Failing Forward - WK 3- When We're Afraid to Fail - Audio
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Welcome, Lee Pastor here at Coast and thanks to worship team, that was so good. So we're continuing our series, Failing Forward, Life of Moses, and today we're talking about being, oh, Jess, welcome back, afraid to fail, afraid to fail, here's the thing I don't like. This is what I don't like, I don't like being humiliated. That for me is probably the worst thing that can happen to me. One of my earliest memories of, oh, I do not feel good right now was, I think I was maybe kindergarten, maybe first grade, and we had a fair at school, and there was a dunk tank at the fair, and my dad, who was a teacher at the school, was going to be in the dunk tank, and if you know what a dunk tank is, it's like it's this big, you know, water tank, and there's a seat on it, and there's a target in front of it, and if you hit the target with like a baseball or whatever, it causes the seat to drop, and the person who's on the seat gets wet, and all week I had been looking forward to this, and my dad had been taunting me, like, there's no way he'll be able to get me, I'm the best, and he was doing it jokingly, now I know, I didn't realize at the time I was like, I'm going to get you, so I stepped up to the line, and I got, you know, three baseballs or whatever, and I threw, but I wasn't strong enough to get the ball to the target, and so the ball fell short, and I think I had three tries, I mean, in my memory, it doesn't really matter, because I missed the ball, I mean, not even close, and the whole time, everyone around me was making fun of me, including my father, he was like, he's like, come on, you can do better than that, and again, I know now that he was joking, but at the time, for a six year old, however old I was, it was an absolute catastrophe, and so I failed horribly, and everyone was laughing at me, and so I ran away, and I ran away, and what the big mistake that my dad had made is he had told, he had showed me when we were setting up the fair, that there was like a secret latch behind the dunk tank, that if you went behind it and you pulled the latch, it would cause the seat to fall, and you'd go in, and I was angry, I was humiliated, and so I said, that's it, I'm gonna get him, and so I quietly waited for a while, and then I snuck up behind the dunk tank, and I waited until it was like in between times, and he was pretty dry, because it was a hot day, and he wasn't expecting a thing, and I pulled the latch, and he fell into the dunk tank, totally freaked him out, because he didn't see anything coming, and he gets up and he's looking around, he sees me running away, it's hard to hide when you have hair of this color, and it was like brighter in fact, then, so I stuck out, I stuck out like a sore thumb, and he screams, "Thomas Andrew Bennett, what have you done?" or something like that, and I remember I ran behind the school by myself, and I sat against a wall, and I hugged my knees to my chest, and I just cried those bitter tears, and it made a formational memory for me, it was when I learned, probably for the first time, that what I hate more than anything else is letting down the people I love and being humiliated, and maybe the worst thing for me is when somebody I love humiliates me, or at least that's how I feel. That was only six, surely I've gotten over it, maybe. Today we're going to see this at work in the life of Moses, this dynamic, and I think we're going to see it at work in our own lives as well. And so we're going to be in Exodus three and four, and the first thing I want you to take away is this, all you have to do is get going, all you have to do is get going. It is the simplest thing in the world. It's so easy to say, all you have to do is get going, but man sometimes it's hard. Picking up in Exodus three, if you remember Moses last week we saw where Moses tried to take things into his own hands, he relied on himself, disaster struck, and he actually ran away to a place called Midian. He's there for, the Bible says 40 years, what it means, 40 is the term in the Bible, the number that signifies trial, it can signify disaster, exile, and so he's out of where
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Coast Bible Church, PastorTom Bennett, San Juan Capistrano, CA, www.coastbible.org