This is a follow-up to last week's article: "Beware of Missing God's Plan For Your Life"

Like a bird with two wings - one opposite to the other - that enables it to fly, two Biblical truths often look like contradictions of each other. This is called a paradox. But both opposites must be held together simultaneously, if we are to understand the truth correctly. Only then will we be able to fly - spiritually. Otherwise we will be earthbound - and depressed.

The WHOLE truth is contained (as Jesus told Satan) in "It is written" and in "It is ALSO written" (Matt.4:7).

If you have missed God's perfect plan for his life through disobedience, it doesn't mean that all hope is lost. You can still be an overcomer if you believe that your Almighty heavenly Father can do a miracle for you.

The Bible begins with two cases of failure that God turned to amazing profit.

First: God created the heavens and the earth perfect. But when some of the angels sinned, the earth became "formless, empty and dark" (Gen.1:2). But God worked on that shapeless, empty, dark mass and made something so beautiful out of it that He Himself finally called it "Very Good" (Gen. 1:31).

The second case: God made Adam and Eve and had a perfect plan for them. But they frustrated God's plan by sinning. But God came to the garden and promised them that the seed of the woman would bruise the head of the serpent. That was a promise of Christ crushing Satan on Calvary.

But Christ's death was part of God's perfect plan from all eternity. He is referred to as "the Lamb Who was slain from the foundation of the world" (Rev. 13:8). Yet we know that Christ died only because Adam and Eve had sinned. So logically speaking, we could say that God's perfect plan to send Christ to die for the sins of the world was fulfilled, not despite Adam's failure, but because of Adam's failure! We would not have known God's love shown on Calvary's cross, were it not for Adam's sin!

This baffles our logic and that is why the Scriptures say that we should "not lean on our own understanding" (Prov. 3:5). God doesn't work according to mathematical logic!! When solving an arithmetic problem, if you make a mistake at any step, the final answer will always be wrong. According to such logic, if you missed God's will at any time in your past life, you cannot fulfil God's perfect will now.

But God says "My ways are not your ways." (Isa.55:8,9). His plan doesn't work according to mathematical logic. If it did, then not a single human being would be able to fulfil God's perfect plan. For we have all failed God at some time or the other. We have sinned even after becoming believers. But the amazing truth is that there is still hope for every one of us.

If God worked according to mathematical logic, then we would have to say that Christ's coming to the earth was God's second-best. But it would be blasphemous to say so.

What is the message that God is trying to get through to us? Just this that God can take a man who has failed repeatedly, and still make him fulfil His perfect plan.

This is because even the failure may have been part of God's perfect plan to teach him a few unforgettable lessons. This may not be possible for human logic to grasp, because we know God so little.

God can use only broken men and women. And one way He breaks us is through repeated failures.

Genuine victory over sin is always accompanied by the deepest humility. Repeated failures help to destroy our self-confidence so that we are convinced that victory over sin is impossible, apart from God's enabling grace. Then, when we do get victory, we will never boast about it.

Further, when we have failed repeatedly ourselves, we cannot despise another who fails. We can sympathise with those who have messed up their lives, because we have discovered the weakness of our own flesh, through our own innumerable falls. We can then "deal gently with the ignorant and misguided, since we ourselves are beset with weakness" (Heb. 5:3).

If you now say, "But I have messed up things so many times. It is impossible for God to bring me into His perfect plan now", then it will be impossible for God, because YOU do not believe that He can do that for you.

God's law is: "It will be done for you according to your faith" (Matt. 9:29). We get what we have faith for. If we believe that something is impossible for God to do for us, then it will not be done for us.

On the other hand you will discover at the judgment seat of Christ that another believer who had made a greater mess of his life than you did, nevertheless fulfilled God's perfect plan for his life - because he believed that God could pick up the broken pieces of his life and make something "very good" out of it.

So all of us - young and old - can have hope, no matter how much we may have failed in the past, if we will only acknowledge our failures, humble ourselves and believe in our wonder-working, Almighty Father.

Thus we can learn from our failures and fulfil God's perfect plan for our lives.

And in the ages to come, God will show us forth to others as examples of what He could do with those whose lives were total failures. He will show what He could do in us, through the "surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus" (Eph. 2:7). Hallelujah!

Amen and Amen.