Monday, August 29, 2016

Feeling like a Failure

Have you ever felt like a failure?

I mean, have you ever given something or someone your everything? And at the end of the road, at the end of that day you feel like nothing? You feel useless or empty... Like nothing you've done mattered?

Maybe it was a person you put all your love into, maybe it was a business or a job, maybe it was a ministry... Maybe it was people... I've spent a good portion of these past three years pouring myself into ministry and people... Loving people like I've never loved people before, caring about their lives, their hurts, pains, struggles, the good, bad, and the ugly... 

And although so many people have been amazing, there are always those who make you feel worthless, like a failure, leaving you asking yourself, "did I just waste all this time for nothing?" It is so easy to feel like a failure, it is in our humanness that failure lives, because as Followers of Jesus Christ we ultimately know that although we may be failures, Christ will never fail us! 

But that doesn't take the sting of failure away does it... Nope, it would be so much easier if it did... The reality is we fail all of the time, people and things or positions will fail you all of the time, because if something didn't ultimately fail us, we wouldn't need to place our hope and trust in the only thing that never fails...

Jesus Christ!

I constantly feel like a failure, as a man, a parent, a husband and a pastor, as a friend and a family member... I can reach into the file so easy and pull up one failure after another of times I've been a failure in these areas and plenty more...

But Christ died that we could be free'd from being failures ultimately, because ultimately Christ died because of the ultimate failure, Adam failing in the garden of Eden... So we have to realize that if Christ so died for Adan's failure, then we know, "That yet while we were still sinners, Christ died for our sins" So if this is true, and yet while we are failures in the human sense, or new life in Christ makes us victors, not failures! Not because of anything that we did, but only through the death of Jesus Christ, could the free gift of salvation be offered to mankind.

So the next time (and I'm preaching to myself here too), you feel like a loser, or a failure, like a reject... Realize that the God in Heaven took a long hard look at your failure, and Said, "This one I love!"

God loves you in spite of your failures, that he sent his only begotten son to die on a cross, for you and just you!

God bless you and keep you always

The Pudgy Pastor