Quote from Forum Archives on March 9, 2005, 10:43 am

Posted by: bhfbc <bhfbc@...>

STANDING TALL #6/9
DOES YOUR NOSE HURT?
March 6, 2005

Text: Matthew 14:22-33

Since the success of “Survivor,“ the airwaves have been filled with
so-called “reality” shows. I do not think that they really depict reality
all that well, but that’s what they are called, so I’ll stick with it.
The only one I watch regularly - the one that intrigues me - is “The
Apprentice.”

As I thought about this week’s Spiritual Adventure theme, “Standing Tall
Against the Fear of Failure and Disgrace,” I thought about that program.
“The Apprentice” candidates put quite a bit of their self-esteem on the
line when they go on that program, especially in the beginning. I mean,
think about how you would feel about being the very first contestant
fired before a national audience! Think that person might go into it with
some fears about failure and disgrace? I think so.

The thing that brings respect to “The Apprentice” participants, though,
is that each of them have already demonstrated great success in their
respective field of work. In fact, Donald Trump frequently asks, “Why do
you want to quit your already successful career to come work for me?” I
don’t go searching through the online stuff for additional information
about the contestants, I’m not that fanatic about the show, so what I
learn about them comes from the program episodes themselves. I get the
feel that quite a few of them have achieved their success through the old
school of “hard knocks.” They have worked hard, taken chances, and picked
themselves up when things didn’t go right. In other words, they have
learned to overcome their fears of failure and disgrace somewhere along
the way. Doesn’t mean that they don’t experience them; I mean that they
have overcome such fears. This brings me to the title of my sermon, which
is a question: “Does Your Nose Hurt?” The metaphor frequently used to
describe personal failure and disgrace is to “fall flat on your face.”
“Well, he really fell flat on his face when he tried to start that worm
ranch business!” I figure that the nose of anyone who falls flat on his
or her face is going to hurt. Thus, the question, “Does Your Nose Hurt?”
My personal belief is that the noses of “The Apprentice” candidates have
hurt many a time.

Well, a real reality show was going on a long time before “Survivor,”
“The Apprentice,” or any others - about 2,000 years before in fact. At
the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, he chose twelve ordinary - some
actually below-ordinary - guys to be his disciples. These are the twelve
who would be closest to him and learn the most from him. They would be
the ones who would witness the step by step events of the introduction of
the new covenant, the betrayal, the arrest, the denial, the trial, the
suffering, the crucifixion, the resurrection, and the bodily appearance
of their Teacher, Lord, and Savior. They thought that they would ascend
to places of power when Jesus took an earthly throne, but Jesus trained
them to carry on the ministry he instituted. During their apprenticeship,
they had plenty of opportunities to fall flat on their faces, and they
took advantage of those opportunities. Yeah, the disciples had sore
noses.

Matthew 14 reminds us of one of those opportunities. The lesson is
familiar to a lot of us. The disciples are sent on ahead across the lake
while Jesus retired to pray. After his time in prayer, Jesus goes to the
boat by walking on the water. This catches the disciples’ attention. They
are terrified and cry out in fear, “It’s a ghost!” Jesus calms them by
speaking, “Take courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.”

Who knows why Peter does what he does next. He is an impetuous sort of
guy - an action guy - so I guess it’s consistent with his personality.
“Lord, if it’s you, tell me to come to you on the water.” In what I
interpret to be a normal, commonplace, everyday tone, Jesus responds,
“Come.” What a step of faith - literally. You want to walk on water?
Come. Step out of the boat and come. Walk on water.

This is amazing stuff. Out of twelve disciples in the floundering boat,
one hears Jesus and actually issues a kind of challenge. “Lord, if it’s
you, tell me to come to you on the water.” Out of twelve disciples in the
floundering boat, one receives an invitation to step out onto the water.
“Come.” Out of twelve disciples in the floundering boat, one disciple
gets out of the boat. “Then Peter got down out of the boat and came
toward Jesus.” One out of twelve dared to try the “impossible.” Everyone
knows it is impossible to walk on water. Peter’s eleven brethren knew it
was quite impossible. But Peter got out of the boat.

One thing about life. With great reward comes great risk. Anyone who
takes on a new venture knows this. Anyone daring to get out of their boat
and tackle some looming challenge knows this all too well. The potential
to fall flat on your face is always there. Colonel Sanders was in his 60s
before his Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises got off the ground. Thomas
Alva Edison experimented with thousands of different types of materials
for light bulb filaments before discovering one that would last more than
a few hours. Dr. Seuss’s first book, And to Think That I Saw It on
Mulberry Street, was rejected twenty-three times before being published.
Talk about failure and disgrace. They fell on their faces many times.
Their noses hurt.

That fear of failure and disgrace is powerful. It is powerful, so
powerful that that alone is what oftentimes keeps a person from really
daring to try something big. I know. I spent my childhood, teenage, and
young adult years in the fear of failure and disgrace mode. In school, if
I was unsure of an answer, I would not raise my hand. I would have an
answer, but without being sure, I wasn’t going to stick my neck out to
the ridicule of being wrong. As a young Naval officer, that fear was
magnified many times over. There were so many things that came up that
required an immediate, positive response, but the old fear of being wrong
was right there beside me, too. My gut instinct and training told me to
take this action or that action, but my fears were whispering, “What if
you’re wrong? Wait until you can know for certain if you should do this
or that.” By then it would be too late; someone else would be taking the
correct action. We just don’t want our noses to hurt, do we?

You know what I have learned about myself along the way over these many
years? This might sound arrogant and conceited, but I have learned that I
am usually right. You don’t know how many times I sat there in a class
after the teacher gave an answer thinking, “Why didn’t I answer that? I
knew the answer.” You don’t know how many times I have gone back in my
memory and asked why I didn’t give this order and that order at the
appropriate time. It was the right thing to do! Now, unless we learn a
positive lesson from such thoughts, there is not a whole lot of use
wringing our hands over what could have been. What I have learned,
though, is that my nose would not have hurt as much as I thought that it
would have at the time if I had taken a few more chances. Given the
events of my life, I would have succeeded more than I would have failed.
That’s what the fear of failure and disgrace does, though. While it may
keep us from failing some of the time, it keeps us from succeeding a lot
of the time.

Stop and think a moment about this question: who should not be in church?
Who should not be hearing about God’s redemptive love and salvation?
Anyone you know who should not be hearing this and learning this? Anyone
you know who has not heard the invitation to be saved? What keeps you
from telling that person or inviting that person to church? I’ll tell
you, because I have heard this repeated over and over. “I’m afraid that
I’ll be rejected. I’m afraid I’ll be made fun of. I’m afraid they won’t
like me.” We’re afraid of failure and disgrace!

Now consider these questions: anyone here this morning think that your
belief in the salvation from Jesus is wrong? Anyone here think that you
are wrong to believe in Jesus’ sacrificial death and bodily resurrection?
Anyone believe that we should not live and teach the commands of Jesus
Christ? Anyone here believe that we are not right to think and believe
and live this way? Then for goodness’ sake, what are we afraid of? We
have the right answer, what more do we need?

I wish that I could stand here before you this morning and claim to have
overcome every fear of failure and disgrace that I experience. That,
unfortunately, is not the case. But I have gotten better. We can all get
better. Nothing I am saying this morning implies that we have to become
obnoxious or unlikable to do the Lord’s will. But we can all become
bolder, I am sure. Why? Because we are right! And because even if we do
experience one of those “fall on your face” moments, Jesus will pick us
up. He’ll keep us from sinking. In the end, what do we really have to
fear?

Have you ever thought of trying something for the Lord - in the church,
perhaps, or in the community - but held yourself back because you were
afraid of failing and being embarrassed? Yeah, you might have saved
yourself some personal embarrassment - or so you think - but what if you
had tried and succeeded? What if you try and succeed? Will another’s walk
with the Lord be strengthened and emboldened through your ministry? Will
another come to know the Lord Jesus Christ as his or her Savior because
of your ministry? None of us will always succeed at every endeavor, but
what will our church be like if none of us ever try? What will our
generation and the next generation be like if none of us ever try? There
are worse things in life than having noses that sometimes hurt.

Theodore Roosevelt said, “The only man who never makes a mistake is the
man who never does anything.” If we allow the fear of failure and
disgrace to keep us from trying, then real failure is always the outcome.
That failure is a wasted life.

Let’s return to Peter for a moment. Peter failed; he did. He sank! He
took his eyes off his beloved Master and placed them on the circumstances
around him - the wind and the waves - and immediately began to sink. But
keep this in mind: Peter, a simple fisherman, is the only man other than
Jesus to have ever walked on water. Millions of men have sunk, but for
one brief moment he rose above all of it, even the laws of nature and
physics, and walked on the surface of the sea. That’s pretty powerful
stuff. Christian teacher John Maxwell reminds us in his book Failing
Forward that “The less you venture out, the greater your risk of failure.
Ironically, the more you risk failure—and actually fail—the greater your
chances of success.” (quoted in “Stand Tall Against the Fear of Failure
and Disgrace” by Jerry Shaffer, Standing Tall: Facing Fears That Grip the
Soul, Wheaton, Illinois: Mainstay Church Resources, 2004, p. B142.)

Our Spiritual Adventure application is to do one outrageously courageous
act. Actually, I’m going to drop the “outrageously” part of it. Do a
courageous act. What might that be? In all honesty, I don’t know what it
might be for you. There are so many things that can be done in service to
God that I cannot possibly enumerate them here. And don’t try to guess
whether anyone else will think it’s a courageous act or not. Doesn’t
matter. You’ll know whether it’s a risk for you or not. Here’s one thing
I have done. The front of our church is one of the bus stops. When the
weather started getting bad, I thought that I would like to wait inside
if I had to wait on the bus. Problem is, when I opened the church before,
the students had not been easy to control, and they didn’t all get along.
So I didn’t know if it would work out this time or not. But, I came down
and tried it anyway. It’s been going OK. They can be a little outlandish,
but for the most part respectful. Outrageously courageous? Not really.
But it is something that I think speaks well of Christ’s church.

John Ortberg, author of If You Want to Walk on Water, You’ve Got to Get
Out of the Boat, offers a lot of spectacular insight throughout his book.
He writes, “When you face a difficult situation, do you approach it, take
action, and face it head on or do you avoid it, wimp out, and run and
hide? If you take action, you get a surge of delight, even if things do
not turn out perfectly. I did a hard thing. I took on a challenge. You
grow. When you avoid facing up to a threatening situation, even if things
end up turning out all right, inside you say, But the truth is, I wimped
out. I didn’t do the hard thing. I took the easy way out. . . . When I am
honest about it and begin to explore beneath the surface, I discover that
much of the pain of failure for me is not just that I have not achieved
something—it is that other people might think of me as failing. . . . To
run the best race you can, to give it everything that is in you, and
win—that is glorious. To run the race, to give your best and lose—that’s
painful. But it is not failure. Failure is refusing to run the race at
all. (John Ortberg, If You Want to Walk on Water, You’ve Got to Get Out
of the Boat, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2001, pp. 125, 147)

As we continue through our Spiritual Adventure, as we progress toward
this year’s celebration of the resurrection, look around at your fellow
pilgrims. If our faces look a little flatter over the next few days - if
our noses are hurting a little more - let’s smile and praise God, because
we know why. “Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water
and came toward Jesus.”

Rev. Charles A. Layne, pastor, First Baptist Church, Bunker Hill, IN