospel writers’ accounts of the trial of Jesus is this blending of the legal and moral factors. They all indicate that in both Jewish and Roman courts a certain ...

In his highly insightful work, Inside Job , Stephen W. Smith shares the sobering truth of what happens to many leaders when they climb the “ladder of success”: The ground at the foot of the ladde...