Ezekiel 19:5
“Now when she saw that she had waited, and her hope was lost, then she took another of her whelps, and made him a young lion.”
God uses a parable about a lion to show what was going to happen to Israel. He said that the lioness had two whelps which she nourished. One grew up and became a lion that learned to catch prey and eat men. The men of Egypt saw what this lion did, so they came and captured this young lion and brought him in chains back to Egypt.
What I love about this lioness is that she did not give up. She realized she still had one more whelp that she could invest her efforts into. She was not going to give up. She once again began to train the young lion to catch prey and to eat men, and it became a great lion just like the previous. Though this lion eventually was captured, I love the determination of the lioness who didn’t give up after one failure.
There is a great lesson that everyone can learn from this lioness and that is that there will always be another to invest your energies into and train. You may experience failure, and you will experience failure, but that doesn’t mean you have failed. You always need to understand that there is another who needs you to keep on going. There is another who can be trained if you don’t allow your failure to stop you.
So, you have failed. That failure doesn’t have to make you a failure. Failure is the excuse of the quitter but the motivation of the successful. Failure is the obstacle of the quitter but the opportunity of the successful. It all comes down to perspective and determination. You can let your failures defeat you, or you can take them and use them as a motivation to do better the next time. When you invest in people, you are going to fail, but you must not let your failure cause you to give up.
Moreover, there is always another person you can help if you will get back up. Samuel felt like he failed when Saul went wayward, but there was a David to help him when he got back up. Paul could have felt like a failure when John Mark quit, but he kept going and invested his energies in Silas and Timothy. You always have to remember that there is another person who is waiting for someone to invest in them. Don’t let what seems like a failure with one person keep you from continually trying to help others.
I point this out because in the ministry you are going to have those who mess up after you’ve invested a lot of time and energy into them. When this happens, you must not let this stop you from helping another. Remember that people have a choice to follow what you taught them, and just because they chose to quit or go a different direction doesn’t mean that you are the failure. The Devil would love to discourage you to the point where you stop investing in others. Don’t let him win the war because you lost a battle. Keep on helping others and you will eventually find some trophies of grace.
Let me also encourage every parent not to allow the seeming failure in one child to cause you to feel that you are a total failure. If you have other children, you need to keep doing your best to help them do right. Even if a child chooses the wrong path, remember that it was their choice and not your training. My encouragement to all is to simply get back up and keep investing in others. If you keep investing in others, you will find your rewards will be people following your example and investing in others as well.