Gateway to Hope – an exploration of failure

I have been given the book “Gateway to Hope – an exploration of failure” to read, and early on came across this:-

We fail because we are weak, wounded, confused and inconsistent. We each have particular built-in weaknesses, flaws that seem to be part of the very stuff of our characters. We fail to do and we fail to be. We fail in the good we try to do, and we fail to love. At the deepest level of our life is sin: we fail God.

If you are like me, you may feel a little bit uneasy after reading this as it reveals the truth about us. No matter how hard we try, we fail to reach God’s standard – there is no getting away from this. Many people see themselves as being “good people” and always trying to do the right thing, but even this, according to how I read the Bible, is not enough.

However:-

Here above all, is the place of failure where the God of our failures finds us with his grace. Prayer is a relationship with God in which failure is tasted very bitterly, suffered with love, and allowed to become the place of resurrection.

This is the wonder of God’s grace that even though we fail God, he is not only pleased to meet us, just as we are, but He wants us to experience His love that comes through the death and resurrection of Jesus and brings us to a place where we are welcomed into His family.

If we can grasp just part of the vastness of God’s love, then it should spill out of our lives into the people we meet and into the world that we are part of. May each of us continue to help to bring God’s kingdom into His creation, understanding that it isn’t how good we are that will bring us into eternal life, rather humbly recognising that we fail, but are always loved.

Martin