BBD 03.04.22 When You Fail (New)
Posted by: theburningbushdevotional <theburningbushdevotional@...>
Since June 8th 1998, this is
the 1848th
The Burning Bush Devotional
04 March 2022
When You Fail
For a righteous man may fall seven times and rise again, But the wicked shall fall by calamity. – Proverbs 24:16 NKJV.
The NIRV (The New International Reader’s Version) puts this as: “Even if godly people fall down seven times, they always get up. But
those who are evil trip and fall when trouble comes.”
While I was a probation and parole officer I conducted and wrote many
pre-sentence investigations of people who had been convicted of a crime or
crimes. This was usually performed prior to the sentence or penalty for their
crime being given. I have interviewed murderers and murderer accomplices, armed
robbers, burglars, embezzlers, alcohol and drug related offenders and probably
more that I don’t remember. It was not always a pleasant task talking with them
and their victims, along with digging into their life histories with every tool
available.
I want to mention this because by committing a crime or crimes they were
societal failures. Most of those that I interviewed you would consider to be
broken people. Their spirits had been broken, and many had little hope left for
anything good in their lives. After they were sentenced by the court, I would
have the ones not going to prison under supervision. While investigating them,
and during the intake process I always tried to determine their spiritual
condition. Those with a relationship with God were always more successful in
completing supervision and restarting their lives.
Too many times I have seen people who have committed a moral failure in
some way and are unable to face the consequences of it commit suicide. I do not
remember any of my clients doing that and there is a reason for that. The
reason is that all of them had reached a point where they had realized what the
worst thing would be as a consequence of their actions and had decided that
they could live with those consequences.
There are so many things that can happen in our lives that sometimes
make it hard for us to keep living. I believe that decision to live is always easier
to make when we have a relationship with the Lord. Not all of those heart-rending
things are the result of a crime or necessarily even a sin. Early in my
marriage I was laid off from three jobs in a period of about a year. It was
difficult to go home and share that with my wife even though she always supported
me.
After the last one of those three job layoffs, I was without work for
several months while my wife began to work again. We were living in a mobile
home on my parent’s farm and our oldest son was still a baby. I was emotionally
depressed and that is something that my Mother had been hospitalized several
times for while I was in high school and later my sister was also hospitalized
for depression.
During that difficult emotional time for me I read through the New Testament
for the first time and God gave me strength. God gave me the strength to
continue on with life and to make the right decisions of what to do from that
point.
I have done some things in my life that I am not proud of, you could
call them sins. How many have I committed, I have no idea. However, I know what
to do in order to rise up again. I fall upon the mercy of my Lord and Savior
Jesus Christ. 1 John 1:9 tells us what to do, “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to
forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
No matter how bad
the situation may be in your life, no matter what your failure may be, God can
give you the strength to go on, to continue to live and to live life well.
Please allow God the opportunity to do that for you!
Copyright © 1998 - 2022. Ed
Wrather. The Burning Bush website has been online since January 31, 1998. On
June 8, 1998, the email version of the Burning Bush Devotional was first sent.
Ed Wrather began writing devotionals in the early 1990s. The distribution of
those first devotionals was primarily through the Burning Bush Newsletter sent
to prison facilities throughout the United States and Canada.
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Please pray that the hearts
of the American leaders will change and do what is necessary to stop Putin. It
can be done without troops on the ground by simply allowing oil and gas
producers to again give us energy independence stopping our need to buy Russian
oil.
Please pray for God to touch and
bring about His will in these lives: Andrew Cohen Winfield; Martha and John W.;
Alan Medders; Norman Cupp; Georgia Bronnert; Caleb Freeman; Pat S.; Buck &
Barbara Wright; GWEN PRUET; James Perkins and his wife; Vonnie; Evi Porter;
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(Please pray for 10-year-old Jo Jo
Stahlman who was saved last Sunday night at our church. Please pray that she
will grow rapidly in the faith and that she will be protected from evil. Please
also pray for Elizabeth Young Anderson a young woman who was saved Sunday
morning in our church.)
Please pray for the coronavirus
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virus to be rapidly found and deployed. Pray for all those afflicted to be
healed and for our leaders to have supernatural wisdom and ability to lead us
through this pandemic.
Please pray for an end to the
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it will be replaced with peace and love. May God help the USA! Many prayer
needs are posted at the Burning Bush website on the Prayer Request page. You
can also post your prayer requests there (Of
course, I am always in need of prayer - please pray for me. Having back surgery in a few weeks. 03.18.18
I accepted the call to be the pastor of Fairview Baptist Church in Elk City,
Oklahoma. Please pray for me and for this church.).
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