When you refuse to fully own the failure, you only prolong the healing process. Deflecting responsibility causes more damage because the people closest to you pull themselves further and further away because of your arrogance in refusing to accept what has happened.
Own the failure. Own it.
There is no other first step back to righteousness. Owning the failure is the first and only way to freedom.
BRING EVERYTHING INTO THE LIGHT
Lies, deceit, and wrongdoings are what get a man into moral and spiritual failure, so a man must be committed to walking every next step after the failure in the light of Christ.
Surgery is always done in the light; it is never done in the dark.
Darkness is where infection dwells. What’s the first thing you do when you start to fix something, operate on something, or repair something? Get some light on it so you can see clearly. Surgeons, mechanics, electricians, computer repair gurus, home contractors, HVAC mechanics, and plumbers all have something in common: they shine a light right onto the problem when they are making assessments.
So why, then, does a man—when he’s failed his family, his friends, his boss, or just himself—want to conceal his failure?
Normally it’s a toxic concoction of embarrassment and fear mixed with a small dose of leftover pride.
“THE DEVIL FINALLY GOT ME”
“The devil finally got me.” That’s what my friend said to me many years ago on the worst day of his life. We were sitting in his kitchen talking about a plan to move him forward in life. I don’t know why, but I remember it as clear as if it happened just last week.
Late the night before, his wife had called me. When I answered the phone, she was sobbing hysterically. I felt fully convinced that someone, perhaps her husband, had been killed in a car wreck and I was her first call. It was that sort of loud, screaming panic on the phone.
She couldn’t express anything of substance but wailing.
She kept saying my name over and over again through weeping and tears. “Jason, oh no, Jason. Jason, help me. Oh no, oh no!”
It took me five minutes to get her to a place where she wasn’t completely hysterical with panic.
“What happened? Take a deep breath and just tell me what happened.”
Finally, in a weak voice, she said, “I noticed we were getting some strange bills, and I looked into it and something looked way out of place. I asked him about it, and he just started crying.”
She then shared, “He just told me that we are deep in debt. Way, way in debt, and I had no idea about it whatsoever. I’m afraid we are going to lose everything we’ve got.”
What her husband had done, was what happened to so many people. It’s an old play in a toxic playbook. Once the financial trouble started, he started to use one credit card to pay off another.
So there we were, standing in his kitchen, and he said, “The devil finally got me, Jason. That’s all I can say.”
My response totally shocked him.
I mean, honestly, it shocked him to the core.
I said to him, “No, my brother, the devil didn’t do this to you. No, in fact, God just did you the biggest favor you ever could have asked since all this started.”
He just looked at me, so I went on. “Yes, you let the devil influence you, and you got yourself into this awful mess with his demonic influence, but today God brought all the walls down. Today God showed His love for you by taking away every way you could continue the lies and deceit. God has stripped away every cover and brought the lies into the light where you’re forced to deal with them.”
He sat there in silence.
I continued to explain to my friend that God’s discipline is His love. I walked him through how God had intervened.
He’d been praying for God to get him out of his mess. And so God did just that, but God wasn’t going to get him out of it through the continued employment of lies.
Why? Because the love of God doesn’t live in the dark. God’s sovereign grace doesn’t operate in shadow games and deception.
No. God deals only in the light.
Let’s go back to the verse that started the idea that eventually became this book: “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy” (John 10:10).
God deals only in the light.
When you bring all the facts into the light, you leave no more room for your enemy to steal, kill, or destroy.
Why does a mechanic shine multiple sets of lights onto an engine when he’s working on it? Because the light gives him different angles to see things previously hidden.
Every great mechanic I know wants a few lights on a problem to show all the issues he’s dealing with at the moment.
My friend had accumulated thousands upon tens of thousands of dollars of debt, and he finally came to the place where lies weren’t able to cover him anymore. It was then that he and his wife developed a plan to recover from it together, which included bankruptcy.
Life was really tough for them financially during those next few, cold years, but they made it. They made it together.
Can you imagine what life would be like today had the lies and cover-ups continued? There’s no telling how much hidden debt he’d have acquired just trying to keep his wife from knowing about it.
HEADLAMPS
I duck hunt. And I love it. Duck hunting done well is a ton of work. There’s so much gear involved that it’s often pure labor, but when you love something, it doesn’t feel so much like work.
There is one piece of gear that makes life much easier for a duck hunter: the headlamp.
If you don’t have a headlamp, life can get painful—or painfully wet—for you on a duck hunt.
Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.
PSALM 119:105
Think about that. A lamp to my feet. A light to my path.
In other words, this kind of light is not a spotlight. Not a QBeam that casts a ray of sunshine in the darkness for three hundred yards, but just enough light to keep you steady and upright for the next few steps.
I think, at least for me, the hardest part of failure is forcing myself to bring my failure into the light.
Light is painful at first. It shows you all the flawed and broken areas. Those areas are ugly and embarrassing. You find yourself asking, “How in the world did I not see that? It seems so obvious.”
The reason: darkness hides things.
The enemy blinds you with darkness when you allow him—which is why light matters more than ever when you fail. Light is critical to your recovery. So bring all your sin into the light.
Once the bomb of failure has exploded, you’re already embarrassed and broken. Use that to your advantage and get everything in the light.
Once the bomb of failure has exploded, you’re already embarrassed and broken. Use that to your advantage and get everything in the light.
IN A DIFFERENT LIGHT
This idea of living in the light begs a different question: Why do so many men refuse to allow full, unfiltered light onto a sin situation?
In a word: arrogance.
People often refer to pride as the reason for a person’s downfall. I’ve discovered, however, that in many cases it wasn’t pride, but arrogance, that caused a person to fall into ruin.
Arrogance is the ability to deceive yourself into believing a lie. I’ve seen far too many men take on the attitude, “Yes, the enemy is real, but I’m not going to succumb to cashing in all I know to be true to chase a fantasy.”
Several years ago I studied the book of Proverbs. I wouldn’t say it was a deep study of this wisdom book; I simply began to work through the thirty-one chapters looking for the overtones of the individual chapters themselves.
I wasn’t prepared for one small takeaway. It was a discovery that simply reinforced what I had learned many times from studying scripture: arrogance is paramount in most every man’s life.
Almost every single chapter of Proverbs has at least one verse warning ab
out the dangers of arrogance.
In fact, entire chapters in the book of Proverbs are devoted to warning a man about how fast his ruin will come if he takes on an arrogant spirit.
Arrogance shows up when a man fails and then refuses to bring the failure into unfiltered light. Arrogance shows up when a man fails and refuses to accept full responsibility. Arrogance clouds perspective, and, my brother, perspective is what you need when you fail.
REALIZE THAT NO CHAMPION IS WITHOUT A COACH
Look, if you woke up tonight with a severe toothache shearing through your jawbone, you wouldn’t think twice about calling a dentist immediately the next morning.
Yet the vast majority of men who experience the pain and obstacles caused by failure won’t get professional counseling. Pride and arrogance are what got them into a predicament in the first place, and now pride and arrogance are keeping them from getting help.
Many men think that if they can just “do better” and clean up their lives, their bad situation will go away.
Brother, let me save you some unnecessary heartache: your situation won’t self-correct. Hard work may help solve the problem, but there is collateral damage when you fail, and you know it.
Kids are involved. Employers often get dragged into the drama. Wives feel the huge brunt of our sins, whatever they may be.
You need a Spirit-filled professional, who knows the Word of God well, to hitch up with you and walk you through the wilderness.
A wilderness is what you have coming for a year or more in front of you. When the bomb goes off and your failures come calling, you don’t just repent and then everything gets better.
Jesus forgives, but the scars take time to heal. And you’re going to need help to make that healing process progress to completion.
Jesus forgives, but the scars take time to heal.
AN AMERICAN ICON ON SEEKING WISDOM
A fascinating story that sheds light on an American business icon further drives home why this one man is such a legend, even though he passed on many years ago. After reading Jim Collins’s account of the story, How the Mighty Fall, I did some research, but it was hard to find more depth on the topic. Gleaning from Collins’s account of it, it is truly fascinating to me.
The story, says Collins, has its roots in the retail chain store brand Ames Department Stores.
In the 1970s and ‘80s, Ames had solid success. Some researchers even say their stock in many ways rivaled that of Walmart.
In the late 1980s, a handful of Brazilian investors purchased the Ames brand. Wanting to gain a more solid understanding of their market share, they sought out meetings with American business owners who were winning in the retail marketplace.
Now, you have to realize that we are so comfortable today with the free and easy access to information that we tend to forget just how difficult this next chapter of the story would be for those leading a business in that era.
They had no Google, no LinkedIn, no online way to find a corporate phone number with the scroll of a thumb across a smartphone screen, no easy way to reach straight through the red-tape tangle and talk with these business leaders one-on-one.
These were the days still deeply mired in landlines, phone books, and snail mail. You know—the days when you had to go to the library to find information, as I mentioned earlier.
So these Brazilian marketplace capitalists did the only thing a person could do if he wasn’t networked with someone on the inside of a corporation: they wrote letters!
They sent letters to many high-level CEOs who led companies in the American retail marketplace, asking if they themselves could come to America, meet with these leaders, and learn from their wisdom about running department stores.
Here’s a shocker: not a single CEO responded.
Except one.
Upon receiving word that this CEO would meet with them, the Brazilian businessmen boarded a plane. Upon touching down, they were stunned at the man standing before them in the small regional airport.
He had no driver, no red carpet, no corporate liaison team of attorneys to vet these Brazilian wisdom seekers. No, he just showed up at the airport in a pickup truck—accompanied by his dog, Ol’ Roy—to pick up his guests.
His name was Sam Walton.
Now just for a second, can’t you picture this in your mind? It wasn’t like Sam Walton was still a no-name. Walmart was well established and on the scene in the 1980s and was getting huge reviews in the media world of the corporate sector.
There stands Sam Walton.
I picture him wearing an old pair of khaki pants, a button-down shirt, and a humble grin as the Brazilians approach.
Having been to Arkansas many times to duck hunt, I can hear him now: “Hey, boys. Glad y’all could come see me. It’s nice to meet you.”
He takes them out of Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport, and there in the back of his truck sits his dog.
It’s like a scene out of an Andy Griffith Show episode.
As the story goes, Walton actually took the businessmen to his home and they sat in his kitchen.2
The strange and unexpected turn in the story is that the Brazilian investors couldn’t get over how many questions Walton actually had for them. He quizzed them about their data, thought through their insights on retail, and pushed to learn from them. He was more than intrigued by their venture. From the reports of how this trip played out, Walton wanted to gain their wisdom and insight from the research they’d executed in the due diligence phase of buying the Ames brand.
The Brazilians, however, were no doubt thinking, This is Sam Walton. He’s already crazy successful.
I get it. I would be stunned, too, at why this rising corporate legend would be so intrigued to know what I thought about the marketplace.
Sam Walton seemingly had a pure and sincere willingness to get counsel. He valued being a lifelong learner.
Walton wasn’t too smart to be educated, even in a field of knowledge where he was considered a top-level expert.
When it comes to success, whether that is spiritual success, financial success, marital success, or going from a 12 handicap to a 4, my experience is that the common denominator among successful people is that they value learning.
Think about it: you’ve just gone through an epic failure. Something went way, way wrong. It isn’t that you’re not intelligent. No, it’s not at all about “smarts.” It is about humility. It is about asking questions of people who love you enough to tell you the truth. It is about being willing to reassess your trajectory.
And it’s about desiring to do what wisdom demands, even when doing so is difficult or inconvenient.
What is the point of seeking counsel if you don’t follow through with what you are being told about recovery?
What is the point of seeking counsel if you don’t follow through with what you are being told about recovery?
BE WILLING TO SEPARATE YOURSELF
I’ll never forget the conversation. It wasn’t rocket science; in fact, what my friend Greg was telling me about life after giving up on dealing drugs sounded like commonsense stuff.
Greg grew up in a world far different from the home life I’d experienced. His was a Jekyll-and-Hyde type of world. His parents were divorced, so his family life had all sorts of dynamics with new siblings and new environments where instability was the norm. Greg split time between families and could pretty much do what he wanted when he wanted. Money was scarce, so Greg ended up selling drugs and sold them all the way into his senior year in high school.
One day during our sophomore year in college, we were sitting on the tennis court talking, and somehow we got on the topic of our formative years in high school.
Greg had come to Christ during his senior year and had a testimony that was having an impact on people all throughout his community. Eventually our conversation turned to our career paths. We were both working simple retail jobs at the time.
Greg said, “You know, Cruise, I’m making minimum wage—$3
.25 an hour in an honest job at the age of twenty. I’m making about $28 a day now, and I was making about $100 in five minutes when I was fifteen, selling drugs. I’d make a thousand dollars a week and work just a few hours at the most.”
We laughed at the irony. He had no desire to go back there, but the contrast was mind-bending for him.
It was then that I asked him, “Greg, what did it take for you to finally get off of drugs and out of that world?”
He said, “You know, Jason, I know this sounds like something you’d hear in a high school public service announcement, but honestly nothing changed with me and drugs until I stopped running with the people who did drugs. Nothing changed until I changed those closest to me.”
FRIENDS VS. BROTHERS
Being in ministry for more than twenty years has shown me a lot about people. For whatever reason, compared to most ministers I know, I’ve had more than the average minister’s experience in dealing with people who are locked up in addiction.
The comical absurdity with addicts is that they honestly do fear leaving the lifestyle for many reasons, and one of those is that they think they’ll lose their friends. They really believe their friends love them deeply, and they don’t want to lose that network.
I’ve driven many people to inpatient rehabilitation facilities for a three-week stay to get clean, and do you know that 100 percent of the time, the friends of an addict have never even bothered to call and check on how the person was doing?
It’s funny to see the look on the face of an addict when I ask, “Hey, have your friends given you any support or checked in on you to encourage you through the process?”
There’s always a strange look of bewilderment as they say, “You know, not one. No one called or checked up on me.”
A Wanted Man Page 7