Failure is Not Final - Part 2

Welcome to Right Beside You in the Pulpit with Dr. Stephen Rummage! 

This episode is Part 2 of a recent sermon titled "Failure is Not Final." 

Over a four-week series, we’ll focus on a single sermon—tracing the journey from initial preparation all the way to the closing invitation on Sunday morning. Each month, we’ll also gather around the table with pastors from across our state to hear insights from their unique preaching rhythms, contexts, and experiences. 

As you listen, our prayer is that you’ll find encouragement and practical help to strengthen your weekly preaching of God’s Word. 

This podcast is funded by the generous Cooperative Program giving of Florida Baptist churches.  

If you have any questions about this episode, please email communications@flbaptist.org.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

He died for Peter's failure and sin. He died for my failure and sin. He died for your failure and sin. The cure for failure is the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ on the cross and his resurrection from the grave. His shed blood only takes away our sin.

SPEAKER_00 0:27

Welcome to Right Beside You in the Pulpit with Dr. Stephen Rummage, a series geared to help strengthen your preaching of God's Word and encourage us together along the way.

SPEAKER_01 0:39

Hi, this is Stephen Rummage, Executive Director of the Florida Baptist Convention. Thank you for listening to Right Beside You in the Pulpit. This month we're walking through an expositional sermon I recently preached from Mark 14. If you haven't listened to part one yet, you might want to go back and start there before diving into this episode. Pastor, I hope you're doing well and God is blessing you as we jump back in and continue the message. It's called Failure Is Not Final from Mark chapter 14, verses 66 through 72. Let's open the word together. The cost of our spiritual failure. Peter heard the rooster crow, and then Mark 14, verse 72 says, Peter remembered how Jesus said to him, Before the rooster crows twice, you will deny me three times. When the rooster crowed, Luke's gospel adds this detail. It says in Luke 22, verse 61, the Lord turned and looked at Peter. Can you imagine that moment? I don't know exactly when it happened. I don't know if Jesus looked down from the second story of Caiaphas's house or if he looked over across the courtyard as he was being taken from one place to another. But as soon as that rooster crowed, Jesus looked at Peter. And Peter remembered. Verse 72 concludes, and he broke down and wept. And understand something. This wasn't embarrassment. This was the beginning of repentance. Peter's bitter tears show the sorrow that has to come at the beginning of restoration when we sin and fail. The cost of failure is the brokenheartedness that sin brings into our own life. The only way it can be mended is by bringing that failure to Jesus so that he can restore. Several years ago, I was in an event at an event where guys from the community brought all of their old cars there. They were displaying all their old cars. It was, man, it's like old guys and old cars. And we're just all looking around at all these old cars. And so I was going around looking at the different cars, and I came to one car that my friend Mark was there showing off his car, and it was a 1965 Mustang. And I got to tell you, there is a special place in my heart for a 1965 Mustang. Because when I was 11 or 12 years old, my dad got a 1965 Mustang, and somewhere in my mind I had the idea that when I turned 16, that would be my car. But then when I was around 13 years old, my dad decided that a Mustang was too much car for a 16-year-old boy to have. And so he sold that car out from under me. I'm not bitter. But I saw my friend Mark with his 1965 Mustang, and um, and I just, it was beautiful. I mean, paint job looked awesome. Chrome was shiny, the interior, just everything looked great. And I said, Mark, I love the way you've restored this car. And he looked at me, he said, Stephen, I haven't restored this car. I said, What do you mean? It looks great. He said, No, it's not restored. He said, It's been painted, it's been polished, it's been repaired, it runs okay. He said, But to restore it would mean taking everything down to the bare metal, reworking every part of the engine, rebuilding every system, every detail until this car was just like it was when it rolled off the Ford Assembly line in 1965. In other words, I was admiring a good-looking polish job, a good-looking paint job, but not really a restoration. And that's when this hit me. A lot of us want Jesus to paint us and to polish us up and to tune us up a little bit, but not to restore us. We're fine with him fixing what's obvious and polishing up what people can see, but restoration goes deeper. Friend, listen, God did not send Jesus to touch up your life and to make it look better. He sent his son to remake us. 2 Corinthians chapter 7, verse 10 says, Godly grief produces repentance that leads to salvation without regret. That's what we see in Peter as he wept. We see him beginning the place in his heart where he needed to be for Jesus to restore him. When you're like Peter feeling bitter sorrow about the deep cost of a failure, what do you do next? What do you do when you know you've messed it up with your marriage, or you know you've messed it up with your kids, or you know you've messed it up financially, or you know you've messed it up in your relationship with the Lord? You can paint over the failure with excuses and anger and self-justification, or you can choose to strip things down to the bare metal and repent before God. Praise God. Through his grace, he allows us to repent. He allows us to turn to him and he will make things right. When you acknowledge the cost of your failure, it opens up the path to restoration. We see the certainty of our spiritual failure. We see the cost of our spiritual failure. The third thing I want you to see in this text is this. Think with me about the cure for our spiritual failure. The cure for our spiritual failure. What was going on with Jesus? What was going on in the house of the high priest as Peter wept over his failure? Look in verse one of Mark chapter 15. The Bible says, and as soon as it was morning, the chief priests held a consultation with the elders and scribes and the whole council. And they bound Jesus and led him away and delivered him to Pilate. What was happening to Jesus? He was being mocked and beaten and prepared for crucifixion. After a brief meeting in Caiaphas's house, the religious leaders took a break to wait for the sun to come up and to call the whole Sanhedrin together. As the night grew, later and later the soldiers and the temple police amused themselves by humiliating Jesus. They covered his eyes. They stood all around him. Then they started hitting him from different sides and asking him, Who hit you? Who hit you? Who hit you? In Luke's gospel, the Bible says they were blaspheming, which means they were not only mocking Jesus, they were mocking God who had sent Jesus. After this gruesome night, Jesus' last day on earth dawned. He was delivered to Pontius Pilate, the Roman leader in charge of the area of Israel. Under Pilate, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was interrogated, declared innocent of any crime deserving of death, and yet condemned to be nailed to a cross anyway. He was beaten, crowned with thorns, and led away to a place called Calvary to be crucified. Here's what I want you to see. What Jesus suffered as he went to the cross was designed by God the Father to provide the cure for spiritual failure. Why did Jesus die on the cross? Not just to give us a good example, not just to show us what dying love looks like. Jesus died to provide the remedy for our sins. He died for Peter's failure and sin. He died for my failure and sin. He died for your failure and sin. The cure for failure is the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ on the cross and his resurrection from the grave. His shed blood only takes away our sin. On New Year's Eve of last year, New Year's Eve of 2025, about a month and a half ago, my dad retired at age 81 after working as a barber for 63 years. He started when he was about 18 and he worked until he was 81. I was his last customer. I was the last person to sit in his chair. I sat in his chair and he gave me a haircut. I let that haircut stay. I let my hair keep, I just didn't want to get my next haircut because I wanted my haircut to be the last one that he gave me. This haircut is not that haircut. I had to get it cut since then. But I was his last haircut. I sat there in that chair, and as I sat there, I remembered something from when I was a 16-year-old kid. When I was 16 years old, my dad gave me a job cleaning his barber shop. I'd come in on Saturday afternoon after all the other barbers were gone, and I'd use an air hose to blow out all the backstands and blow the hair out from under the mats, and then I'd sweep everything up, and then I'd I'd get on my hands and knees and I'd mop the floor, and that's what I did. When my dad gave me that job, he went through and he showed me how to clean the shop and he said something to me that I was surprised by. Here's what he said: he said, Stephen, you can't get rid of all the hair. Don't even try. He said, You can't get rid of all the hair. And he was right. But I'm gonna tell you this. If you go to a barber shop, there is hair everywhere. They cut and they use they use the buzzer, the the shaver, I don't know the the word for it. I was a barber son. Anyway, they they do all these things that they blow it around, they they use the hairdryers, and you can't get rid of the hair. There's hair everywhere. I'll tell you this about your barbershop or wherever you get your hair done. You look behind any surface, and there is the hair of a thousand heads behind that thing. There are hair balls that are so big, it would stagger your imagination to think about them. I'm talking about when they try to keep it clean. While we were there at my dad's barbershop, my daughter-in-law was there. I know the hiding places. I told her, I said, come here, Morgan. I I showed her, and she said, That's absolutely disgusting. And it is. But my dad told me, you can't get rid of all the hair. You can make it look good on the outside, you can try to clean it up the best you can. You can't get rid of all the hair. Can I tell you this? You and I can't get rid of the guilt of our failure and sin. We can't. We can try. We can try to sweep it under the rug. Or we can try to call it something else and say, well, well, it's not really sin, it's this. We can redefine immorality and try to convince ourselves it's no longer immoral. Today, what scripture calls sin is not just tolerated, it's celebrated. But even after we've done that, the sin is still there and the guilt of the sin is still there. We can try to think that if we're good enough and if we do enough religious things that we can make up for the guilt of our sin, but the failure is still there. The sin is still there. We can't get rid of it. That's the bad news. The good news is this: Jesus doesn't hide from our failure and sin. Jesus seeks us in our failure and our sin. And by his shed blood and his resurrection, he can take the sin away. And he can take the guilt of the sin away. He sought Peter after Jesus died on the cross and rose from the grave. The angel at the empty tomb said in Mark chapter 16, verse 7, Go tell his disciples, and then look at this, and Peter. I love that. Go tell the disciples that he's risen, but not just all the disciples. Make sure you tell Peter. Jesus sought the one who failed. And because of that, failure is not final. Grace has the last word. Jesus said that the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost. He sought Peter. And today he seeks you. Have we failed? Yes, absolutely. But overcoming failure doesn't mean pretending we haven't failed. It means we stop hiding. It means we come clean. It means we come to Jesus. It means we receive his grace. And then it means we follow Jesus forward. Every person in this room has failed. But praise God. The grace of Jesus Christ extends to every person in this room. Do you believe that this morning? Praise the Lord. Failure is not final. The cure for failure is the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ on the cross and his glorious resurrection from the grave. We've covered a lot of ground in these last two weeks, and I'm grateful that you've walked through this sermon with me. Over the next two episodes, we'll move into some of my favorite conversations. Next week, we'll step behind the scenes and I'm going to talk about the sermon preparation process that shaped this message, the study, the structure, and the decisions that bring everything together. Then the following week, I'll be joined by pastors from around our state as we discuss this text and share our approaches to preaching it. If this episode sparked a question or stirred something in your heart, I'd love to hear from you. Don't hesitate to reach out. You can contact us at info at flbaptist.org. Also, please subscribe to this podcast so that you'll automatically get new weekly episodes. Thanks again for listening, and remember, we're right beside you.

SPEAKER_00 15:51

Thank you for listening to today's episode of Right Beside You in the Pulpit with Dr. Stephen Rummage. This podcast is made possible through your faithful cooperative program giving. For more resources, ministries, and upcoming events in Florida Baptist life, visit fblbaptist.org.