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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Adrian Zahid

God Turns Failure Into Success

Dear Father, we ask that you forgive us of our sins, and that you open our eyes that we may see, and that you teach us today.

I would like to talk today about something we've all experienced, but we rarely like to discuss it.

Something that we've all experienced, but we rarely like to discuss it.

I would like to talk about failure today.

And it's interesting, as I was typing up my sermon, I experienced failure.

My Mac, which never quits, decided that day, after I'd finished my entire sermon, to crash, and I couldn't find it, so I had to type it up all over again.

Failure is something that we learn, that we are introduced to as kids.

My very first memory, actually my second memory, was of me on stage.

My mother had taught me this poem and we had rehearsed it over and over and over.

And so in front of 600 people, I walked out on stage and I began to recite this poem that I had memorized with my mother.

But halfway through the poem, I forgot the lines.

And my mother, who was standing in the wings, had to come out and prompt me on stage so that I could finish the poem.

But as a three-year-old, I was introduced to failure.

How would you like to be, every surgeon has their percentage, their percentage of success, and they try to have 100% success, but not always do you get 100% success.

How would you like to be that 1%, the other 1% of a surgeon's work?

Every 1 of us, we experience failure, and we feel that failure is a step or 2 backwards.

And today, I would like us to look at failure.

And I know that there's some of you that may be thinking, why is he talking about failure?

And you're thinking about maybe perhaps an Ellen White quote, which I'm going to mention right here, that talks about failure and why we shouldn't talk about it.

People quote this a lot of times when we bring up failure.

She says, Not once should we even think of failure.

We are to cooperate with 1 who knows no failure.

We should not talk of our own weaknesses and inability.

This is a manifest distrust of God, a denial of His word.

So people quote this, but context, as we know, is everything.

So let me read the paragraph before that and the paragraph after that and you'll see what she's talking about.

She says, when we give ourselves wholly to God in our work, follow His directions, He makes Himself responsible for its accomplishment.

He would not have us conjecture as to the success of our honest endeavors.

And then she mentions this thing that I just read.

And then the next paragraph is, when we murmur because of our burdens, refuse the responsibilities he calls upon us to bear, we are virtually saying that he is a hard master, that he requires what he has not given us power to do.

She's talking about this in the context of the person who had the 1 talent and he hit it in the ground and then he was blaming the master for being a hard master and giving him an impossible task to do.

And so in that case, she talks about when God gives you something to do, she says don't talk about failure because God can enable you to accomplish what He's wanting you to do.

And if you follow exactly the way He asks you to do it, He makes Himself responsible for your success.

We're going to look at failure today and we're going to see how God can turn failure into success.

And we're going to look at 3 individuals and 2 organizations and we're going to learn about how God can take failure and turn it into something greater than what anybody could have envisioned.

So today's sermon is more of a leadership slash practical seminar.

I saw a good friend of mine walk in, Paul Yu and his wife Janie.

They're going to be going to the mission field this Monday, I believe, and they're going to be serving there for 6 years.

Praise God for people who give the opportunity, give God their lives to serve in missions.

A lot of Advent Hope leaders have moved on from here and some of them are in the mission field today and they're serving God.

So if you are a student here and you're thinking about what you want to do with your life, consider missions.

So let's look at today at individual failures.

3 individuals who are famous failures and how God turned their lives around and turned them into successes.

Let's look at Exodus chapter 2 verse 11 through 15.

He was born, but then he was unable to live because of the rules that were enacted, the laws that were enacted in the land, and he had to be killed.

And so his mother made a, as you remember, she made this basket of bulrushes and she put him into the River Nile and prayed that God would take care of him and God certainly did.

God organized it in such a way that the girl who picked up The basket ended up being the Pharaoh's daughter and she raised him in the palace of the king.

After Moses had spent 12 years with his birth mother, she raised him in the palace of the king and when he was 40 years old, he wanted to save God's people.

He realized that God's people were in slavery and this is not where God wanted them to be anymore.

And so he wanted to get them out of slavery.

And so we read in verse 11, it says, 1 day when Moses was grown up, he went out to his people looking on their burdens.

And he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, 1 of his people.

And he decided to take action and he committed an extrajudicial killing.

He killed that man who was beating 1 of his fellow Hebrew slaves.

Moses had to run away from Egypt And he spent 40 years learning the lessons that Christ wanted to teach him in the school of failure.

He had to unlearn some of the lessons that he had learned in Egypt so that he could learn the lessons that God wanted to teach him.

God turned his life around in such a way that he was able to pen books like Genesis, Job, and the first 5 books of the Bible, laying the foundation for modern law as we know it today.

He not only was able to write those books, but he was also able to go back and take the children of Israel out of Egypt and bring them to the promised land, to the borders of the promised land.

During that time he also, there was a time when God wanted to wipe them out and start a new nation with Moses as its head, he interceded for the children of Israel.

He told God that he would be willing to give up heaven so that the children of Israel would make it into heaven.

And in doing so, he earned the right to...

He showed how much God had trained him, how much God had changed him, and he ended up earning the right to be resurrected and taken to heaven.

God took his life around, He made such a big mistake, a mistake that very few people can bounce back from.

But God took his life, He took him into the school of failure, He trained him, He taught him and he was able to turn Moses' life around.

Before we go there, I'm going to read a passage.

I don't know if this is Christian character.

It says, in the future life the mysteries that here have annoyed and disappointed us will be made plain.

We shall see that our seemingly unanswered prayers and disappointed hopes have been among our greatest blessings.

So many disappointments that Moses faced in his life, they ended up being his greatest blessings.

He's not a mummy in Egypt, but he's alive today looking down on us and he is waiting to be rejoined, that we will be rejoined with him in heaven as well.

Another story in the Bible, a famous failure.

Let's look at a life of a young man who seemingly had everything but just couldn't control himself.

He was the strongest man who ever lived, Samson.

1 of the best warriors for God, but unfortunately he couldn't control himself.

He really didn't realize this, but all his life he had been spiritually blind, and it took the losing of his physical eyes to be able to see spiritual things and be able to see his mission and realize what God had had in mind for him.

He wanted to experience the wild side and there were no girls in Israel that were good enough for him.

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God Turns Failure Into Success

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