In 10 years of ministry, I have had lots of practice at failing, and it has gotten easier. I’ve also read about many successful people who first endured significant failure: Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Walt Disney.
To that list we could add the Apostle Paul: leader in the early church, eloquent writer of letters that became essential works of the new Testament, preacher of the gospel who gave us “saved by grace through faith” and “the greatest of these is love” and “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.”
Paul’s story, too, includes plenty of failure: a reminder that God, more often than not, chooses the unlikely.
This message is an excerpt from the Bible study, “Paul and the Power of Failure,” by Meghan Johnstone Aelabouni in the November 2016 issue of Gather magazine. Today we remember Isaac Watts, hymnwriter, who died in 1748.
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