I used to work at the city council where there was a man in our section, who often used to say “success has many fathers but failure is an orphan.”  Everyone wants to claim they played a part in something that was successful but when something is a disaster or fails, nobody wants to own it. We might talk about failure in hushed tones but everybody does it. Teacher and students, cops and crooks, parents and children all fail.  Doctors fail and they bury their mistakes! Nobody likes to fail but everybody does sometimes. In Gen 3.10 we find that failure is part of the human race. Moses failed in understanding when he sought to save the Israelites. He rose up in anger, killed an Egyptian and hid him in the sand. Samson failed morally and David failed the temptation test. Peter denied that he knew Jesus, and wept bitterly later as he thought about his lack of courage and loyalty. Probably like me, you have come to church some weeks with a small or large library of failures from the past week, and some even added that morning.

Friend, failure has been a part of the human experience for a long time but stop and think; did their failure stop them being used by God and becoming an eventual success? No they all finally did the will of God. Some of them not in spite of their failure but because of their failure, as it made them more aware of their need for God.