Breaking the Spirit of Failure

Introduction

Luke 5:1–10 NKJV

So it was, as the multitude pressed about Him to hear the word of God, that He stood by the Lake of Gennesaret, and saw two boats standing by the lake; but the fishermen had gone from them and were washing their nets. Then He got into one of the boats, which was Simon’s, and asked him to put out a little from the land. And He sat down and taught the multitudes from the boat. When He had stopped speaking, He said to Simon, “Launch out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.” But Simon answered and said to Him, “Master, we have toiled all night and caught nothing; nevertheless at Your word I will let down the net.” And when they had done this, they caught a great number of fish, and their net was breaking. So they signaled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both the boats, so that they began to sink. When Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!” For he and all who were with him were astonished at the catch of fish which they had taken; and so also were James and John, the sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. And Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid. From now on you will catch men.”

Everyone fails. Overcoming failure however is something that sadly, few are able to do regularly in their lives. Discover how to overcome the spirit of failure through faith and obedience with our comprehensive sermon outline based on Luke 5:1-10. This sermon outline, “Breaking the Spirit of Failure,” delves into the moment when Jesus turned Simon Peter’s empty nets into an abundant catch, thereby Breaking The Spirit Of Failure and showcasing the power of God’s word and the importance of perseverance.

When I started studying the Bible, I didn’t start studying the Bible to preach. I didn’t start to get a message, or to perfect a ministry. Nor did I start so that I might be able to argue theologically with those who are astute in scriptures, to prove my ecclesiastical and theological persuasions. I started reading the Word of God because I was drowning, and I needed desperately to find a lifeline or a reason to keep living.

• I started reading the Word of God because I was tired of listening to the words of men. I was tired of their counsel, thoughts and fodder. The tunnels and the burrows, as it were, that I dug into the Word of God, to find healing for myself, became cisterns, wells of living water that begin to bless other hurting people.

• There are biblical words and concepts that have so much life in them, they are stronger than therapy, greater than psychology, reaching deeper than psychiatry. They are able to calm the rampant beating and the stressful taunting and flaunting of the enemy that come against you, to overwhelm you.

He is the only one I know who can speak a word now. That goes back into your past, heals your yesterdays, secures your today, and anchors your tomorrow. He is absolutely awesome.

One of the things that really excited me about God, was beginning to realize that He is sovereign, and auspicious. That He is in control, and He has absolute power. It was interesting to find that He foreknew me, that He knew me before I was born, that my mother and father did not get the first look at me.

• They were not the first ones to see me. That God had searched me, before I was born. He had chosen me; He had monitored my mother’s pregnancy. He had secured me. He had protected me in the womb.

• That in fact, before He had formed me in the belly, He knew me, ordained me, sanctified me, to be a prophet unto the nations. He did it before, that I might be..........., He was saying that I was going to be, in the future, what He had prepared before, in the past!

• There are no surprises in God. God says, “I already know all about you!” “You will never surprise me!” “Your thoughts, will not surprise me, I already know your thoughts before you think them!”

“I sanctified you.......,” When did you sanctify me? Was it when I was baptized and You cleaned up my life? “I sanctified you before I formed thee...!” “Your hands were still webbed in your mother’s womb, when you were just a bleeping on the monitor, I sanctified you!” “Before they could determine your gender, I sanctified you!”

• “It means that He marked you, before you got here!” “He put my mark on you, you are mine!” “I sanctified you!”

“I set you apart, and that clearly means that I meant for you to be different!” “I did not mean for you to fit in!”• “It means that He marked you, before you got here!” “I put my mark on you, you are mine!” “I sanctified you!” “I set you apart, and that clearly means that I meant for you to be different!” “I did not mean for you to fit in!” put my mark on you, you are mine!” “I sanctified you!” “I set you apart, and that clearly means that I meant for you to be different!” “I did not mean for you to fit in!”• “It means that He marked you, before you got here!” “ put my mark on you, you are mine!” “I sanctified you!” “I set you apart, and that clearly means that I meant for you to be different!” “I did not mean for you to fit in!”

What a ministry to understand. He never meant for you to be in the clique or in the club. He never meant for you to be accepted. He marked you! He sanctified you! He set you apart!

• You were meant to be an outcast with men, so that you could be an in cast with God! “Before I formed thee in the belly, I knew thee, I ordained thee, I sanctified thee to be a prophet to the nations!” The good thing about God is that when He ordains you, knows you, and sanctifies you to be, you don’t have to worry about anybody else that doesn’t want you to be!

• Because no weapon formed against thee shall be able to prosper, because you are sanctified! You are on a mission from God! You are a stone thrown, an arrow shot, a bullet propelled from the heavenlies into the earth realm! You were sent from eternity into time!

• Your mother became the birth canal, the conduit, from eternity into time, that in the fullness of time that God would bring you into this world for a designated purpose! You are a marked man, woman, boy or girl!

• You are set apart! God has a definite agenda for your life! He is setting you up for a great move! He wants to move mightily in your life!

There are some things that only you can do! You are distinctly different from anybody else! You are forbidden to imitate other people! You are forbidden to copy other people! You are marked!

• When God wanted you, He created you! If He had wanted Sally, He would have created Sally! When He called you, He called you because He wants you! You never have to be stressed out trying to be anybody other than yourself! He wants you!

Your fingerprint is distinctly different from all the other billions of people in this world, God never repeated on your fingertips, with anybody else, the same print! There has never been anyone ever that has had your fingerprint, nor will there ever be!

• Your hairs are numbered, not counted, but numbered! Counted is awesome enough, but they are numbered! You are special to God! You are set apart! He has an agenda for you!

The enemy is terrified of people that have been sanctified! He is terrified, and consequently, he will set traps, obstacles, and bondages to keep you from entering into your purpose because he is terrified of you! Don’t waste time being terrified of him, he is terrified of you!

• The greater the struggles that you face, the greater the challenges, the greater the turmoil in your life, is an indication that the devil has assigned assassins to terminate you from reaching your designated target!

• He will do anything to overwhelm, belittle, rid you of confidence and self-esteem; he doesn’t mind how much you shout and dance, as long as you don’t have any confidence, faith, or integrity! He doesn’t mind how excited you get, as long as when you get done shouting, you have no character!

• He wants to rip you until you become too impotent and impoverished in your spirit, until you are an empty building a ghost town, a vacant house! Your lights are on but nobody is at home! You are going through the motions of life with a form of Godliness, but denying the power thereof!

• He doesn’t mind how many days you live, as long as you don’t really live in those days you have! He wants to rob you and abuse you of your destiny! He comes to steal, kill, and destroy! He wants to sabotage your success, because you were created to win!

• You were called and set aside to win! The potter meant for you to be a successful vessel! That you might be meat for the Master’s use! You were not meant to fail! You were not meant to die! You were not meant to quit, or collapse, you were meant to live!

They still can’t figure out why the human body dies. Because the body was meant to rebuild and refurbish itself! You were not meant to faint, to collapse, to have a nervous breakdown, a stress attack, migraine headache, break out in nervous conditions and rashes and all kinds of diseases, hypertension, and stress attacks, heart attacks and such!

• You were not meant to lose it! To lose control, kick the dog, slap the cat and dog! You were not meant to be a failure! You were not meant to be destitute and lonely, to be hungry, to be isolated, to be driven!

• You were meant to be the head and not the tail! You were meant to be above only and not beneath! You were meant to prosper and live in goodly houses!

• You are children of the King, the Heavenly Host, the God of Israel dwells in the midst of you!

Touch somebody and tell them, “You don’t even know who I am!”

It is important, because when you read the Word of God, you begin to understand the magnitude, the awesome, tremendous, awe-inspiring, mind-renewing, thirst quenching magnitude of the deposit of the Holy Ghost that was put in you from the foundations of the world.

• If you do not understand the deposit that God has placed inside of you, then you will be ill-prepared when He comes back to make the withdrawal!

• If the enemy has so contaminated your thinking and your philosophy to the degree that you think that you are a nothing, a zero, has-been, a reject, that you feel like that you are too old, or too fat, too dark, or too light, or this or that to do the will of God: the devil will use anything against you!

• He will use your childhood, your past, your broken home, your broken dreams, or whatever he can get on you! He doesn’t care what he goes after, he will kill anything that He can to destroy you from reaching your potential! I came to tell you tonight that you are on Hell’s Hit List!

• The enemy is after your mind! He is after your joy! Your peace! Your confidence! Your self-esteem! Don’t let anybody tell you that Christianity is a negative, dead-beat religion for rejected, broken people! The devil is a liar! Christianity is jump-starting power to a broken dead celled battery that has gone through a cold world and needs to be renewed! God is able!

While we build great churches and sit in our offices and brag amongst ourselves over who has the largest and the greatest, who graduated from what university, we need to understand that the world was not turned upside down by mega-churches!

• Not by building funds or technology! Jesus never had a television ministry! Not a radio broadcast! Never even had a business card! Never preached with a microphone! But there was so much power down inside of Him that if He started preaching in a place, He would turn that place upside down!

• He never ran an advertisement in a newspaper, never put a flyer in a barber shop, but He would start healing the sick and raising the dead, and after a while five thousand people would be running after Him! He turned the world upside down with twelve men, one of them a curser, the other a doubter, and the other a betrayer!

• The Bible didn’t waste time telling us the sins of the other nine, but with twelve, broken, rejected, ostracized men, He turned the world upside down! The stones that the builders rejected became the chief corner stone!

When Jesus found them, they were pre-occupied with building mountains of nothingness! Going absolutely nowhere, filling their heads with the fodder, the routines and rituals of normal men! They did not recognize the tremendous deposit that God had buried into their eternal spirits, but at the voice of Him who called them, He ignited and exploded inside them and caused them to recognize that you are more than your circumstances!

• I hate to be radical tonight, but I came to tell you that you who have spent years trying to be ordinary, God is about to turn your whole life upside down! You are not going to be able to be ordinary and normal! Quit trying to fit in the clique, club, or ritual, or routine!

• God has an agenda for you! He spared you for that agenda! He saved you for that agenda! The reason you didn’t die in that car wreck, lose your mind, die from cancer, made it out of surgery, is because God has an agenda for you!

Destiny is inside of me! It’s drawing at me! Tugging me! Yanking me! Destiny, eternal purpose is inside of me! I am more than my conditions, I am greater than my circumstances!

• I am on my way somewhere! God is pulling me through test, trials, and trauma! Destiny is inside of me! You are a King’s Kid and you are headed somewhere!

It doesn’t take a lot of people to bring about a change! In fact, a lot of people just get in God’s way! I am not attacking large ministries, because anything that doesn’t grow after a while is not Godly, but I want you to understand that the numbers of men are not our objective!

• You need to understand that it doesn’t take God a whole lot of people to bring about a blessing! In fact, sometimes He will cut down a crowd till he can bring unity in the church! He will do a Gideon revival and reduce the troops until he can get people together that will touch and agree!

God always starts a revolution with one man! It doesn’t take twenty men, He can do it with one man! If He wants to start a new nation, He can get hold of an Abraham! If He wants to overthrow an Egyptian Pharoah with six hundred chosen chariots, He will take a Moses!

• If He wants to deliver out of Moab a woman who is bound and starved, a great for a King David, He will use a Ruth! If He wants to bring a lineage that has a Canaanite thread, He will get a prostitute named Rahab, pull her out of the red-light district and say, “I want you!”

Jesus boggles my mind. He comes down to the Sea, down by the Lake of Gennesaret, to do Kingdom business. He is going to preach and He comes to the Lake preparing to espouse the infallible Word of Truth. You know, that thing that He did that wrecked and turned upside down, cities?

• Preaching! The foolishness of preaching! He could just talk and bring about havoc! He was the Eternal Word!

He was coming down by the Lake Gennesaret, there are some men who are on the seashore, washing their nets. It was a normal sight to see. When I first read it, I paid it no attention at all, after all it is the Lake Gennesaret. Fishing was a primary industry in those days!

• It was natural that at a certain point, men would come in and wash their nets. There seems to be no oddity, initially, in the text. But, on closer examination and scrutiny, there is a disturbing detail!

• There were no fish in the boat, and it was morning! They had caught nothing, and they were washing their nets! If you are not an inquisitive person, you would just keep right on reading, but I am concerned, why would these men wash their nets that had never been used?

• I know it’s just a small point, but obscure points are filled with revelatory knowledge!

These men had given up! They had given up and quit trying! Jesus is recruiting potential disciples and He can only choose twelve men, and here He is talking to some losers! Some quitters!

• Now if it was me and I had to choose, I would not choose dead-beat quitters, but maybe that’s because I don’t know the deposit that the Master has ordained and placed in these fallen princes! He stops and watches as they washed their nets!

• They had decided that nothing else was going to happen. Their confidence and faith was violated and they believed that the way it is, is the way it’s going to be! So, they decided to wash their nets!

The washing of the nets means that you are giving up, and you are convinced that nothing is going to get any better! It is not an action, or a characteristic, it can happen to the wealthy as well as the impoverished, the intellectual as well as the illiterate, it is a giving up, quitting, tired feeling, it is the spirit of failure! The Spirit of Failure!

Key Themes of Breaking the Spirit of Failure

1. Godly Intervention in Human Effort

Explore how Jesus’ instruction to cast the nets one more time resulted in an overwhelming catch. Breaking the Spirit of Failure and allowing success to become your new norm often follows faith and obedience to God’s word.

2. Faith Overcomes Failure

Understand that failure is not the end but a stepping stone. Jesus’ command to “launch out into the deep” symbolizes taking bold steps in faith despite past disappointments.

3. From Toil to Triumph

Learn how the fishermen’s willingness to try again at Jesus’ word turned their toil into triumph. Thus emphasizing that overcoming failure through persistence and trust in God can lead to extraordinary outcomes.

4. God’s Sovereignty and Purpose

Delve into the idea that God has a purpose for each of us. He knew us before we were born and has sanctified and ordained us for specific missions. This was illustrated by His intimate knowledge and care for the fishermen.