#4. Failure can be a dreambuster!
Failure is a dream buster. Joshua 7. There are many examples I could have used but I liked this story. Joshua had led the children of Israel into the promised land. Everywhere they went they were winning battles. They're just knocking the socks off the Canaanites. Then they get a little cocky and somebody had committed some sin in the camp and they go out and try to take over a little village of Ai with about 3000 people. They said, "No problem. We'll just knock them off!" They go out and fall flat on their face.
Joshua comes back and starts crying out to the Lord in chapter 7, "God! What in the world are you doing? You bring us all the way out of Egypt, across the Red Sea, across the desert, into the promised land. We're winning all these battles and then all of a sudden, one little enemy causes us to be a failure."
He falls flat on his face, crying, feeling sorry for himself. God comes to him and says, v. 10, "Stand up! Take this like a man. What are you doing on your face? Get up and go correct the problem." Failure is not final unless you choose it to be.
Was Joshua doing the wrong thing? No, they were doing what God said -- Take over the land. Often in your dream, you'll be doing the right thing but you may be doing it in the wrong way. You don't give up on your dream, you just try a new approach.
Maybe some of you have gotten all excited about a dream, a profession, a business. You've started and fell flat on your face. You bombed out. What do you say, "I'll never work again!" Of course not. You try a new approach. One of the principles that's taught all through the Bible is that we build on our hopes not on our hurts. You build your dreams on the future, not on the past.
#5. Fear can be a dreambuster.
Numbers 13 is the story about the children of Israel going into the promised land for the first time. In v. 1 the Lord had said to Moses, "Send in some men to explore the land." v. 18 He said, "Go and see what the land is like." See what the people are like and find out all you can. They sent these twelve spies into the promised land and the spies came back and gave a report. It was a majority report which was wrong.
The majority is not always right. There was a minority report which was positive. v. 26 says they came back to Moses. They were there at Kadesh in the desert of Paran. There they reported to the whole assembly and showed them the fruit of the land. "Look at this! It really is a tremendous land of abundance. Then they gave Moses this account, "We went into the land where you sent us and it does flow with milk and honey." It's great! Here's the fruit. In v. 28 they said the wrong word, "but the people who live there are powerful and the cities are fortified and very large." What they were saying was, "This is a tremendous opportunity but there are problems."
They made a fatal mistake that will kill more dreams than almost anything. You never confuse the dreaming phase in your life with the problem-solving phase. The lesson is: You don't try to think up creative ideas and evaluate them at the same time. You'll kill your creativity. Many years ago John F. Kennedy got up and announced to the United States, "We're going to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960's." He made the decision and then he started solving the problems. Can you imagine him saying, "We're going to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960's but first we're going to discuss and solve all the problems." No. It would have never been announced. He said, "This is what we believe we ought to do." Make the decision and then you go and solve the problems.
If you wait for perfect conditions how many things will get done in life? Every good idea has problems. Never say no to a great idea just because it's got problems with it. Don't confuse the problem-solving with the decision-making or the dreaming because you'll give into fear.
No comments:
Post a Comment