Epic Fail!

            “Epic fail, dude!” How often have you heard that one after you or someone else makes the blunder of the century?  Fails are remarkably entertaining these days.  There is even a popular web blog dedicated to chronicling, preserving, and spreading these tales of beleaguering blunders.  Now suppose there was a blog or even a whole book filled with every single one of your failures, and that was visible to the God who will judge you according to your actions.  Every mistake you made, every ignored opportunity to do the right thing, every sin.  Epic fail.

            Some of the greatest tactics our demons use to drag us down are guilt and condemnation.  Our failures are some of their most powerful weapons.  We often feel as though we are trapped in our failure and that it is all we will ever do in this life.  This is nothing new.  Going back to scripture we find hundreds of accounts of men and their failure.  One of the greatest is that of Simon Peter.

            Peter, one of the Twelve Disciples of Christ, was known to be quite hot-headed and rash, acting in the heat of the moment.  When he saw Jesus walking toward them across a lake, he immediately jumped out and began to walk towards him, but overcome with doubt and fear he began to sink, prompting Jesus to ask why he had such doubt and little faith. When Christ was arrested, he suddenly took out a sword and attacked a presumably unarmed servant, while armed soldiers (a far more immediate, though also far more intimidating, threat) were also there.  While Christ was being tried and tortured, he had shrunk away from his Master’s ordeal, and lied three times, saying he had never known Jesus—not a day after he had sworn to never deny Him.  Not only are there the obvious failures, but we can also see in Peter a pattern of fear, hesitation, and cowardice, despite his natural zeal.

            But here is where it gets interesting.  Despite all of these failures, Peter was one of the most successful evangelists in the history of Christianity, with his preaching bringing people to Christ by the hundreds.  Jesus Himself said that the divine knowledge Peter had concerning Jesus’ identity as the messiah was the foundation upon which the Church would be built.  Peter was even one of Christ’s closest disciples and friends.  He is also the only man in history to have walked on water.

            In-and-of ourselves, we are failures.  But God’s grace and redemption lifts us out of our failure and self-loathing into the success for which He created us.  You may or may not believe Christ meant in Mathew 16 that Peter himself would be the foundational rock of the Church, but what is certain is that he was indeed the foundation for some of the greatest triumphs of the Church’s history.  Once we allow God’s will for us to be the foundation for our actions instead of our failure and guilt, there is no telling what He will build from us.