Black Hills Health and Education Center

God’s word gives us this promising insight: “This Book of the Law (the Bible) shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate in it day and night, that you may observe to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success.” This verse found in Joshua 1:8 communicates that if by faith we are willing to take daily time to quietly contemplate the word of God, compare our lives to its teachings, and choose, by faith, to respond in obedience to the Lord’s will as He reveals it to us, He promises to prosper our lives and give us success in living a healthy fulfilling life!

Now please understand this – following God’s word doesn’t necessarily free us from making any more mistakes in our daily living here on earth. However, it can free us from the FEAR of failing and the FEAR of making a mistake! It is so valuable to recognize that without mistakes – we would lose a valuable tool for learning God’s way of living life successfully. God never tampers with our power of choice and in the process of learning to keep our will submitted to Him through faith under any and all circumstances, He allows us to experience mistakes that may outwardly appear to us to be failures. However, to the one who is desiring with all his heart to please God in all he does, what seems to him to be a failure or mistake can actually be the means of gaining a success he never would have had without it! Thomas Edison in his attempts to produce a light bulb, after a couple of thousand apparent failures, was accosted by a well-meaning friend who suggested that he give up trying. Edison’s reply went something like this: “Every one of those failures only taught me one more thing that wouldn’t work to produce light.” John Dewey once wrote, “Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks – learns quite as much from his failures – as from his successes.”

Now here’s the beauty of the success God offers us in our attempts to live a life pleasing to Him. 2 Corinthians 8:11,12 NKJV states, “but now you also must complete the doing of it (what you said you would do); that as there was a readiness to desire it, so there also may be a completion out of what you have. For if there is first a willing mind, it is accepted according to what one has, and not according to what he does not have.” Did you catch the freeing principle in these verses? God considers our willingness to do the best we can with what we have, not how well we do something, as the evidence of acceptability and success in His sight! In the parable of the talents in Matthew 25, the five talent servant and the two talent servant, who both went faithfully and did the best they could with their master’s goods, were given the same commendation when the master returned to reward them! This communicates a very powerful and freeing point - in God’s sight, a physically handicapped person who is doing the best he can to glorify the Lord with the physical capabilities and resources he has can be just as successful in God’s sight as someone who has no physical infirmities! Wow! I love the beautiful rendering of this concept the devotional “My Life Today” gives on page 250, “When it is in the heart to obey God, when efforts are put forth to this end, Jesus accepts this disposition and effort as man's best service, and He makes up for the deficiency with His own divine merit.” Praise God!

So dear friend, to the best of your ability and resources, in every situation you face in life, rather than follow your own inclinations and desires, purposely make an ongoing faith decision to respond to that situation according to God’s will as He reveals it to you in His word, the Bible. Just like Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane before He was taken, misjudged, cruelly persecuted, and crucified – just like Jesus, the innocent Son of God, when faced with the most difficult decision of His life on earth, whether or not to go ahead and suffer and die to take the penalty for all our wrong choices upon Himself – just like Jesus, whatever you face, choose this course, “. . . nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will.” Matthew 26:39. If you’ll make this decision, you are giving God the right to free you from the fear of failure! Remember the Lord’s promise in Proverbs 1:33, “But whoever listens to Me will dwell safely, and will be secure, without fear of evil.” Courage to you!