Ministry of Failure1_of_3)
Ministry of Failure
STRANGE MINISTERS
Ron Dunn
Deuteronomy 8:1-3
Deuteronomy is a book of remembrances. Moses is rehearsing with God's people all the
things that God has done for them and in them during the past years. In Deuteronomy 8:1-3:
1All the commandments which I command thee this day shall ye observe to do, that ye may live, and multiply, and go in and possess the land which the LORD sware unto your fathers. 2And thou shalt remember all the way which the LORD thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his commandments, or no. 3And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD doth man live.
Then he goes on to describe what perhaps could happen to them after they have entered the land
and have forgotten the goodness of the Lord.
14Then thine heart be lifted up, and thou forget the LORD thy God, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage; 15Who led thee through that great and terrible wilderness, wherein were fiery serpents, and scorpions, and drought, where there was no water; who brought thee forth water out of the rock of flint; 16Who fed thee in the wilderness with manna, which thy fathers knew not, that he might humble thee, and that he might prove thee, to do thee good at thy latter end;
Some time ago late on a Saturday night I needed to make a trip to the supermarket that stays open 24 hours a day. I was a little hesitant to go because of the way I looked. It was a Saturday and I had taken that day to catch up on all those handyman jobs I had let go around the house. I hadn't shaved or combed my hair and had on some old dirty jeans, an old, leprous t-shirt, and some old soiled, crumbling tennis shoes. I just didn't look like the respectable pastor of a local Baptist church. I certainly didn't want to meet anybody in that condition, but I thought no decent person will be going to the grocery store at midnight so it won't hurt if I go and get a few things we are going to need in the morning. You know how you will do in that situation—look straight ahead, neither to the left nor the right lest your eyes meet somebody that you don't want to meet. I was standing at the check-out stand. I was aware of somebody behind me but paid little attention to it. When the lady finished ringing up my purchase and sacked it, she handed it to me. I turned to walk out and standing behind me was one of the ladies in my church. She looked at me for a minute—up and down. She said, Bro. Dunn, I didn't recognize you. Then she made this very interesting statement: you know, I have never seen you without a shirt and tie on. I didn't recognize you without a suit..
I began thinking about that as soon as I could get away. That lady has been in my church for seven or eight years, been there Sunday morning and Sunday night and a lot of times on Wednesday night. Yet she didn't recognize me out of uniform. I began to wonder what she had been looking at all those years as she came to church. I don't suppose she ever looked at my face. I guess she just looked at my suit or my tie. I was wondering if some night she might be driving down the street and see one of my suits on the side of the road and say: there is one of Bro. Dunn's suits.
They do tell us that one of the best disguises a person can wear is a uniform because you have a tendency to notice the uniform rather than the face. You don't recognize these people that you see in unexpected places because you are accustomed in seeing them in certain ways and certain places. I was this woman's minister, and yet she failed to recognize me because I didn't look like a minister.
There are a lot of ministers that God sends our way to minister to us that we fail to recognize because they don't look like ministers are supposed to look. There are many things that God uses to accomplish his purpose in my life. Yet, many times I miss God in those situations. I fail to recognize this situation as a minister of God because it doesn't look like I think a minister should look. We have a tendency to believe that we can always correctly evaluate everything that happens to us. We know a blessing when we see one. We know a curse when we see one. But I am finding, and perhaps you are as well, that kings come to my door dressed as beggars, and princes as paupers. Many times blessings come wrapped in the rags of a curse. Sometimes sorrow is the disguise that real joy wears. Many times you and I will miss the ministry of God in our lives because we are looking for God to minister to us in a certain, specified way.
I want to talk to you about one of these ministers that God sends our way to work his purpose in our lives, to bring us where he wants us to be. I call it the ministry of failure. I have no doubt that my message will be relevant because there is not a person here who has not experienced failure. Every Christian experiences it sooner or later. Some of us seem to live in the same house with failure all the days of our Christian life.
One of the most effective ministers that God has to work in your life and mine is the ministry of failure. I'm going to make a statement and then we will look at the Scripture in a moment. God not only allows us to fail, but there are times when the Lord actually maneuvers us into a situation of failure, when the Lord actually negotiates for our failure because that is the only way that he can teach us a lesson he has been trying to teach.
Have you ever found that the Lord adds some verses to the Bible that you just know weren't there before? You just know the Lord inserted it while you were asleep. That's the way I feel about Deuteronomy, chapter 8.
Not long ago I was reading this passage and I saw a phrase in verse 2 that I had never seen before. Moses says, and thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God led these forty years in the wilderness. When we talk about the forty years of wilderness, I think of failure. The people of Israel had come to Kadesh Barnea. God had given them the promise that if they would just believe and obey him, they would cross over into Canaan.
Let me say that in the Bible, Canaan never represents physical death. Notwithstanding the good old hymns that we sing, Canaan never represents heaven. There were giants in Canaan; there were no giants in heaven. There were battles to be fought in Canaan; there are no battles to be fought in heaven. There was failure and sin in Canaan; there are no failure and sin in heaven. Canaan, not representing physical death or heaven, represents what we might call heaven on earth. Canaan represents everything that God saved us to be in this life. Canaan does not refer to the sweet by and by; it refers to the sweet here and now. That's where God expects us to live. Moses says in Deuteronomy, chapter 6, that God brought them out of Egypt in order to bring them into Canaan. The reason that God led the people out of Egypt was not simply to get them out of Egypt. It was to get them into the land of promise, into the land of fullness where they could live in the full promises of God and be everything that God wanted them to be.
Understand that when God saved you, he did not save you simply to get you out of hell, nor to get you into heaven; he saved you in order that you might experience in your everyday life everything that God wants you to be in the Lord Jesus Christ. Moses says that he brought us out that he might bring us in. But when the people had the opportunity to enter in, they made a mistake, disbelieved and disobeyed God. You know the story. For the next forty years they wandered in that wilderness.
I had always assumed those forty years were forty years of failure. That is a right assumption. I had also assumed those forty years were simply aimless wandering, wasted time and experience. Notice the phrase that caught my attention: Thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness. Notice that he led them while they were in the wilderness.
In verse 15 he says that he led them through that wilderness and fed them while they were there. In the latter part of very 16, he says that he did that to do thee good at thy latter end. I like that. That is the way you can sign everything that God lets come into your life--that he might do thee good. God led them in that wilderness experience in order to accomplish something in their lives that he could not otherwise accomplish.
Suddenly, I began to realize that those forty years in the wilderness were not wasted years, aimless wanderings. Even though they had failed at Kadesh Barnea, even though they had disobeyed and disbelieved God, yet God did not abandon them, nor did he give up on his purpose. He continued to lead them those forty years in the wilderness in order to do them good, in order to accomplish in their lives something that he could not otherwise accomplish.
I know right now I am speaking to people who are living in the wilderness. If you were honest, you would say: Preacher, I am in the wilderness. I have come to a point in my life where it looks as though I am aimlessly wandering. For a while in my Christian pilgrimage everything was going smoothly as I felt it ought to, but something happened, maybe a series of circumstances fell upon me, and it seems like I have lost my direction. I am experiencing spiritual vertigo. I am disoriented. I don't know whether I'm up or down. I don't whether God is alive or dead. I don't know whether he loves me, or doesn't love me. It seems everything I do just turns to ashes, and I would have to say honestly that I am in the wilderness.
Well, I have good news for you. God never wastes time, and he never wastes experience. If you believe in God, and belong to Him, He uses everything that comes to pass in your life to perfect his purpose and plan in your life. I believe one of the most effective ministers that God has sent my way is the minister of failure. God has done some things in my life through failure that I know he could not have otherwise done. Moses said God led thee these forty years in the wilderness. Why? He mentions several things that God sought to accomplish by that wilderness of failure and I want to share them with you. Why does God let us go through the wilderness? Why does God allow us to fail? Why are there times when God even actually negotiates for our failure?
1) God uses failure to empty us of pride.
Look at the second verse: 2And thou shalt remember all the way which the LORD thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness. Why? To humble thee. And he says the same thing in verse 16: 16Who fed thee in the wilderness with manna, which thy fathers knew not, that he might humble thee. Verse 3 says: and he humbled thee. God led them into the wilderness to humble them and empty them of their pride.
Man's basic sin, the original sin of the universe, is pride. God's toughest task in your life is to humble you and to empty you of your pride to bring you to the place where you recognize that you can't handle life by yourself. You can't even handle yourself by yourself. God has to bring you to the place where it seems as though he pulls the rug out from under you and you fall flat on your face.
I was studying the book of Proverbs not long ago and that very familiar verse where it says lean not unto thine own understanding, but trust in the Lord. The Hebrew word translated trust has the idea of falling flat on your face, of lying helplessly face down on the ground. That's a pretty good description of trust. God brings you to a place where you have no alternative but to trust him.
I believe a man will never trust God until he has to. There is something about man that is basically self-sufficient. He likes to think he can handle everything himself. God is forced to bring us into circumstances where we have to confess: I cannot handle it. The old theologians used to have a phrase that I think is tremendous. They called it being shut up to faith. That is where God hems us into a corner where the only way out is up. You see as long as I've got another trick or two up my sleeve, I'm going to use it. As long as I've got a back door, a fire escape, some other plan or gimmick, I'm going to use that. If God is going to bring me to the place where he wants me to be, absolutely dependent upon him, he must first of all destroy my faith in myself. I know that we say you have to be confident and have faith in yourself. I understand that to a certain extent. But what I'm trying to understand is that as long as I'm trusting in myself, I'll never trust in God.
This was Moses problem when he started to deliver Israel forty years earlier when he saw the Egyptian arguing with one of the Israelites. It is interesting to notice that when Moses thought he was qualified, he wasn't. Yet when he thought he wasn't, he was. Have you ever noticed that? Forty years later after spending those years in the back side of the desert, God said, now, Moses, I'm ready to use you to deliver my people. Moses gave excuse after excuse as to why he wasn't capable. He said, the only experience I've had was bad experience. I'm not eloquent and have no authority. People won't listen to me. Lord, I just can't do it. God said, you are just the man I'm looking for. The sad thing is that it took God forty years to get Moses to the place where he no longer trusted in himself. You say you want to learn to trust God and be everything God wants you to be. You must understand that sometimes it is a painful process. God has to bring about circumstances in your life to empty you of your pride. This pride takes two forms. I have already talked about one, the pride of self-sufficiency. The pride that says I can handle this situation myself. In all the family counseling I have done, I found that one of the big problems or barriers to overcome is a man who is the head of the family insisting that he is sufficient in himself. He insists that he is able to handle any situation and circumstance himself. One of God's toughest tasks in your life is to convince you that you are not sufficient, that you are not capable of handling life situations all by yourself.
One Sunday morning we had a young man saved. He came forward during the invitation and pronounced his faith in Christ. I presented him to our fellowship and told them that the young man had come to take his stand for the Lord Jesus Christ. As I did once in awhile, I would allow a person to share what the Lord had done for him. This particular morning, I said, Tommy, is there anything you'd like to say, to share with this fellowship what God has done for you. That young fellow stood up there, and thrust out his chest. He said, yes, sir, I want you to know preacher that I feel great. I'm never going to lose this feeling. Well, I knew he would. Feelings are fickle and fleeting and don't last. I said, now, Tommy, it's great you feel like you do, but don't trust in that feeling. You aren't always going to feel like that. He said, oh no, preacher, I'm always going to feel just like this. We went back and forth like that for a few minutes. Finally, I decided to let it drop. I didn't think it would look good for the pastor to have a fight with a new convert. I said, all right, God bless you, son.
Have you ever noticed that there are some things that only experience can teach you? Well, about three weeks later this young man didn't actually walk into my office; he dragged himself into my office, his chin practically on the floor. I said, what's the problem? He said, I think I'm lost. I was gracious enough not to ask him what happened to that feeling. I had to bite my tongue. I said, son, tell me what happened. He failed in his Christian life, in his obedience to God. Suddenly, when he did that, he lost that glorious, glowing feeling and was plunged into despair because he thought he was self-sufficient.
I think one of the Lord's biggest problems in his earthly ministry was with Simon Peter. I get a lot of encouragement from Simon Peter because I am about as stubborn as he was Have you ever noticed that Simon Peter was always the first one to speak up at any occasion? All he needed to encourage him to talk was two ears that would listen. Peter was always the spokesman for the crowd. Sometimes he got himself into a great deal of trouble. I heard a man say the other day that Peter was always wondering why he couldn't walk straight while he had one foot in his mouth. You just can't maintain your balance when you have one foot in your mouth. If you will carefully follow the career of Simon Peter, you will find that most of the time Jesus was trying to teach Simon Peter this very point: Simon had not arrived, had not achieved, was not sufficient. Jesus was constantly trying to empty Simon of his self-sufficient pride.
On the eve of his crucifixion, Jesus made a prophecy. He said that the disciples would forsake him. That was Simon's cue. He said, Lord (and I'm going to paraphrase a little bit), I understand what you are saying, and I know that the rest of this bunch is of the sort that will leave you, but I want you to know that you can count on me. I'm not going to forsake you. I'm willing to go to prison with you. I'm even willing to die for you. Isn't that a pretty fair paraphrase of what he said? I wonder if that discouraged Jesus. At the end of three and one half years of ministry, Simon still had not learned.
I told you a moment ago that the Lord negotiates for our failure. Here it is. Jesus said, Simon, Simon, Satan hath desired you, that he may sift you as wheat, but I have prayed for you, and when you are turned again (when you get straightened out from this mess), you'll be able to strengthen your brethren. The word translated desired (Satan hath desired to have you), is a word that means to obtain by asking permission. Do you know what Jesus was saying? He was saying Satan has asked permission to get hold of you, Peter, and turn you inside out, and I have given it. That's very encouraging to me in one aspect. It says to me that the devil can't touch me without the permission of the Lord Jesus. He cannot do it. God has built a hedge about me, and the only way the devil can touch me and get to me is if the Lord Jesus gives his permission. He was saying Simon, there is only one way you are going to learn. By the way, he learned it. If you follow his career, you'll see that he never again had a problem with self-sufficient pride. God taught him something through his failure that he could not teach him any other way. There are some things in your life that God is not going to be able to teach you apart from failure. He is going to have to manipulate you into a situation where you are faced with failure to empty you of your self-sufficient pride. He said, when thou art turned again, which meant Jesus knew Simon was going to fail, but when he failed and learned the lesson of that failure, he would be competent to minister and strengthen his brethren. The Lord had to negotiate with the devil for the failure of Simon in order for Simon to learn that lesson and be emptied of his pride.
Right along this line of the devil touching God's people, have you ever read the book of Job. You need to remember who initiated that conversation about Job. Who brought up Job's name? God did. The devil reported to God on a certain day and God said, have you considered my servant Job? There's not a man like him on the face of the earth. (That sort of makes me wish that God wouldn't do any bragging on me to the devil.) The devil said, the only reason he serves you is because it pays. Everything is going good. You've blessed him. If you were to lift that hedge and let me get hold of him, he wouldn't serve you.
Are you serving God tonight simply because everything is going good? What if everything in your life were to fall to pieces and you lost your health and family? Would you still serve the Lord? The devil asked God, does Job serve God for nought? He is saying a man won't serve God for nothing. The devil says a man serves God for what he can get out of it. It is interesting that as I read this account, Job never one time gave credit to the devil, did he? When you read the book of Job, you'll never one time find him one time referring to the devil. As a matter of fact, the Bible refers to Satan's affliction of Job as the hand of God touching Job. Sometimes what the devil wants to do to me somehow or another fits right into God's plan. The devil wanted to turn Peter inside out and sift him as wheat. Jesus said, I think that would be good for him, and I'll give you permission to do it. God will use failure to empty us of our self-sufficient pride.
God uses failure to empty us of the pride of self-satisfaction. Look at verse 3. And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger. In other words, God did such a work in their lives as to deprive them of certain resources and made them cry out, Lord, I'm hungry. Have you been brought to that place?
When I begin to move into an area for a conference, do you know one of the primary things I pray for? Lord, make them hungry. A man won't eat if he is not hungry. You'll never discover the resources of God until he first of all puts you in a situation where you are hungry for him. The only way you can be hungry for the things of God is for God to deprive you of what you have been feeding yourself upon. Many of us have been complacent with our lives and our spiritual progress. Before God can spur us on and bring us to his fullness, he has to work in our lives in such a way that we cry out for God to meet our needs. The same God that makes you hungry is the same God that feeds you. The only time God makes me hungry is not to mock me, not to make fun of me, not to see me writhe in hunger, but in order that he might feed me. It says that he fed them with manna you knew not and none of your fathers knew. I find that when God finally gets me to the place where I cry out and say, Lord, I am desperate and hungry to have what you have, the Lord meets that need through the most unusual circumstances. He feeds me from unknown resources. Have you found, Christian friend, that God meets your need from the most peculiar resources, and from the most unexpected ways imaginable. . 1) God uses failure to expose our pride.
2) God uses failure to expose us to the wickedness that is in our hearts. Look again at verse 2. He led thee these forty years in the wilderness: 1) to humble thee, and 2) to prove thee to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldst keep his commandments or no. He says the same thing in verse 16: that he might prove thee. If you'll read in Exodus 15 and 16, you'll find that on different occasions God arranged adverse circumstances in order to prove his people. The word prove means to discover what is present by means of a test, to expose what is present by means of testing. God said that he led them through this wilderness to prove them, to expose what was in their hearts, whether they would keep God's commands.
It wasn't that God wanted to find out what was in their hearts. God knew. He wanted them to know what was in their hearts. I want you to know tonight that God knows what is in your heart. He knows whether or not you are going to keep his commandments. He knows that, but you don't know it.
If you'll go back, you'll find that when Moses was making preparation to go up on Mt. Sinai to get the law, Israel made a boast. This was their boast: all that the Lord God says unto us, we will do. They thought what was in their hearts was total obedience. They didn't know that idolatry and terrible sin was in their heart. God used that failure to expose them to the unknown wickedness that was in their hearts.
Go back to Simon Peter. That was one of the accomplishments of his failure. If you had sat down with Simon Peter as Jesus attempted to do, and had tried to convince Peter that lurking in the darkness of his heart was denial of Christ and cursing, he wouldn't have been convinced. When it says that Peter swore, it doesn't mean he cursed like we think of cursing. It means he took God as a witness that he didn't know Jesus. It means he called God in heaven to bear witness to his statement that he didn't know Jesus. Jesus tried to convince Peter that in his heart there was deep wickedness. Peter said, no, Lord, it's not there. The only way that Jesus could prove to Peter what was in his heart was by letting him fall into that failure.
Jesus says that out of the heart are the issues of life. Did you know that in a man's heart, even though he is saved, there is the possibility of every kind of evil? I don't know how many times I have had men whose home was breaking up because of infidelity come to me and say, preacher, I would never have believed I would do something like this. If there is sin, and there is that wickedness in my heart, I want to know about it. If I have a tumor growing in my body, I want to know about it. I want it to be exposed. I want something to happen to me to expose the sickness that is in my body so that it can be treated before it kills me. When God lets us go into failure, he really is being merciful to us because he is exposing some things in our lives so that we can deal with them and get God's treatment and God's help in those areas of our lives. You would never have been able to convince Simon Peter.
There are some things in your heart and life that you don't know are there. God will arrange a set of circumstances, and you will react to those circumstances and surprise yourself. You'll say, I didn't know that was there.
When a Christian gets behind the wheel of an automobile, he takes on a different character. He grows horns and fangs. He doesn't drive his car; he aims it at the enemy. I've joked about that and used it as sermon illustrations because, frankly, I didn't think that was my problem. I'd always been cool and collected behind the wheel. One day sometime ago a situation happened that exposed to me what was in my heart.
My wife and I were getting ready to go to Europe for a conference, and we were leaving the next day. We needed an additional suitcase. It was on a Monday, and I had staff meeting and didn't have time to have a staff meeting and also go to Dallas and search for the right kind of suitcase. I decided that what I could do was to take the five men on my staff with me, and we would staff on the way. I would kill two birds with one stone. We went at lunchtime to a big shopping center. You know how crowded it gets at that time and there wasn't an available parking place.
You know what a parking place is, don't you? That's a space the size of your automobile on the other side of the street. There were plenty of places on the other side of the street, but as I would turn around and go back, they would be gone. I was cruising about five miles per hour, waiting for somebody to back out. There was a fellow behind me who was not looking for a parking place. He just wanted to get out of there. I could see in the rear view mirror that he was growing impatient, looking for a chance to pull out ahead of me. But I couldn't let that bother me; I was looking for a parking place. All this time my staff and I were talking about spiritual things. After a moment, I saw there was an open place. This fellow gunned his engine, swerved around me, blew his horn two or three times and shook his fist at me. Do you know what I did? I just blew my horn back at him and shook my fist at him, and said, same to you, brother. And immediately when I said that, I remembered that I had my staff with me. The least the Lord could have done was to let that happen when I was alone so I could have saved face.
That's a silly thing. I thought I had control of my temper. I thought I was a very patient, understanding, forgiving person. Do you know what? God exposed something in my heart that I didn't know was there. I began to deal with that issue. We each have potential problems. The break-up of any home could have been prevented if a man or woman had listened to what God had been saying to them through failure. No home breaks up overnight. There are always warnings. Haven't you been able to see some warnings in your own life? I never thought I would do that. I never thought I'd feel this way. A year ago I wouldn't have thought that. A year ago I wouldn't have said that. What is God doing? He is allowing you to fail in order that he might expose to you some potential deadly dangers in your life so you can deal with them.
3) God uses failure to educate us as to the true values in life.
I believe one of our greatest problems is a wrong system of values. We place value on the wrong things, and God has to patiently educate us and teach us what really counts in life. You'll find this in verse 3:
and he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not (why?), in order that (that's a purpose clause) he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD doth man live.
That is one of the greatest statements in all of the Bible. Man doesn't live by bread only; he lives by the Word of God. This is so relevant to the Israelites because one of their primary complaints was lack of food, lack of bread. God was trying to teach them that a man's life is not sustained by bread but by the Word of God. That is literally true. God could keep you alive without bread. Bread therefore symbolizes all the material and physical things that we need to sustain life. God is pleased to use bread and air and food and water as the means of keeping us alive, but he doesn't need to do that. You can eat the right kind of foods, get the right kind of exercise, join the health club, and jog two miles every day, but when God says it is time for you to die, you are going to die. If God wanted to keep you alive for forty years without ever eating a morsel of food or drinking a drop of water, he could do that. He is going to do that in eternity.
A man is kept alive by the Word of God. In other words, he is saying that the source of a man's life is God, not the means that God uses to keep us alive. The importance of seeing this is that if I look upon bread as the source of my life, as the source of the meaning of my life, as the source of fulfillment in my life, then I am going to work for bread. Man's life, its source, its substance comes from the Word of God.
I have found that the goodness of God is this: God is always with me, in good times and bad, in hard times and easy, when I am spiritual, when I am not spiritual, when I am obedient and when I am disobedient. His chief purpose in my life is to bring me to the place where I recognize that the greatest good in life is to know him, to feel his presence, to serve him, to worship him, and to honor him. Sometimes the only way God can teach us that is through failure. I hope you learn to recognize that minister. He doesn't always come dressed up nice and neat in a suit and tie. Sometimes he isn't a very pleasant character at all to meet. But he is just as surely a minister of God as your pastor who stands behind the pulpit on Sunday morning.
COPYRIGHT DISCLAIMER: The text contained in this database is protected by copyright and International Law, and is solely owned by its authors. The reproduction, or distribution of this product, or any portion of it, without the expressed written authorization from the contributing authors is forbidden. Remember, this database is to inspire the development of new messages to further the Kingdom's work.