discouragement on Failure

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...

Gracious God, we confess that we are often dissatisfied with our lives. We recognize the gap that exists between what we are and what we want to be. Lord, like the woman at the well, we know our failu...

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

Heavenly Father: You know all about us – our weakness, our failing, our sin; And you still love us enough to give your Son to redeem us. Hear the cries of our hearts today. There’s someone for who...

The Text The Short Ending or the Long ending? This is not the Easter story we’re looking for. The short ending of Mark is not what we want or expect on Easter Sunday. We want celebration, big music,...

Preaching Commentary The Text The Short Ending or the Long ending? This is not the Easter story we’re looking for. The short ending of Mark is not what we want or expect on Easter Sunday. We want ...

Learned Helplessness can be easily seen in a research study when participants are given a math test. In this study, some participants are told, “men don’t tend to do well on this test,” or “Millennia...

Before any great achievement, some measure of depression is very usual.

Do not be discouraged by the resistance you will encounter from your human nature; you must go against your human inclinations. Often, in the beginning, you will think that you are wasting time, but y...

My friend Wendy calls the incremental disappointments we endure over the years “the slow leak of life.”

“Why our son?” are the only words you can muster. The funeral is over and the words of comfort have been politely said. Now it is just you, your memories, and your question, “Why me?” “The tests were...

"The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do."

When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.

God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons we could not learn in any other way.

Most of life is lived in the gaps between great moments. The peaks seem to protrude only after miles and miles of death valleys. While the Bible reveals its characters in terms of their high points, w...

Great griefs exhaust. They discourage us with life. The man into whom they enter feels something taken from him. In youth, their visit is sad; later on, it is ominous."

O Lord, we are too easily discouraged when things don’t go our way, when we face trials, testings, and even persecution. Lord forgive the weakness of our faith. We too often respond in anger and hurtf...

The following story comes from the collection of sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers in Egypt, teaching that would have first been transmitted orally (around 350-450 A.D.) and later written down...

Context Chapter two of Acts follows the ascension of Jesus and begins with his disciples gathered up all into one place. Before these followers are scattered out into the world, the world has come to...

If the Book of Job reaches across two and a half millennia to teach anything to men and women who consider themselves normal, decent human beings, it is this: Human beings are sure to wander in ignora...

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just grad...

When I get honest, I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes. I believe and I doubt, I hope and get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. I am...

Lord and God, sometimes we have thought, even said, that you were nowhere to be found, when life’s insecurities, disappointments, and crushing defeat left us empty and full of despair. In our desolati...

Scalded cats fear even cold water.

One summer, Johnny was ministering among the poor on a six-week urban project with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship in Los Angeles. Part of his assignment was to spend time in a convalescent home in ...

For those who feel their lives are a grave disappointment to God, it requires enormous trust and reckless, raging confidence to accept that the love of Jesus Christ knows no shadow of alteration or ch...

So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond al...

If right now you’re complaining about something, you’re not complaining because you have a lack of resources problem… people problem, …fairness problem, physical health problem, church problem, m...

Right around six years into what would become a thirty-three-year ministry at Bethlehem Baptist Church, John Piper was stuck. His board wanted to enact some significant changes and he felt like he had...

God is never a God of discouragement. When you have a discouraging spirit or train of thought in your mind, you can be sure it is not from God. He sometimes brings pain to his children-conviction over...