God's Grace Abounds

Excerpts from Collin Hansen post:  Failure Is Not An Option

Your kids will fail. This is both inevitable and also necessary. Apparently not many parents today want to hear this uncomfortable fact. And they certainly don’t want to implement it in how they discipline their children. Writing the cover story for The Atlantic’s July/August issue, therapist Lori Gottlieb alerts us that the cult of self-esteem is ruining our kids. Convinced they are the center of the universe and capable of anything, our children have become insufferable narcissists. Then, when these kids grow up and fail, as they must, they head for the nearest therapist, worried their lives have gone horribly wrong. ...

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It’s not hard to see, then, why “moralistic therapeutic deism” (to borrow Christian Smith’s famous descriptor) plagues our churches. This god wants what’s best for us—chiefly, our happiness in all circumstances. He aims to please. Whatever does not please, then, must not come from god. Consider the latest findings of Smith and his colleagues, revealed in their forthcoming book, Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood. They asked young adults age 18 to 23, “If you were unsure of what was right or wrong in a particular situation, how would you decide what to do?” The most popular answer (39 percent): “doing what would make you feel happy.”

As you can hopefully see, this is a perfect recipe for discipleship disaster. Happiness is neither assured nor even God’s ultimate aim for us. Sometimes, for example, he demonstrates the grace of his fatherly concern by disciplining those he loves (Prov. 3:11-12; Heb: 12:5-11). When we aim primarily for happiness in our parenting and discipleship, we actually set up these young adults for needless failure. They will be surprised and hopelessly discouraged when their faith is eventually challenged, whether by skeptical professors and classmates or the inevitable disappointment of life.

 The God of the Bible does not seem so concerned to protect us from all failure. In fact, you’ll search Scripture in vain for anyone but Jesus who avoids failure altogether. Abraham, the man of faith, displays his lack of faith when he lies about his wife to protect himself (Gen. 12:13). Moses, the man of bold and steadfast conviction in God’s power to deliver his people, takes matters into his own hands to control a rebellious people (Num. 20:11-12). David, a man after God’s own heart, indulges the lust of his flesh and takes another man’s wife (2 Sam. 11:2-4). If these men failed, so will we.

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And what if you don’t teach your children how to overcome by the grace of God and power of the Holy Spirit by patiently enduring their failures? They’ll find out the truth anyway, the hard way. They’ll see failure in church with the backbiting, gossip, power plays, and judgmentalism. They’ll see it in themselves when they struggle with doubts and no one will listen. They’ll see it in you and wonder why you can’t just admit it.

If you don’t teach them that Christians sometimes fail, then they’ll conclude Christianity has failed. But by the grace of God they’ll add to the numbers of bitter adults who grew up in the church and rail against its destructive influence. Yet when they see us fail, repent, and ask God’s forgiveness, they’ll see in action the most glorious truth of all, that God himself took on flesh and walked among us, failures all, so we might walk with him in heaven forevermore. They’ll know that when they fail, too, God’s grace abounds to even the chief of sinners.