Successful Failure – What is Success according to God –

A Successful Failure –

Pastor Calvin Cook –

August 7, 2025

Scripture – O Lord, you have deceived me, and I was deceived; you are stronger than I, and you have prevailed. I have become a laughingstock all the day; everyone mocks me. 8For whenever I speak, I cry out, I shout, “Violence and destruction!” For the word of the Lord has become for me a reproach and derision all day long. 9If I say, “I will not mention Him, or speak any more in His name,” there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot. Jeremiah 20:7-9

I love how God speaks into our hearts when we are not sure what we need to hear or sometimes what burden is beating us down. I am trying to be within the good and perfect will of God. At times I am trying to consider the ways of the Lord that can be shared in a popular attractive way. However, the message that we are called to share is in great conflict with the world and what and who we have been called to be.

From the scripture for today: The Prophet Jeremiah shares this great lament that after being freed from the stockade in Jeremiah 20 for pronouncing the word and way of God along with the coming doom – ordered to keep quiet – he could not!

Maybe that is the problem that leads to the unsettled feeling many times within the depths of our soul, we allow it to remain there without doing what we are led by the Spirit to do – to share it – regardless of the cost.

Brennan Manning in the Ragamuffin Gospel calls this “successful failure”. When we are called to be followers of Jesus in every aspect of our life, the view of that to the rest of the world is failure. Because we have been so conditioned to be successful according to the world’s standards and not to the will of God being lived out in our life. Jeremiah stood alone in his proclamation of God’s word, making him very unpopular, even viewed as a crazy person. Yet Jeremiah comes to the resolution in his life, confessing that the fire he was holding in could no longer be contained. But the question for today is this: Are we willing to do the same thing?

Going back to the song “Make Room” – Here is where we have to be willing to lay it down. Whatever is keeping us subdued and quiet is where we feel the gnawing in our soul of this indwelling of the Holy Spirit that is desiring to flow out of us into a world that is desperately in need of hearing a message of a God who has created us for so much more.

We are at a pivotal point in the spread of Christianity – we have every excuse and reason why we can’t and then we wonder why we live in such chaos and ruble of defeat. When we are called to so much more and to be so much more for and in the name of Jesus.

I pray that in the burning depths of my soul and your soul begins to bear witness to the success God is giving and developing in all of us. In that way may we by the worlds standards be viewed as a successful failure.