Failure and Success – A book review!

This is a book review that I shared in my local church’s Lent Study March 2023. Theme Failure and Success based on a book by Emma Ineson (SPCK) and applies to a bible reading from Matthew 13: 1- 13

Chapters 1 – 2 Reasons to write about failure – Seeds upon a path

Emma the author wrote the book on Failure, interestingly after her book on Ambition in 2019. What comes first: success or failure and what is the relationship between them? Out of the trauma and failures of the COVID pandemic Emma has highlighted the importance of failures that are very much instrumental in any measure of success gained and maintained.

Thanks freebibleimages.org

Emma went on to outline what failure was and its impact upon each one of us personally and collectively and how unfulfilled plans, fears and anxieties play a big part in it. As Christians we bring our fears and failures to the Lord who can transform them through Jesus which is beautiful and edifying. As Christians we should not seek the god of success but rather the establishing of God’s kingdom personally and within church and community.

Question: Think about the ambitions, fears and failures of seeds scattered upon a pathway?

Chapter 3 – Sin, guilt and human nature – Seeds in shallow ground

Emma refers to how human nature is affected by sin and guilt. If we realise that we are inherently sinful before a Holy God then there is only one way up and that requires confession and repentance, trusting that God’s grace mercy and forgiveness will be granted to us through the life and ministry of Christ.

Thanks freebibleimages.org

It is important to truly understand the depravity of our sin and not to trivialise it to something extra that we eat or drink! Sin in essence, represents a broken relationship between a Holy God and humanity that falls short of what a Holy God wants and requires from us. We looked at the ‘sins of commission and omission’ and how sin might be seen individually and collectively and how the ‘sins of the fathers’ affects modern life.

It was somewhat comforting to realise that God blots out sins and then forgets them (Isaiah 43: 25) whilst asking us to sin no more. We will never be perfect this side of heaven but we can practice a life of sanctification that enables us in some measure to be near the mark God wants us to be in a sinful world.

Question: Think about how confession and repentance enables us to be forgiven of our sins?

Chapter 4 – The failing Church – Seeds amongst thorns

Emma set out how the church fails successfully to ‘be and deliver’. It is a human institution and any success it achieves is only based on God’s grace and mercy which holds back God’s judgement and rejection. Throughout church history the church has always failed to fully deliver but within its failure it offers to the world a radical and different approach to human wellbeing, identity, wholeness and inner peace and purpose.

 Thanks freebibleimages.org

The church is a place of sinners full of failures who are seeking reconciliation to God, each other and within community which is radically empowered by God’s spirit and full of love, grace and humility. The church serves and works within humanity and against a back drop of opposing thorns acting like spiritual ‘powers and principalities’.

God seeks to create goodness and renewal for all his people through the church but opposing powers seek to steal, kill and destroy. The bible is full of examples of individuals and communities that fail successfully and are bad examples rather than good ones.

The history of the church is full of self-opinionated and power seeking individuals and various church groupings that have engaged in strife, jealously, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions and division. The Church represents different things and expressions yet its purpose is to serve everyone both old and young, traditional and modern. A church as a ‘noun’ is a thing that may be seen as restrictive but as an ‘adjective,’ a describing word, it represents something that is forever evolving and changing.

Question: Think about your ambitions and expectations of the Church are they being fulfilled or not? Who is failing? God or those who live and serve in it?

Chapter 5 – The greatest failure of all – Seeds that produces a crop

Jesus spent a great deal of time with failures and it was the main reason, alongside his claim to be able to forgive sins that got him into trouble. Jesus ate with tax-collectors and prostitutes compared to the simply life of John the Baptist. Jesus trained his disciples to handle failure and then bring it into a success.

When failure arrives at our door we have an opportunity to apply the good news of Jesus to it. It is important to name our failures and then bring God’s grace to them just like the women at the well. ‘You have had many husbands! Go and sin no more’.

Many outside and even within the church see the life and ministry of Jesus as a total failure. Yet in these confusing days that we live in Jesus represents a radical lifestyle that offers a measure of success even in the midst of all the doom and gloom around us.