025 Core Beliefs: Failure

Most guys don’t fail because they lack effort… they fail because they believe the wrong things about failure. What you believe about failure will determine whether it breaks you or builds you. Failure isn’t the enemy—misunderstanding it is. Failure cases some men to quit too early. While failure causes others to hide in shame. But what I want to show you today is that the difference between two men who fail isn’t the talent they have; it’s the belief they choose.

Transcript

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Most guys don't fail because they lack effort. Instead, they fail because of what they believe about failure. Most guys really believe the wrong things about failure. And the truth is what you believe about failure will determine whether it breaks you or whether it builds you. Failure is not the enemy, but misunderstanding it can cause you a lot of trouble. Let's take a little time. Let's talk about that. Welcome to the Iron Pursuit Podcast, where men are forged by the truth of God's word. As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. This podcast is a call to biblical manhood. Here, we challenge men to rise above comfort, reject passivity, and live under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Each episode is designed to strengthen your faith, sharpen your character, and equip you to lead with integrity, wealth, and grace. So whether you're a husband, a father, a brother, or a friend, this is your invitation to pursue the kind of manhood that honors God and changes generations. This is the Iron Pursuit. Thank you guys for coming back and being with us again. We are on our 24th episode, guys. I think I keep saying that, I think, and every time, whenever I come back on here, I'm thinking, well, is it 23 or 24? Now is it 24 or 25? I'm pretty sure it's 24. And we are still in our series of core beliefs. And today we're going to talk about the core belief of failure. Believe it or not, there are some things that you believe about failure that are literally detrimental to you as a man, as a worker, as an employee, as an employer, as a husband, as a father, as a friend. The things that you believe about failure can break you or build you. You see, failure is not your enemy. If you feel like you have failed over a period of time, over your life, that's not your enemy. But misunderstanding it is, just like I said in the intro here, because what I want you to understand is that failure, um, it it causes some men to quit way too early, just because they've messed up on some things. And then whenever for some men, it it causes them to hide in shame. It makes them feel like they're not good enough. But today, what I want to show you is the difference between two men. Both of the men fail, and the reason they fail has nothing to do with talent that they have. Has has nothing to do with that. These men, the the difference that I want to share with you today uh is that it's not their talent. It has everything to do with instead, it has to do with their belief. The belief that they choose. And what you choose to believe about failure is going to make you or break you. And again, I'm going to go through uh three points here, and I'm going to try to get it, get it down. I know I'm I'm not a I'm not a Baptist preacher, y'all. I mean, I I guess I'm I may be. I'm kind of I might I might have a little Baptist in me. Um, but you know how those Baptist preachers are always uh preaching on three points, you know, and it seems like when I come onto the podcast, I give you three points, and I I try to. Sometimes I give you a little more than that, but I do want to touch on three things today, and these are the the core beliefs of failure, at least the way that I've kind of constructed it for us today. I want to be uh brief but not too brief. I want to be concise, but I also want to explain this in a way that helps you understand um what failure actually is and the way that you should believe about failure. So, number one, let's jump into this. Failure is not your identity, it is your instructor. And if you will start looking at failure as your instructor instead of your identity, it will change the way you operate. Just take my word for it. Listen to this. A lot of men have made this mistake. Have you ever been the guy who said, uh, well, I failed, therefore I am a failure? Well, that's a lie from the enemy. I know that I have done that. I have said that about myself, that um, that I'm a failure just because I have failed or I have fallen or I've made some mistake. Satan wants you to believe that you are a failure, so you'll continue to think as a failure. You see, uh what we have is we have this, uh, there is this progression, I guess if I could, if I could try to define it this way, there's a progression of the way things happen in your life. You have beliefs and you have thoughts and you have feelings and you have actions. You see, whenever you, whenever you believe as a failure, you begin to think as a failure, okay? So if you have this belief that uh somebody has has called you a failure or whatever, you you take that on as identity. You believe, you start believing as a failure. You will, I believe that I'm a failure. I believe that I'm a failure. And that's put on repeat in your mind. It's like a broken record going over and over and over uh in your mind. So whenever you believe as a failure, you begin to think as a failure. And whenever you think as a failure, you feel like a failure. And when you feel like a failure, you start acting like a failure. And I want to get that out of your mindset tonight. I want to take that away from you today. I want that to go away from you tomorrow. I don't want you to be dealing with that for the rest of your life. Failure is an event, it is not a name. Okay? Understand that. Failure happens, it happens to all of us, but it is not your name. I want you to take this into consideration. Proverbs 24, 16. Proverbs 24, 16. The wise man Solomon says, For the righteous falls seven times and rises again, but the wicked stumble in times of calamity. Notice what he says. The righteous, and I'm just gonna say, the righteous man falls seven times, but he does not stay that in that fallen state. The scripture says he rises again. Righteous men may fall, but they don't stay down. I want you to think about this as we try to apply this to our life. I want you to try to practice this, if you will. Separate who you are from what happened. Separate who you are from what happened. Whenever I say what happened, and I'm talking about failure, if you are anything like me, um you automatically go back to something that happened in your life where you thought you were a failure, or you were made to believe that you were a failure. For some of us, this causes us to think about our childhood, um, some trauma that we may have experienced, or maybe some abuse that we had from our dad, from our mom, whatever, whatever it may have been. I know for me, for me, uh, I was always worried and afraid uh for of my dad coming home because I cannot remember a day in my childhood. I cannot remember a day when my dad came home and he was excited to come home. I can't remember when I remember, I I can't remember uh ever. I don't I don't remember the time, and Lord help me if if I'm wrong about this, but I don't remember a time when my dad came home and he was just excited to be home with me and my brother and my mom. I I mean, maybe things changed with him and my mom when he got behind closed doors or whatever. But me and my brother, my brother Jackie, we feared our dad coming home. We worried uh about it, about him coming home. Now, uh, don't get me wrong, my dad was a very good man. He did all the dad things, right? He provided, he took care of us, um, he took us fishing, he took us hunting, he did all those other things. But he, my dad was not a good instructor. He didn't have patience. Um, he didn't teach us before he corrected us. All right. And I and I want you to understand that. And if you're one of these dads uh that's like that, you're falling into that the habit of not being able to teach before you correct, then you need you need to back up uh away from that because you're you're causing your child to feel like he's a failure or that she's a failure. For example, uh as a five or six-year-old boy, um, I remember this one specific time where I forgot to feed the dog. And when my dad came home from work that night, he beat me with a belt until I successfully filled the dog's bowl with food. Now, I don't know about you, but uh maybe you can uh imagine how difficult it must be to fill the dog bowl up with food while your dad is whipping you with a leather belt. You know, you you gotta think that that's pretty tough, right? But anyway, that event that event in my life caused me to feel like a failure, but that day, um, but that day the day came, I should say, when I was able to separate myself from it. And the the only way I can tell you that I ever separated myself from that day where I was made to feel like a failure because I I forgot to feed the dog. Come on, man. I'm I was five or six years old, man. And and as a five or six year old, you can't you can't punish a child for making a mistake. Now, if it was just blatant, like you knew that I did the wrong thing, or if you know your child does the wrong thing, yeah, that's that's something completely different. But I mean, here I am, this young boy, and I I just forgot to feed the dog. I I came to a place in my life, and it was years later. I'm talking about on on up into my uh late teenage, early adult years, where I finally was able to separate myself from what happened, and I I did it because I was able to forgive my dad. And so that that was how how it happened. But I had to come to a place to where I understood that I was not a failure simply because I forgot to feed the dog. I was not a failure simply because my dad had a bad day at work and he decided to take it out on me. You see, I was not a failure because one because of one bad day in my life. And guess what? Neither are you. You're not a failure just because of one bad day. You see, you need to identify that thing, uh, that that thing that happened in your life that made you feel like you were a failure, and you need to separate yourself from it because you are not wrapped up in what you did or what someone did to you. Your identity is not wrapped up in that. And you need to be able to separate yourself from it, okay? So not only do you need to separate yourself from what happened, separate your identity from your from that failure, but you need to treat that failure like feedback and not like a label. This was huge for me whenever I finally came to a place of understanding the issue. See, it doesn't matter what we do, if we do it enough, we are going to make uh mistakes. I remember standing uh in a in a sporting goods store and I was shopping for crankbaits to bass fish with because uh that that particular year I had just gotten into crankbait fishing up. My dad had always shown me uh how to fish with a crankbait, but I had a buddy that really, really got into it and he and he showed me and I got into it. And that year I lost a lot of crankbaits because if you know about crankbaits, they've got treble hooks on them, they'll get hung on anything. Um, when you throw them, you can bounce them off rocks and things, and then you end up breaking the bill on them and they don't work right anymore. Anyway, I was I was shopping in a sporting goods store and I was looking for crankbaits, and um, because my tackle box was basically empty of crankbaits, but I was talking to a gentleman there, he was an older man, and I was telling him about how many baits I had lost, and he said, you know what, son, if you aren't losing baits now and then, you probably aren't doing very well at fishing. And I never forgot what he said when he told me that, because it it was a simple truth uh that he was just reaffirming that, you know, if you do something long enough, son, you're you're going to mess up. You you are going to make mistakes. If you are doing anything at all, if you're working at something, you're you're going to mess it up. If you're painting a wall, eventually there's if you do enough of it, you're going to have a run. You're going to have a streak, you're going to have a scratch, you're going to have a mess up. It makes no difference what it is. This concept goes back to the core of the core value of identity, knowing who you are in Christ. And whenever you know who you are, you're more apt to understand that failure doesn't define you. Instead, you see failure as what? What did I say a while ago? You see it as feedback and not as a label. Feedback, whenever you, whenever you get feedback, it's feedback that asks, well, why did that happen? Why did that happen? I mean, because you understand who you are and you're not riding the fence about your identity. I mean, you are solid in your identity. You know who Christ has made you to be, uh, but but you you've messed up, you made a mistake, uh, and here you are in this position, not really sure of which way you are to go uh right now. But instead of just bailing out and saying, okay, this is who I am. I am a failure. No, no, no. We know who we are in Christ, we know our identity. We're gonna back up and say, okay, well, why did that happen? And how can I stay away from that next time? How can I grow stronger in this area? And this goes for every failure, guys. Okay, this goes for what happens between you and your wife, what happens with you and your children, what happens with you and your boss or your coworker, what happens between you and the porn that you're watching, what happens with you and the curse words you're saying, what's happening with you and the pills you're taking that that aren't prescriptions, or you're doing too much of it, or the alcohol, or the dope you're smoking, or whatever. However, it is, whatever it is that the devil is using to make you feel like a failure, you can come back to that when you know your identity and you can say, why did that happen? How can I stay away from that next time, and how can I grow stronger? You see, when you know your identity in Christ, you're more likely to face challenges with the mindset of asking God, Lord, what are you trying to teach me through this trial? And whenever you back up and you ask that question and you give God the opportunity to answer you, you are more likely to find a way to use this as growth instead of sinking you further and further into a pit of shame and guilt. You see, a man who ties his identity to failure will stay stuck. But whenever you're a man who learns from your failure, you're gonna grow stronger. So don't let your identity be tied to the mess-ups and the mishaps, okay? Learn from your failure and grow stronger. Let's move on to number two. Failure is often God's tool, not his punishment. You need to understand this. This is part of the core belief of failure. You need to know that failure is often God's tool. It's not his punishment. We've we've kind of fallen into that category of thinking that it's punishment way too many times because we we tend to think things like, well, if I've failed, God must be against me, God must be mad at me, God must be disappointed in me, and blah, blah, blah, blah. But scripture does not show this. Scripture actually teaches us the opposite. Let me just give you uh just two big examples, okay? Let's think about David, King David, back in the Old Testament. I always loved to use David because he is a good example of strong biblical manhood. David fell very hard and he, you know, he fell into adultery. Not only was it adultery, but he ends up with murder and uh a whole bunch of other stuff, lying and different things like that. David fell hard, very hard, but yet God still said that he was a man after his own heart. You see, even though he had failure in his life, God still loved him and cared for him. So God took a man who he knew was going to fail, and he used him to be the father or one of the fathers of a very great nation, and ultimately one of the fathers of, you know, one of the air uh people, the forefathers of Jesus Christ. Now, take the example of Peter and how Peter denied Jesus. He he denies him, but we know the end of the story. He's restored and he's given the authority and the power and the ability to lead, and he does it quite well. You see, failure didn't disqualify either of these men, but instead it ref it refined them, it made them stronger, it made them better. So I want you to think about this and think about the principle here is that God doesn't waste failure. He uses it. God uses failure to expose pride inside of every one of us. Now, let's just stop here. Let's just let's dig into this a little bit more. How that God is not gonna waste failure in your life. There's gonna be failure. There are going to be things in your life where you are going to realize, hey, I messed that up. And all of a sudden, it's gonna expose some pride in you. I want you to think about this example of Peter one more time. Remember how Peter was so sure of himself when he said, Lord, even if everyone else deserts you, if everyone else leaves you, if everyone else turns their back on you, I never will. He was confident in himself. He was pretty sure within himself, his pride was telling him, Hey, Peter, you're strong enough, man. You can do it. You won't ever leave Jesus. And the devil was setting him up for failure. This happens to every one of us. But the difference is what you do with your pride when it's exposed. That leads me to this next little point here. So God does not waste failure. He uses failure to expose pride. But whenever pride is exposed, he uses it to build humility. When your pride is exposed, humility should grow. Because if we're living our lives for Jesus, we will notice our pride whenever these things happen, whenever failure comes, we realize that we don't have it all figured out, we don't have all the answers. So we notice our pride, we notice our arrogance, and hopefully we want to correct that warped and that bad behavior. And then whenever we begin to develop humility, then we develop endurance. Whenever pride is exposed and humility is under construction in our life, we finally realize that these characteristics take time to develop. And the more that you practice humility, the more you're going to grow and develop endurance. It just works hand in hand. The Bible uses a word that's called long-suffering. And that's that's what this is, what this is. You you come to this place where you realize that um it simply doesn't happen overnight. You don't just become the man that God wants you to be overnight. It's going to take a little time, it's going to take some practice, it's going to take endurance. So do yourself a favor and start asking yourself better questions. Don't don't do this. Don't don't say, oh God, why did this happen to me? Don't don't ask that question. Instead, say, God, what are you forming in me? God, what are you teaching me? Quit using it all as excuses or quit trying to play the victim card here and start trying to figure out what you can learn and how you can better develop your characteristic as a godly biblical man. Point number three, our last point. Failure only becomes final when you quit. And this is where most men lose the fight. I'm telling you this, I have uh I have witnessed this way too many times. Failure itself is not what takes most men out. Quitting is what takes them out. If you read Galatians 6 9, it says, let us not grow weary in well doing, for in due season we will reap if we do not give up. It says you will reap a good harvest if you don't give up. But what happens if you give up? If you give up, if you quit, there's not going to be a harvest there for you to reap. You can fail multiple times, guys, and still win. Did you know that? You can mess up multiple times and still and still win. I I remember as I was developing this uh this podcast today or this episode, um this idea came to my, or I remembered uh this sermon that I preached, or a series of sermons that I preached several years ago that I titled Faithful Failures. And in that sermon, um my point was to highlight all the different people in the scriptures who were simple, ordinary people, and they failed at many, many different things. I'm talking about they were just, they were, they were failures. I used, I used Paul as an example, I used Peter as an example, I used so many different people as examples of faithful failures. And the reason that I did it was because I wanted to show the importance of noting that God never called perfect people to follow him. There was only one perfect person, and that was Jesus Christ. But whenever Jesus went about calling these guys to follow him, he knew that they would fail. He knew that they would mess up. But in the end, they they win. They won the battle in the end. If the heroes of the Bible were faithful in their failures, what makes us think that we can't be as well? It's the enemy that comes in. He's the one that wants to try to make us believe that we're shameful or that we're never going to be able to get it right and that we're guilty, and the list could just go on and on and on. But God never ever called perfect people. He knew that there would be failures in our resume. He always knew that. But see, here's the deal: you you can fail multiple times and still win, but you can never win if you quit. You cannot be victorious whenever you quit, whenever you give up. And I know too many men who have given up way too soon. Man, in my ministry now, um, I don't know, 22 plus 23, four years now in my ministry. I have watched guys, they have, they have been on fire for Jesus. They have wanted to serve, they have wanted to be a disciple of Christ, they have wanted to be a better husband, a better father, uh, a servant in the church, and all these different things. And then the water goes getting a little bit hot. You know, the earth starts quaking beneath their feet. Something gets out of kilter, something gets out of order, and all of a sudden they are nervous. All of a sudden, they're uneasy and they bail out because they cannot handle the pressure. When they become uncomfortable, whenever things become difficult, when the job is stressful, when things at home get a little bit chaotic, they have to bail. And that's not the right time to be bailing, guys. That's the time where you have to keep growing and keep going. I want you to think about muscle growth. If you've ever tried to uh go to the gym, lift weights, uh if you've if you've tried to ever train in any kind of sport, um, you know, anything really, if you if you train yourself uh for an extended period of time, your your muscle starts growing, even if it's muscle memory. Whenever you begin to think about it, you think about muscle growth, the only way a muscle grows is when you put it under pressure. Are you guys getting as many spam calls as I get? I get these things all the time, man. Uh I try to block them from my call list, if you will. But if you think about muscle growth, the only way that the muscle grows is when you put it under pressure. And and I I've I've begun noticing this. You know, uh, those of you that know me, you know that I'm I'm going through a uh weight loss journey right now. I'm cutting down, um, trying to lose body fat and trying to build muscle mass, um, not for any other reason than just to be healthy. I got up to um uh about 314 pounds, I think, just about six or seven months ago. I've been uh doing this training with with my buddy Colby, and uh he's really been coaching me along the way. I think I'm right at this morning, I'm down um like a full 70 pounds that I'm down. And I can look at myself in the mirror and I can see a change happening in my body. But as I try to learn more about eating the right foods and training my body and um muscle growth and you know, working out and things like that, uh, I was listening to this guy the other day. He was talking about working out in the gym and what you have to do to get muscles to grow and why so many men they don't see the results from going to the gym doing different things that they want to see. And he said it's because they will push the reps, they will push the weight and get the reps all the way up to that point to where it starts to burn and they think that they've done enough, and so they rack the weight and they're done with it. And he said, that is when you're supposed to keep going. Because if you would keep going through the burn and go all the way to the point of failure, then that's when your muscle starts growing. I want you to think about that analogy with me just for a moment. If we use that in the spiritual or in what you're doing with your work or with your your wife or with your children or with your Bible reading disciplines or whatever it might be. You don't quit whenever the things get hard. Sometimes it's hard for you to get out of bed to read your Bible. Sometimes it's hard for you to remember to pray at night whenever you lay down with your wife or right before your kids go to sleep. Sometimes it's hard for you to remember that you should uh be involved in a Bible study uh or a discipleship group or whatever, whatever it might be. It's it's hard for you to do that. And whenever you start going through the processes, if you'll notice in yourself, you will do the things that are easy, the things that are just they fall perfectly into your schedule. They don't stress you, they don't stretch you, they don't cause you to do anything extra, you're fine with doing them. And when you're doing those things, you will pretty much stay right where you are. But this is what I can guarantee you if I can just kind of piggyback off the analogy of the muscle growth, is that whenever you push all the way up to the place that it's uncomfortable, if you will keep going in the uncomfortable thing, then you will grow in that area. It won't just happen in muscle growth. It will happen in spiritual growth, it will happen in your memory, it will happen in relationships, you name it, it will happen. Welcome to the pressure, my friends. I'm trying to apply some pressure. I'm trying to help you understand that these failures, these things that you're going through, they haven't identified you or they shouldn't identify you. You shouldn't accept it as your identity. Instead, you should accept it as challenging as a challenge, because where this pressure comes in to make you make you think something different, that is where you're going to start growing. Don't run from the pressure. Stay in the pressure and let that muscle grow. Now, whenever you start applying these things to your life and you're working, you're working, you're working, you're trying to overcome failure, you're trying to learn from failure. You want it to be a uh you want it to be a framework for how you think and and how you're gonna move forward from here on out. You don't want to just be stuck in believing that you're a failure. You're not gonna use it as a as your identity. Instead, you're going to use it as something that is going to grow you. You're not going to use it as a label, you're going to use it as feedback and on and on and on. While you're doing that, you need to understand that more than likely there's something gonna happen along the way that's gonna trip you up and you're gonna fall, right? We said it earlier. Every man has fallen at some point. They've they fail in some area, but this is where it begins to change. Are you ready? You need to listen. When you fall, if you if you fall, don't let me say when you fall, okay? I don't I don't want to say that because the Bible doesn't say when you sin. The Bible says if you sin, you have an advocate with the Father. I don't want you to believe that you that you're just gonna fall because you're just a failure. That's not what it is. So let me just go ahead and correct my thinking while I'm trying to help you correct your thinking. Whenever you walk this walk and you're trying to overcome failure and you're gonna have a right core belief about what failure is, if you stumble and fall, get this in your mind. Get back up quickly. Get back up quickly. If you fail, get yourself back up and start doing it again. Because of what you're learning in this podcast and hopefully in your life, just by living a more positive life, you're gonna know who God created you to be. Therefore, you know that you're not defined by your mistakes. People mess up. We all mess up. So when it happens to you, get up and stop wallowing in your self-pity. Stop doing that. Also, don't romanticize defeat. I have never, ever understood why people insist on thinking about the negative thing all the time. Have you ever, have you ever been around that person? You ever been around that person? Um, they they start talking and they start their sentences off with, but what if? And then then you fill in the blank with the the the negative thing that they're dreaming about happening. Not that they may just fantasize on it happening, but they're always just like, yeah, yeah, but but what if, what if such and such happens? What are we gonna do? And I'm like, why are you why are you worried about that? Why don't why don't we live in the moment right now? Why don't we tackle what's right here in front of us and do our absolute best at what we've got going right here? And if that happens down the road, we will face it as a challenge then. It's not a challenge now. I'm not saying that we shouldn't prepare for things, but stop romanticizing about it. Stop sitting here trying to think about these things happen. Don't you it just I don't, I don't get that. It frustrates me. And I don't, I don't waste my time worrying about things that I can't control or things that I can't change. But what's been given me right now, this that I have right now in front of me, I can face this challenge. So I'm not gonna create another challenge to take up more of my time. When that challenge comes, I'm gonna fight it then. So instead of romanticizing over defeat, then instead of doing that, why don't we just build grit through obedience? Why don't we just obey what God's telling us to do and just go do it? Instead of worrying about failing, instead of worrying about falling, why not just set our minds on hearing the word of God, hearing the voice of God, and build spiritual muscle through obeying what he's telling us to do? How about that? How about that for a change? What if, you know, what if, like how people say, well, what if that bad thing happens? What if we just said, hey, you know what? I'm gonna follow God. What if you actually took the word of God seriously and you did what it said and you remained obedient to God? What if that were to happen? The reason you can't answer that is probably because you're not doing it. You know what God wants from you right now, you know what God wants from you. You know it. He wants you to live a faithful life, he wants you to be a righteous man, he wants you to be a biblical man, he wants you to follow biblical manhood. So let's let's just do this. Let's just stop crying about the circumstances and let's go, let's go tackle it. Let's get through it with a mindset of making this thing better. Why don't we do that? You see, the enemy wants to discourage you, and God wants to develop you. Are you gonna just let the enemy keep discouraging you, or are you gonna let your creator keep developing you? This is why you're going through the trial, because God wants to develop you. Listen to me. We can sit around and we can moan and we can groan about all the things we want to. But what I'll the the the the the fact is this here's here's the fact, the bottom line. Everyone listening to this podcast has failed at something, at some point in life. The question is not, have you failed? We know the answer to that. The question is, what do you believe about it? Do you wear it?

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Do you wear failure like a badge? Do you run from failure? Do you face it? Or do you learn from it? The question is not, have I failed? I have.

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The question is what do I believe about it? Your belief is what's going to make or break you. It's either gonna build you up or it's gonna tear you down. You see, guys, failure is not the end of your story. It's the forge where stronger men are made. Hey guys, thanks again for listening. Remember, share, like, and subscribe. If you think this podcast could help someone else, please share it with them. Check us out on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook at the IronPursuit. If you're interested in my personal or marriage coaching, send me an email at theironpursuit79 at gmail.com. Thanks again for listening. And remember, never run from the clashing because that is where the iron is sharp.