Failure and Guidance

The matter of geography is in the line of lights guiding our lives but it is not usually decisive as related to success, as God interprets success.  Success with God is found in faithfulness.  Each person has enough information to determine personal faithfulness in the interpretation of his or her own life and work.  That observation does not mean that determination is easy.  It does take some insight, knowledge of self, and the Scripture, with prayer and willingness to follow one’s star (calling). Obedience to Scripture, some practical perception of our abilities, all covered by believing prayer and application, means we can gain God’s will in our lives – even if we may seem to fail in the effort.  We sometimes feel guided by geography, but that is not where God’s will is found, even if it becomes a part of planning and design.  Many persons may miss God’s will because they want to live in a moderate climate, or in the mountains, perhaps the desert, even in the city or another country.  Seldom does this have any meaningful application to God’s will.  Wherever I am, I can find God’s will for my life.  His will is in my application of the gifts he offers to my life. 

Failure, as the idea of missing the mark in the humanistic concept, is sometimes needed in a context of life so to carry out the will of God for others as well as for ourselves.  Historians may find we did not fail.  Jesus gave to the disciples the approach to be made to seeming failure after they have done what they believe they ought to do.  They go on from the failure to make another effort in another place.  They would use the simple gesture of shaking off the dust of the village in which they have preached the gospel and faced rejection.  They were instructed to move on, and that without ill-will.  They were to use a gesture, the shaking off of the dust from their feet so to take nothing from the community they tried to serve.  They simply go on to the next inviting opportunity.  The invitation may be found entirely within themselves, so they plant in another field.  Wherever there is a need, there is invitation to service.  People always have needs God wants us to address, especially the need for the gospel to any population.

It is well to pick up on words used in Scripture to freight some ideas.  Dust is one of those words.  Dust is beautiful in identifying the clouds of the sky as the dust of God’s feet walking among us. (Nahum 1:3)  Dust is also a sign of evaluation to judgment for humanistic response to redemptive offering from God. (Isaiah 34:7-8)  The parable using dust is extensive in Scripture, to which even the physical body of mankind is identified.  (Psalm 103:14; Ecclesiastes 3:20)  With these factors in place (understood and applied) we launch, and will usually find what we may call success.  For God, success is counted in the application of Scripture and prayer, in a spirit of devotion and obedience, for the person in self.  That is expressed practically in service to mankind, service that is in a context of rightness reflecting the love and holiness of God, in Christ.  It is a point made many times in these Pages.  Success and failure as we generally apply the terms do not fit for God.  Where we live, and wherever that may be, we become his world Christian in that place.

Christians need to be reminded that to think christianly is different from thinking naturally.  Natural thought is now perceived to be scientific.  It started in an orderly way with Aristotle’s writings which are magnificent in the terms of language and thought related to nature.  In this way we are concerned with evidence that persons agree upon as evidence, from which theories (simple and complex) emerge which are related to reality.  We say they are real and when put into practice they work so to make the theory strong by which we educate and live day by day – unless violated by other interpretations of the evidence leading to other theories and practice.  In the passing of the centuries, the great theologians of the Christian Catholic tradition tended to cast theology in the Aristotelian tradition.  But, spiritual context does not fit in many matters related to faith-based logic.  The loudest voices in the Aristotelian tradition tend to espouse that verified assumptions in an approved context of syllogistic reasoning is the only way to go.  Much of Catholic Christian theology is so cast.  Jesus avoided the problem by using persuasive parables to freight the truth of spiritual and natural lives in limited human contexts.  We believe in parable experience.