12-30-07 The Joy of Failing

This is our last Sunday of the year together.

In two days we begin the first day of the 8^th year of the new millennium.

What I share with you this morning

has a little bit to do with New Years,

and a little bit to do with our series on spiritual growth,

and a little bit to do with random thoughts in my own life right now.

There is something fascinating about this time of year,

something completely inconsistent with what we see in the physical world around us.

We look outside and everything we see is frozen solid.

There is beauty out there, of course,

sometimes tremendous beauty,

but the world itself is motionless, static, unchanging.

And yet there is something about the beginning of a new year that is anything but static in our lives,

something that often has a powerful affect on our thinking.

We find ourselves looking back over the past twelve months,

remembering where we were a year ago,

and what expectations we had for 2007,

and then, too, we look forward to the year ahead,

frequently even setting conscious goals for ourselves.

In fact this goal-setting response within us at this time of the year

is so universal

that we’ve even give those goals a name.

We call them New Years Resolutions.

“I am resolved that in the year ahead I will...”, or more often, ‘I will not...”.

They are promises we make to ourselves,

promises that things will be different,

things will be better in the year ahead.

Most of you know by now

that I’m not a big fan of New Year’s Resolutions,

not because I don’t think we should seek change in our lives,

because I most certainly do,

but rather because a rule, even a very good rule

never has brought real change into my life,

and it never will.

Sometimes the rules help to protect me

while the real change is taking place inside,

like the fence around the back yard protects a child

until he grows up enough so that he no longer needs it.

But the fence itself doesn’t bring about growth,

it doesn’t bring about change.

It just preserves and protects until change can take place from within.

Funny how it is...

people who haven’t read the Bible,

or haven’t understood what they’re reading

often believe it’s all about rules.

They honestly believe

that God is so foolish,

or so naive,

or so out of touch with His own creation

that He would write up a list of rules

and then hand them to us

with the honest expectation that those rules would then bring about change in our lives,

as if the great problem of the human race

was that we didn’t know what was right or wrong

and we simply needed someone to show us where the lines were.

Of course when we take the time to read what He actually wrote,

what we see is very different.

HEB 10:1 For the Law...can never...make perfect those who draw near.

ROM 3:20 ...by the works of the Law no flesh will be justified in (God’s) sight; for through the Law comes the knowledge of sin.

And when Paul wrote a letter to a group of Christians

who were trying very hard

to become very good

by carefully observing an external list of rules he said,

COL 2:20-21, 23 If you have died with Christ to the elementary principles of the world, why, as if you were living in the world, do you submit yourself to decrees, such as, "Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch!"... These are matters which have, to be sure, the appearance of wisdom in self-made religion and self-abasement and severe treatment of the body, but are of no value against fleshly indulgence.

In other words,

you simply can’t get there that way.

The lists,

the vows,

the resolutions certainly have the appearance of wisdom,

but there is no external list,

no external structure in existence

that has the power to change the heart.

So then where does real change come from?

Well, to answer that

we have to back up one step

and ask ourselves honestly what kind of change we want.

What is it we’re after?

And if you think the answer to that is obvious,

well...maybe it is and then again maybe it’s not.

I spent the whole first part of my Christian life

believing that the goal was to get my life together so that it worked the way I thought it should work.

I just assumed it was all about improving my performance.

Obviously the goal was to be good and to do good.

More than anything I wanted peace -

peace with myself

and peace with my God,

and I just naturally assumed that being better and doing better would bring that peace.

And in my own fumbling way I tried...and tried....and tried.

I pleaded with God to give me the strength

to be who I should be and do what I should do.

But not only did He not answer my prayers,

but there were times when I actually seemed to be getting worse,

messing up more.

And it wasn’t until I realized that there were in place in my life

assumptions that made it impossible for God to answer my prayers

that things finally began to change,

that I began to change.

You see, at that point in my life

I assumed that performance was the pathway that led to peace with God.

And when I could finally offer Him

a sufficient level of performance

that would justify His approval

I would then, at last be able to relax both with Him and with myself.

And as long as that lie was in me

He could not answer my prayers for increased performance

because it would only reinforce the most destructive lie of my life -

the lie that God’s love for me

is in some way linked to my ability to produce a life

that justifies that love.

I’m making it too complicated again.

I could say it more easily by saying simply that I assumed God likes good people

lots more than He likes bad people

and the more I could be one of the good people

the more He would like me.

How could it be otherwise?

And yet it is.

If you were here two weeks ago

you will remember that I closed our time together

by sharing with you the story of a little boy and a wall,

a wall that separated him from his Daddy.

I told how he tried everything he could think of

to find some way around that wall,

and how it wasn’t until he finally realized

that, no matter what he did or how hard he tried,

he could never get past it on his own

that his Father then opened a door for him from the other side.

I used it as an illustration

of the futility of our trying to reach God through our own efforts

and how only God can make a way for us to enter into His presence

through Christ forever removing the wall of our sins against Him.

But what I didn’t tell you at the time

was that just as we cannot find a way into the presence of our Heavenly Father through our own efforts,

neither can we, through our own efforts,

ever offer Him any sufficient reason

why He should allow us to remain with Him.

We can’t get to Him by trying harder,

we can’t stay with Him by trying harder.

And that isn’t the worst of it.

Just as we could not enter into His presence without first giving up,

so we cannot find the peace we long for with ourselves or with our God

or the kind of practical changes we long for without first giving up.

And here again let me see if I can state it more simply.

From the day we enter this world

there are just two things our God seeks to communicate to us.

The first is that He loves us.

He does not love us because,

He simply loves us.

And second,

He wants us to know that we were designed by Him

to live in a dependent relationship upon Him,

and nothing will work correctly in our lives

until we make peace with that truth.

The whole thing is rigged, folks.

Life only works - really works to the degree that we live

in a desperate daily dependance upon Him.

And with most of us

the only doorway into our discovery of that most basic truth in life

is through the doorway of failure.

As long as we continue to believe

that there is some way we can make it work through our own efforts,

as long as we believe that we can control what needs to be controlled,

or do what needs to be done

in order to make our lives work,

we will never find the peace we long for

or the change we so desperately need.

Our daughter, Joni, is 28 years old.

She’s married to our son-in-law, Matt.

Our grandson, Matty, is nearly 4 years old,

and our granddaughter, Anabelle, just had her 1^st birthday.

From a parental point of view

Joni was one of those extremely easy children to parent.

She had both a strong desire to please those in authority over her

and also the gifts and abilities to do so.

Throughout her entire school career

we watched as she would spend the first few weeks of each new school year

figuring out what the teacher wanted and how to produce it

and then the rest of the school year she delivered the goods.

And each year she would leave behind her

projects and reports that teachers would then treasure for years to come

so that they could then show them to future classes

as examples of the way it should be done.

From our point of view, of course,

it made the whole parenting thing wonderful.

But there is a major down-side to being able to do all things well,

one that none of us had anticipated

and none of us were prepared for.

Having succeeded so well throughout childhood

on the basis of hard work, determination, and natural ability,

Joni went into her adult years assuming

that she could successfully cope with anything that came her way in life on the same basis.

She certainly loved her Lord and was deeply committed to Him,

but I think perhaps, because she’d done all things well through her own efforts up to that point,

she simply had no doorway into the discovery

of how desperately she need Him.

And then God brought Matty into her life.

A few weeks ago I read something that she’d written a few months ago

and then posted on her web site.

It affected me so deeply

and communicated so powerfully what I most want to share with you today

that I asked her if it would be OK for me to read it for us this morning.

This is what she wrote.

“I know we all change as we age. We grow, we stagnate, we go backwards. We learn the truth. We forget the truth. Hopefully we remember it again. My mom always told me that having kids changes everything. That God would use whatever little people He gave me for wonderful things in my life. But I never knew he would give me a Matty. I never knew how much things would change.

When Matty was born he had very low muscle tone and he was hypermobile (aka freakishly flexible:). Kids that are hypermobile already require extra muscle tone to control their movements, to keep them within a normal range. Kids with low muscle tone start out behind and have to go twice as far.

For the first year of his life we watched him struggle to roll over and support his head at 6 months. I allowed an inept pediatrician to tell me that all children develop at different rates and sooner or later he would catch up. He didn't. He fell further behind. At a year he could hardly sit supported by pillows. I remember desperately wanting a picture of him sitting in front of the Christmas tree. I must have taken fifty pictures of him fallen backwards under the tree before I gave up, set the timer and took a picture of him in my lap in front of the tree.

That January, through an odd series of events we met Kathy, Matty's first physical therapist. I would cry every time we had therapy. For the first time someone recognized that Matty needed help and spoke honestly with us about what we could expect. Due to a series of moves, we've had six OT's and PT's since then.

On good days, Matty looks at me and says "Watch this. I'm gonna do a jump." Then he actually does it and both feet make it off the ground. On bad days we stop going to church because a childcare worker listens to me describe his unique needs, watches Matty fall and then tells me that "his problem isn't physical, he just lacks confidence." I think that if I was bigger I would have drop kicked her across the playground. Then I go home and snap at Matt for something that isn't his fault. Or I go shopping and spend money we don't have. I exist in varying degrees of failure. And for the first time in my life, I have begun to feel free. I am a big fat failure and I am God's Beloved.

We have listened to geneticists describe our son as "failing to thrive," (I hear these words and the rage within me boils and turns to steam. do they know how much more he has overcome than other children his age?) neurologists speculate on this disorder or that and order more blood work. In the end they all say the same thing, "We don't know why Matty is hypotonic and hypermobile and that's good news because you don't want the diagnoses we give out."

They're right. It is good news. It could be a lot harder. He could have far more hurtles to jump each day. Probably by the time he's an adult, maybe even a teenager, he'll be over it all. And so far, I don't think he's realized he's different yet. But Anabelle can already throw further than he can, so those days are coming.

But I'm a different story. I fight fear and anger and frustration everyday. I watch him fall and struggle to rise for the tenth time in two hours and I'm overcome with frustration. I fight tears when we walk home from the park and I've seen him isolated from his peers because he can't keep up. On really bad days, when I'm my most selfish, when I've entirely lost sight of the truth that God loves Matty and me, I feel angry that I got more real life than I wanted.

And then as quickly as I lost perspective, God whispers it back to me. Matty climbs up on the couch and holds my hand. Anabelle laughs, at anything. Matt reminds me that there are only three things I have to do today: Love God. Love him and the kids. Don't die. The leaves outside drift to the ground and I am reminded that there is still magic to be seen. The story isn't over yet and no matter how badly I fail, I am always loved and it's always ok.

My heart breaks daily. I fight with God to regain control of my life, control that I never really had. I get discouraged at snail paced progress. I worry about what will happen when Matty starts school. And I fail myself, my children, my husband again and again. Matty has shown me that I am a failure and it's ok. In fact, it's wonderful.”

Welcome to the Joy of Failure, my friends.

She’s not really a failure, of course.

She is a glorious display of the redemptive handiwork of God.

But she has learned well

that she really has no control whatsoever over life,

and the only thing she can control

is her response to it.

And even that, sometimes,

is beyond her ability.

But in the process she has also discovered

that giving up the illusion of control

is the first huge step into the discovery of the true nature of God’s love.

Strange how it is.

You would think that giving up would be one of the easiest things in the world for us to do.

But the truth is

it is one of the hardest

because to give up is to admit our deep, desperate dependance upon our Lord Jesus Christ,

and dependance is the one thing we seek to avoid at all costs.

And yet...and yet only through that dependance

will we ever begin to find true peace with ourselves -

the peace that comes from knowing both what we can do, and what we cannot,

the peace that comes from knowing

that we can never ever change another human being,

all we can do is love them.

And if we love them,

when we love them

hopefully that love will point them to their Creator

and give them the courage to respond to His love.

But then how about the whole productivity thing?

I mean, does this mean then that we just do nothing?

No, of course not,

but it does mean that we let go of the illusion that our efforts determine the outcome.

And maybe I can illustrate this best

by closing with the account of an incident from the life of Peter.

This particular incident took place early in his history with the Master.

It was at a point at which he was still trying to keep control of his life

and it wasn’t going at all well.

He was still trying to follow Jesus

on the basis of his own efforts,

his own ability to do what he thought needed to be done.

And he came back one morning,

after fishing all night,

to find that the Lord had prepared for him

a little illustration of the way things really are.

This is the way I imagine it went.

Jesus sat at the front of our boat and taught for several hours that morning. He spoke on one of his favorite themes—the heavenly Father’s willingness and ability to provide for those who trust him. His words sounded great, but everything he said just made me feel more grumpy. Talking about God’s care and provision was fine, but after fishing for a full night without a single fish to show for it, the application part of this whole thing left something to be desired.

When he finished his teaching, he turned to me and said, “Now, Simon, put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.”

I couldn’t let this pass without saying something. I was tired. I was hungry. I felt like I had just been preached at by a deeply sincere man who wasn’t in touch with the practical realities of life. Maybe I didn’t know as much about the sacred writings as I should, but I knew a whole lot about fishing, and I knew there were no fish out there—not today, not in this location. It was time to introduce Jesus to my area of expertise.

“Master, we worked hard all night and caught nothing, but at your request I will let down the nets.”

There! That was as tactful as I could be. If he wanted to go on a little fishing trip after his morning teaching session, I would do that for him, but he might as well know the truth right now—there would be no fish in the net.

Andrew and I pulled the boat out a couple hundred feet from the shore. We both knew it was a terrible location, but after last night we also knew it didn’t really matter. This wasn’t about fishing; this was about giving Jesus a relaxing little boat trip and escaping from the crowds for a few hours.

I must admit I became rather parental with Jesus at that point. If he wanted a fishing lesson, I would give him a fishing lesson. I went into great detail showing him how to correctly hold the net for proper casting, how to coordinate the back, leg, shoulder, and arm muscles to get good distance from the throw. After introducing him to the basics I gave a demonstration throw, dropping the net just where I wanted it to go. With one painful exception several years later, that was the last time I ever cast that net.

Few things in my life have impacted me more deeply than what took place during the next few minutes. Having completed Simon’s little lesson in professional fishing, I started to pull the empty net back to the boat. Then, suddenly the water between our boat and the net began to churn and roll as if it were boiling. The turmoil under the surface was so intense it caused the boat to rock violently. The rope in my hand went instantly tight, and I braced myself and pulled with all my strength. At the same instant I saw what was causing the sea to churn—fish! Hundreds and hundreds of fish, more fish than I had ever seen in one place at one time in my life.

I called to Andrew for help, and he grabbed hold and pulled with me. As we strained at the ropes, I peered over the side and was shocked to see what appeared to be several thousand fish all attempting to pack themselves into our net at once. It looked as though they were fighting for the honor of being caught. The weight of the net was far beyond our ability to handle, and I turned my head to shore and bellowed for James and John to come help. By the time they reached us, Andrew and I had been able to bring the edge of the net up high enough so that we could scoop fish into our boat. We scooped and scooped and scooped and scooped until the boat was so low in the water I was afraid we would sink. And still the net was packed with fish. We maneuvered the other boat alongside the net and filled it as well, then rowed the boats to shore, dragging the half-filled net behind us.

The range of thoughts and emotions I experienced during that quarter hour of chaos was unlike anything I had ever known before. At the first sight of all those fish, my initial reaction was the kind of elated greed I always experienced with a great catch. But it wasn’t more than a few minutes before it became obvious even to me that what was happening here had nothing to do with fish. At one point in the harvesting process, I glanced up into Jesus’ eyes and saw once again what I had seen so many times before—he knew. He knew about my plan to live a double life, to be a disciple by day and a fisherman by night. He knew the plan was rooted in the great false foundation of my existence—my unquestioning confidence in my own natural abilities. He knew my commitment to him was deep and genuine, but he also knew my practical trust in him was almost nonexistent. He knew I understood the world of the flesh perfectly and the world of the Spirit not at all. And in that instant I knew why I had fished all night and caught nothing. I caught nothing because he had told the fish to go away, just as he now told the fish to come.

I wonder if you can understand the terror that thought created in my mind. It shook the great pillars of my life. It meant that my effort, my abilities, my determination, and my physical strength were not and could not be my bottom line. It meant I was free to crank out as much effort and energy as I wanted to, but somehow this man could control what resulted from that effort. I felt suddenly, terribly ashamed—ashamed I hadn’t talked to him about my worries, ashamed I hadn’t trusted him, and ashamed most of all because he knew what was in my mind.

I waded through the fish to where Jesus stood, dropped to my knees at his feet, then blurted out, “O Lord! Stay away from me, for I am a sinful man.”

I didn’t deserve these fish. I didn’t deserve his kindness. I didn’t deserve his friendship or his involvement in my life.

Jesus reached down, took my arm, and brought me to my feet. He wanted to see my eyes, he wanted me to see his. He said simply, “Don’t be afraid. From now on you will be catching men.”

Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid of him. Don’t be afraid of his ability to take care of my family. Don’t be afraid of the future he has for me. Don’t be afraid to walk away from the boat, the nets, and the illusion of security they provide. The issue was trust, of course—my willingness to trust him. It was just a beginning, but it was that. I had still learned very little about the difference between life in the flesh and life in the Spirit. But at least my double life ended that day. I ceased to be a disciple by day and a fisherman by night. From that day forward I became a full-time disciple of my Lord Jesus Christ.

And so, with all of that as background,

let me offer you my New Year’s wish for us all -

I wish that in the year ahead

we will each discover in a new way the joy of failure,

so that through that failure

we can discover the truth about our God.