If we are able to be humble and evaluate ourselves honestly when we fail, if we will listen to others when they come with corrections and critiques, and if we will be willing to admit we were wrong, then we put ourselves in a position where we can grow from failure.

I was listening to a podcast with a successful entrepreneur who gave what I thought was interesting advice. He told young entrepreneurs that they needed to get started early because they would likely fail several times and it was best to get those failures out of the way. He implied that there would likely be important lessons in those failures, and treated them almost as if they were a necessary part of ultimate success. I was struck by the simple wisdom of this advice. Although he was talking narrowly to the field of entrepreneurs, I immediately realized there was some truth here that is broadly applicable.

You are going to fail at some point in your life. You will probably fail at many things at many points in your life. The question is not whether you will fail, but what you fail at and how you will handle your failure. Believe it or not, failure can be valuable if we think about it and respond to it rightly. After all, if you’re going to fail, you might as well get something out of it.

Different Kinds of Failure

One of the difficulties of talking about the value of failure is that not all failures are the same. Some people try to build a new company and they fail. Others set out to serve God, and they fail. Still others seek to kill some deadly sin habit in their life, and they fail. Obviously, these failures are not all the same.

Some failures are the result of sin, and we must repent and forsake that sin. Some failures are the result of mistakes and flaws in our plans or in our character. In such situations, we don’t necessarily have sin to confess, but we might have an area where we need to grow. Still other failures are the result of God sovereignly deciding that something we set out to do would fail. Perhaps we had been proudly self-dependent, and God knew that we needed a reality check. It might be that He had an important task for us and to get us ready or put us in the right place, we needed to fail at something.

The Bible is filled with different kinds of failures. David no doubt felt like a political failure, running for his life from Saul. Eventually David got so low that he was befriending the Philistines and lying to them about who he was attacking. Elijah felt like a spiritual failure after he failed to lead the nation in a revival away from Baal and back to Yahweh. Peter felt like a personal failure after denying the Lord three times. But God used all of these men. He used them mightily in spite of their failures and at times because of their failures and the way they responded to them. So how should we respond to failure?

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