WHAT? Seems to me. And big failure is better than small failure. Whyzat? Because until you are freshly stripped of your own worthiness, you will not freshly treasure Jesus and His imputed worthiness. Worthiness-idolatry stands in the way of treasuring Jesus and His imputed worthiness.
So, Dave. Are you saying I should TRY and fail? No need for that. Just pay closer attention to your thoughts, feelings and reactions, especially when you’re all alone, like driving or walking somewhere by yourself, and if you have a wide, deep foundation of grace teaching, and the Spirit is opening your eyes to know better your real flesh, I predict you’ll see your failure in every direction, over and over and over. You will become overWHELMED with your failure. But. You will be highly motivated to run to Jesus for your worthiness, and leave your own pathetic worthiness behind. So WHAT if I’m a big failure? My success/failure is meaningless, says Ecclesiastes.
And being hyper-conscientious — obsessive about failure-avoidance, is the trap of the devil, to get you so self-absorbed that you are a poor enjoyer of others — seed sown on thorny soil, unable to reproduce thirty, or a hundred fold, or even double. Fruitless. No contagious Jesus within.
We don’t learn to be obsessively-failure-avoidant from the Bible, but from the world around us, outside the Church, and sadly, inside too. We Christians have bought into the worldly value of one’s personal performance determining our worth, contrary to Scripture which says personal performance is like filthy rags, and only the imputed performance of Jesus means ANYthing. Jesus warned against the leaven of the Pharisees — imagining we are following God, but actually following OURSELVES, awhoring after performance/worthiness of our own, and living in denial of our failure to obey, to find contentment in Jesus and His imputed performance/worthiness, in denial of our dissatisfaction with Jesus and His imputed worthiness.
— Dave McCarty, GospelFriendships, championing Gospel-awareness, self-awareness, and sovereignty-awareness, so we Christians might be compelling to the seculars around us
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