Failure

Praise be to Jesus–ever-redemptive, never failing–that his nature be imparted onto us so that his eternal life would replace our shrinking life. Praise be to Jesus, who brought an end.

The Lord fights for us, but against what? No power of hell, no force of this world can e'er defeat him. True, there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God, but surely sin can separate us in general. That is its very definition, and a key distinction between love and general separation. If we could never be separated from Him, either He would be all too human, or we would terribly be too divine. For neither can sinfulness and holiness exist at their fullest together. And the Lord is of course the fullness of all holiness. Without Him, there is no such holiness at all. Until we are finally remade, the destruction of sin reversed once and for all, we will not enter into the fullness of the same holiness ourselves. So of course every day would be a battle against an invasive unholiness. It is only invasive to the Christian, because by its very definition, a Christian is a resident in Christ and therefore not in sin. But without Christ, the heart has an entirely different occupant.

And it is easy to see this very fight as an area in which we fail constantly. This is where I want to spend the majority my efforts in this post: the word failure. Again, there is no doubt of whether any given Christian will fall short. But too often, we allow ourselves to be defined by short-coming. The Enemy creeps in and tries to uproot us from our home, and declare that it was never a legitimate place to begin with; we have failed, and therefore as Christians are failures. But there is no failure in the body of Christ. The only Christian failure is one who chooses he would rather not follow Christ. A man may very well choose something over Christ, and in doing so, would be the only type of bad Christian: one who is no Christian at all.

For failure is not independent. It waits until the paper-work has been signed, until the back has been turned, until the time runs out, until everything has come to an end. Something can only be considered a failure which has ended. Now naturally people like to predict failure and attribute the characteristic to something that is very clearly trending downward, but it is from an ending point that they are predicting. They are looking ahead to when it is all over and done, and then speaking from the end backwards. Commenting on a game, someone might easily say, “This is a failed attempt,” but it takes speculation and prediction, from a perspective that assumes the game will not improve, and therefore the end will result in failure. No game has been lost which has not yet ended.

I do not mean to make a twist and talk about how we, as Christians, are to play the game of life forever and not give up. This is not my angle; rather, I mean to say that it may not have even been our game to begin with.

Christ displays this clearly in John 21. Talking with Peter, he asks him a series of questions, to which Peter responds more and more hurt. But the hurt of doubt is not one which Peter experienced exclusively in his friendship with Jesus. Three times was Peter given an opportunity to declare his discipleship. Instead, out of fear, Peter claimed at each accusal that he did not follow Jesus. Three times did Peter reject, not only following, but even knowing Christ at all. Three times, therefore, Jesus asks if Peter loves him. In each, Jesus redeems Peter, allows him to express his genuine devotion to his resurrected savior, having now paid for each of Peter’s denials, and each of mine as well. Peter could not be a failure, for he still followed the Lord. Regardless of circumstance, there was no betrayal too significant for Christ, so long as it was not his last.

For failure does indeed require an end, but in our circumstance, it is an end which failure was not allowed. Before we were even able to question whether we had failed or not, Christ declared every ounce of our burden lifted and every step of our walk to perfection complete. Before we even began, Christ ended it all, said over our lives, “It is finished.” It is not ours to fight and therefore not ours to lose. The Lord, not of our own doings, extends this gift of ending to us out of His love and mercy and grace. Therefore if once extended, never rescinded, and if once accepted, never returned. For it is not our own end, but the Lord’s which was given to us as a gift never to be taken back.

And what comes after an end? Surely nothing at all. Into nothingness then our sins fall, drifting, sinking down eternally, not holding onto any part of us and not hindering us in any way from eternity. He supplies our end that we wouldn’t fear our own, and therefore are free to put an end to ourselves and follow him endlessly. So long then as we are giving all to Christ, there is nothing that this world can take from us, for it certainly has no hold on us. Let us then move forward into the courts of the Lord weightless and free, the cause of our own hearts having been bought once and for all by the blood of Christ, that we would not spend another day trying to buy ourselves. We are totally owned and forever loved by a God who has been our end from our beginning.