Fake News Week 2: I am a Failure
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Fake News Week 2: I am a Failure
September 1st, 2024
Why do we believe certain lies about ourselves?
Lies come from loud “positional” voices. We hear these lies in our own voice even if their genesis was someone else’s voice.
Lies are proactive. You don’t have to go looking for lies.
Lies feel real. Effective lies contain just enough “truth” elements that they stick.
The key to life is learning to differentiate truth from lies and then acting on the truth that kills the lies. Truth is a Lie Swatter.
The Truth about Lies and Truth
The origin of lies is Satan.
The power of lie is in what we do with it.
The purpose of a lie is control and destruction.
The purpose of Truth is freedom and life.
The power of truth is inherent in the reality of Jesus.
Truth frees me as I follow Jesus.
All of Satan’s lies are rooted in 2 core lies…
God is not enough. My problem is due to God’s lack. If God was powerful enough, caring enough, aware enough, I wouldn’t be in this position. I can’t trust Him.
I am not enough. My problem is due to my lack. I can’t measure up to any standard much less God’s standard. I can’t trust me.
“If people knew the ‘real me’, the scared me and scarred me, they would reject me”.
Worth is a simple thing to explain and a yet difficult emotion to resolve. Simply put, the worth/value of something is determined what someone is willing to pay for it.
When I am busy trying to prove my worth (to myself and others) I can’t live in my worth.
What’s the difference between failing and failure?
Failing is a doing issue. Failure is a being issue.
Never let a miss to define the mass.
Satan wants to convert failing from an it to an I.
A healthy perspective of failing is that failing isn’t final, it’s a process.
Failing is never failure when you learn something.
Satan’s 3 key objectives, to kill, steal and destroy needs our cooperation – don’t cooperate by quitting.
You are a failure is a lie targeting your identity, your potential and your future.
Webster’s 2nd definition of to fail is to fall short.
Webster’s 1st definition of to fail is to lose strength.
Satan wants you to lose strength when you fall short to keep you from getting up and moving forward.
3 Failing Environments that set us up for the “failure” lie.
1. Missed Expectations
2. Misaligned Objectives
God would rather us suffer “failing” at a misaligned objective to avoid the greater pain of achieving a misaligned objective.
3. Harmful Comparison
Galatians 6:4-5 AMP 4 But each one must carefully scrutinize his own work [examining his actions, attitudes, and behavior], and then he can have the personal satisfaction and inner joy of doing something commendable without comparing himself to another. 5 For every person will have to bear [with patience] his own burden [of faults and shortcomings for which he alone is responsible].
Two Postures to Combat Comparison
1. Contentment in the strength of Christ.
Philippians 4:10-13 (NIV) 10 I rejoiced greatly in the Lord that at last you renewed your concern for me. Indeed, you were concerned, but you had no opportunity to show it. 11 I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. 12 I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. 13 I can do all this through him who gives me strength.
Contentment isn’t a lack of drive, it is a lack of drama! I ditch the drama when I operate in the strength of the Lord where I am.
2 Chronicles 31: 20-21 “20 This is what Hezekiah did throughout Judah, doing what was good and right and faithful before the Lord his God. 21 In everything that he undertook in the service of God’s temple and in obedience to the law and the commands, he sought his God and worked wholeheartedly. And so he prospered.
2. Humility with the sacrifice of Christ.
Philippians 2:3-8 3 Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, 4 not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. 5 In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: 6 Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; 7 rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. 8 And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross!
Lie Swatters
1. Your weakness don’t make you a failure, they make you dependent. You are strong in Christ!
2 Corinthians 12:7-10 Therefore, in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. 8 Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. 9 But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. 10 That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
2. God isn’t done with you – you are in process and it’s a good process.
Philippians 1:6 6 being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
3. God has good plans for you.
Jeremiah 29:10-12 (NIV) 10 This is what the Lord says: “When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place. 11 For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. 12 Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you.
Deuteronomy 28:12-14 (NIV) 12 The Lord will open the heavens, the storehouse of his bounty, to send rain on your land in season and to bless all the work of your hands. You will lend to many nations but will borrow from none. 13 The Lord will make you the head, not the tail. If you pay attention to the commands of the Lord your God that I give you this day and carefully follow them, you will always be at the top, never at the bottom. 14 Do not turn aside from any of the commands I give you today, to the right or to the left, following other gods and serving them.
A mark of a Christian isn’t our perfection but God’s perfection, not our strength but His.
I failed is past tense. Don’t live there. Your failings frame your story but they aren’t your story.
I am failing is present tense. Don’t buy the lie that this is the end of the story. Failing is the process of success keep moving.
I am a Failure is NON-SENSE – it is a lie! God has already decided that!