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Christian Network

Maybe accomplishing all our spiritual goals successfully isn’t as important as continuing to trust God when we fail to accomplish them. Performance based spirituality is rife in the American church. We have taken the hard driving, Type-A perfectionism of the surrounding culture and baptized it. Exhortation to "excellence" is heard every Sunday from pulpits across the land and it has become all too easy for Christians to feel like they are never doing enough, well enough. Sometimes it appears as if we evangelicals have decided to exalt Martha over Mary, rather than the other way around.

We will all fail, repeatedly. Every saint in the pages of scripture failed at something in their lives and usually more than once. What counted was the fact that they did not give up and walk away from God in the midst of that failure. When we fail our best option is to pick ourselves up, brush ourselves off and pray for the strength to do better next time. Perseverance is precious in God’s economy and far more important than an unbroken string of successes. Trusting the Lord in our failures is vital to spiritual growth and this is something that all of us need to grasp if we are to progress in our sanctification.

Some will say that such an acceptance of ongoing failure in the Christian life is a form of permissiveness, even a manifestation of the sin of sloth. This is only true for the person whose heart is far from God to begin with. The sincere lover of God is not looking for excuses to shirk the responsibility to do what God would have them do. It is akin to the parable of the talents. The problem with the wicked servant was not that he did a lousy job with the gifts his master gave him; the problem was that he hated that master calling him "a hard man". In fearfully burying the talent in the ground rather than at least putting it in the bank so it might at minimum earn interest this man showed that he held contempt for his master’s character. This was his sin, not necessarily the failure to perfectly multiply his talent’s value.

We do others and ourselves a disservice when we mercilessly carp on failure. Failure is part and parcel of the fallen human condition. This is true both before and after conversion. If it weren’t there would be no provision in the New Testament for the confession and forgiveness of sins committed by believers, which there clearly is. Perfection will come only when we someday stand face to face with Jesus Christ and become fully like Him.

Because of this promise of eventual perfection we can continue to put our faith in God for ultimate victory when we fall short in any endeavor. With that in mind it is vital that modern American Christians who have bought into the relentless perfectionism of our society and hung a cross around it cut themselves some slack. Constantly excoriating ourselves for failures God fully expects us to experience is a form of ungodly self-condemnation. It might even be perceived as pride, a "goddish" attempt to see ourselves as more than the fallible, finite human beings that we remain, even after we have come to faith.

Jesus never fails it is true but, for now, His followers’ will and that is ok.