You are either joined to the Saviour, who came to save people out of their failures; or you're joined to the devil, who accuses people of their failures. There's no middle ground anywhere, and I want to always be connected to Jesus, giving hope that in the midst of failure, there's always grace, there's always a hope, there's always a future. You can always get up and get going again. Isn't that true? The church is to be a community of grace. The Bible says: the law came by Moses; in other words, there's laws: do this, or you didn't do it, ooh! See, judgement came by the law; but it says: grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. So it doesn't mean that we're to overlook failures and mistakes; truth means we face them, but grace means there's an empowerment to get up out of it again. You've got to hold the two together. You and I can be a great ministry of blessing, to help people out of their failures; or we can actually hold them in them, and as a church community we have to, if we're going to grow in our influence in the community, we have to step up in being able to handle our own personal failures, and the failures of others around us, and the failures of people in the community.
Most times, the churches can do nothing else except criticise and complain what's going wrong. There is no solution in that. We need to actually understand that the answer is, not to overlook it, but to come with a hope, and with a message, and with faith, and will the possibility that something better could happen - people of vision and faith. So we have to learn to deal with failure. How are we going to deal with failure? So let's have a look at one classic one. I love this glorious one of David's. Now how many know King David was a man after the heart of God? You know David was a man after the heart of God, a great man; so Jesus was called the Son of David. So Jesus didn't mind being connected to David, the one who committed murder and adultery and blah blah blah, because David was a man who sought the heart of God, and got a vision for what he could become; but David made heaps of mistakes on the way, many mistakes, and the mistakes weren't little ones. When he made a mistake, thousands of people died. How do you live with that at night time? That's a big mistake.
When he counted all the numbers of Israel, and broke the law in doing so, then there was judgement came on Israel, and there were thousands died because he counted the soldiers. No wonder he had a heart that was very repentant, very soft, very open to the Lord. In 1 Chronicles 13, the Bible tells us, this a glorious, spectacular failure. This is where he really wanted to do something public, and something great, and something - you know, be really just a significant key note of his being made the king; because under Saul's reign, the ark of God, there was no presence of God, there was no ark of God. So what happened was, under Saul's reign, there was no move of God; so his desire was to bring back the ark of God. So he got the whole country together, he got the trumpeters, he got the musicians, he got everything all out, and they put the cart on an ox. They put the ark on a cart drawn by oxen, and they went down the road and everyone was out - talk about public. This failure was not a hidden failure, and they're going there down the road, the trumpets are playing and everything. David's dancing and shouting, and this is all a new thing.
In the middle of it, the oxen stumbled, someone touches it, and the guy is smitten dead, just like that. I don't know, I'd love to see what happened, whether a bolt of lightning came down and fried him on the spot! Whoa! Everyone, look at that thing. Now who's going to get the blame for messing this up? David! Now how do you overcome that? It says: David was very angry. He's looked forward to this. He's organised the whole nation to do this public thing, and bringing the ark back, and then God smites the man down right in the middle of it, and ruins the whole parade. Everyone goes skulking back to their home, and instead of it being a great thing, the ark didn't even quite make it to Jerusalem. It's now stuck in someone's house - a total, major, public spectacle failure. So what did David do? Well, you couldn't hide it, because it was all public, but he wasn't going to be deterred by it. What he did was he went and he sought the Lord, and it tells us in 1 Chronicles 15, that God showed him where he went wrong, and he re-went and reset the whole thing up again.