Do you find yourself constantly feeling like a failure? Your friends have better jobs, houses or partners than you, while you languish at the bottom of the career path, housing ladder or dating pool. Maybe you’ve had a string of unfulfilling jobs, while you’ve watched your peers’ high-flying careers take off. You can’t seem to get anything right at work – and you feel you’ve failed as a parent too. You just can’t get a break. What’s worse is you feel you’ve never really succeeded. Sometimes you feel that you’ve just failed at life.
“It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.” (John 6:63)
We can all feel like a failure from time to time. But if you always feel like this, you may be stuck in a negative, repeating, self-fulfilling pattern called the ‘failure lifetrap’ or ‘failure schema’. The good news is that you can break out of it.
When you became a Christian did you think it would mean that you would just stop being a sinner and never sin again? How did you feel the first time you sinned after accepting Jesus? Did you feel like a failure?
Living for Christ is a challenge for most of us. Not one person can say that since they accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior that they have sinned no more. That’s because we are but human flesh and will continue to be until the glorious day that the Lord calls us home. This does not mean that we do not strive to live in the Spirit at all times, just that we aren’t perfect
God knows that we will still make mistakes, but we do not need to dwell on the times that we fail. We need to ask forgiveness and move on. We need to just keep doing the next right thing, take the next right step and keep on striving to live by the Spirit that lives within us.
“But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.” (Galatians 5:16)
When we dwell in God’s Word and nurture our relationship with Him it will be easier to say NO to our fleshly desires and say YES to the Spirit.
