Failure again. ...

Tuesday, May 5, 2009. We have talked about failure yesterday. We talked about the experience to fail important things. How do we deal with this experience. We have seen that God is a God who loves in particular those who have failed, who know their failure and turn to him even though they have a broken heart. We have noted that God does not love a proud heart, but a humble heart. He is a God of consolidation, the great counsellor.

What if we have turned to God with our failure, somehow got ourselves going, received God's forgiveness … and then fail again on the next occasion. How do we deal with this? How does God think about continuous failure, about someone failing twice, three times, four times …?

It is interesting. God seems to know exactly, that we will fail many times with many important parts of our life. When we start to think about wright and wrong, about purpose and goals for the human life, about love and dedication, truth and justice, then we will realize more and more that we failed many more times than we ever recognized. We failed personally and our society failed as a whole - with us being one of its responsible members. We cannot hide and pull ourselves out of the responsibility for the people around us, in our close environment or far away.

But God has promised forgiveness also for repeated failure. He has asked us to forgive even seven times seven times. And he himself does so. If we come to him, with sincere regret, again and again, he forgives. He is willing to make a new start again. He will not turn us down. It might be our own difficulty to foregive ourselves again after 10 failures. But for God this is not a difficulty, but he forgives by heart. He loves us, he wants us to succeed in love and truth and come to a new life. [R.W.E.P., jesusnetwork.eu]

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