In the early 1970s, Charles Colson was one of the most powerful men in Washington. As special counsel to President Nixon, he had a reputation for doing whatever it took, and he later admitted that he’d been valuable to the president because he was willing to be ruthless in getting things done. Then the Watergate scandal broke. Facing prosecution, Colson was given a copy of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity by a friend, and he gave his life to Christ. In June 1974 he pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice, and he spent seven months in a federal prison in Alabama.
Colson walked out of prison with his reputation destroyed and his career over. In 1976 he founded Prison Fellowship, which grew into the largest outreach to prisoners, ex-prisoners and their families in the United States, and then spread around the world. Years later he wrote, “My greatest humiliation – being sent to prison – was the beginning of God’s greatest use of my life.”
His worst failure didn’t disqualify him. It became the place his calling came from.
So the question is:
What did your hardest seasons build in you, and what has God promised on the other side of them?
Opening Prayer (Say this aloud!)
Father, You know every failure in my story, the ones I caused and the ones that happened to me. I don’t want to hide them from You, and I don’t want to be defined by them. Show me what You were building in me through them. Then remind me of every promise You’ve spoken over my life, and give me faith to hold on to them. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Your failures and trials are not detours from God’s purpose for you. They’re some of the most important material He shapes you with, because they make it obvious where the power really comes from.
Paul knew this from the inside. He had been beaten, imprisoned, shipwrecked and rejected, and his critics in Corinth used his weaknesses against him. His answer was not to hide them:
“For God, who said ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ is the one who shined in our hearts to give us the light of the glorious knowledge of God in the face of Christ. But we have this treasure in clay (ὀστρακίνοις) jars, so that the extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are experiencing trouble on every side, but are not crushed; we are perplexed, but not driven to despair; we are persecuted, but not abandoned; we are knocked down, but not destroyed.”
Word Study
ὀστράκινος ostrakinos G3749
“clay” · 2 Corinthians 4:7
Range. Made of clay; earthen, earthenware. It comes from ostrakon, a piece of baked clay; broken pieces of pottery were so common in the ancient world that people used them as scrap paper. Thayer notes that the word carries “the added suggestion of frailty.” Strong’s defines it as “earthen-ware, i.e. clayey; by implication, frail.” It occurs only twice in the New Testament: here, and in 2 Timothy 2:20, where Paul contrasts vessels “of wood and of earthenware” with vessels of gold and silver.
The sense here. Ordinary, cheap, breakable pottery: the kind of jar a household used every day and threw away when it cracked. Paul puts the most valuable thing in the universe, “the light of the glorious knowledge of God,” inside the least valuable container he could think of.
Why it carries the argument. The mismatch is the point: “so that the extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.” If the jar were gold, people would admire the jar. Because it’s clay, and visibly cracked, they notice the light coming through it. Your failures are the cracks. They don’t disqualify you from carrying the treasure. They make it unmistakable whose treasure it is.
Source. Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament; Strong’s Concordance via Bible Hub.
A few chapters later, Paul describes a weakness he begged God to remove. God’s answer was no: “My grace is enough for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” And Paul’s response was remarkable: “So then, I will boast most gladly about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may reside in me… for whenever I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:9–10).
This is why the failures in your story may shape you more than any victory could. They humble you, and they make you useful to other people in a way success never can. Think about the testimonies you actually remember. People may applaud a success story, but the stories that stay with us are the ones about a failure someone came through. You may not relate to the details of someone else’s failure, but you understand the pain and disappointment, and you listen differently to someone who has been there. Jesus told Peter, the night before his worst failure, “When you have turned back, strengthen your brothers” (Luke 22:32). Peter’s usefulness to his brothers came through his failure, not around it.
In Session 1 you met Paul’s promise: “And we know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). Notice the first three words: and we know. Paul doesn’t say “we hope” or “we suspect.” If what you’re walking through isn’t good yet, God isn’t done with it.
J. Robert Clinton found the same pattern in the leaders he studied. He called it negative preparation:
“In negative preparation God wants to break you loose from a situation in order to move you on to something you might not otherwise choose.”
J. Robert Clinton · Professor of leadership, Fuller Theological Seminary · The Making of a Leader, 1988
Clinton also noticed that “crises can drive one to God or away from Him.” The failure itself doesn’t decide which. What you do with it does.
Pause & Reflect
Which crack in your jar has let the most light through? Who has been helped because you went through it?
Some of the failures in your story were things that happened to you. Others were lines you drew yourself. God works both kinds into the picture, and that’s why Step 17 looks at them honestly instead of skipping them.
In Session 1 you met the problem of stray lines. Children working a dot-to-dot get impatient, guess at the picture, and skip ahead, connecting dot 14 to dot 30. Here is the picture you’ve been watching, with one of those stray lines on it:
Abraham drew a line like that. God had promised him a son “from your own body” (Genesis 15:4), and Abraham believed Him (15:6). But ten years later there was still no child, and Sarai suggested a shortcut: “Since the Lord has prevented me from having children, have sexual relations with my servant. Perhaps I can have a family by her.” And “Abram did what Sarai told him” (16:2). Ishmael was born. The consequences of that stray line ran through Abraham’s family for generations. But God didn’t take the page away. Fourteen years later, Isaac was born, exactly as promised.
Clinton had a name for Abraham’s kind of failure. He called it a flesh act: a time when “guidance is presumed and decisions are made either hastily or without proper discernment of God’s choice.” It’s what anxious adults do with the picture: we decide what it must be and skip the slow dots. Clinton also found that God uses flesh acts to teach lessons “about what not to do in the future,” lessons that come “in no other way.”
John Mark’s story shows the same grace. On Paul’s first missionary journey, “John left them and returned to Jerusalem” (Acts 13:13). We’re not told why. We are told that it cost him: when Barnabas wanted to take Mark on the next journey, “Paul insisted that they should not take along this one who had left them,” and the disagreement was so sharp that Paul and Barnabas parted ways (15:38–39). Mark had failed publicly, and one of the great leaders of the church had judged him unreliable. But the story didn’t end there. Years later, writing from prison near the end of his life, Paul asked for him by name: “Get Mark and bring him with you, because he is a great help to me in ministry” (2 Timothy 4:11). The stray line was still there. The picture had gone on around it.
Illustration
In an actual group that worked through these steps, people wrote about their hardest seasons with real courage: divorce, betrayal, a spouse’s long illness, the deaths of people they loved. Those stories belong to the people who lived them, and they aren’t retold here. But one pattern in the group is worth noticing. Almost everything people listed was a trial that had happened to them. Only three or four of the eleven named a failure of their own.
The ones who did showed what this step is for. One woman wrote about not bringing her father into the life of her church while he was still well enough to come: “if I did not disciple one of my own loved ones… How can I disciple others???” And then, in the next breath: “I know the Lord forgives me. He and I are planning for the future discipleship endeavors I immerse myself in.” The stray line was named, forgiven, and already being worked into the next part of the picture. One man listed failing out of college, then noticed that if he hadn’t, he’d never have taken the job where his daughter’s story began.
Some trials don’t have a “what God built” yet. One woman answered the step in a single line about a death that had made her question God and her faith. That’s an honest answer. Another man named a year and more of closed doors in a job search, and wrote what he could see so far: “God is developing my capacity and willingness to trust and wait on him.”
Caution
Step 17 asks you to write about the hardest parts of your story, and for some people that includes trauma, abuse, addiction, betrayal or loss that still hurts. Please don’t work through trauma alone in a journal. If a memory surfaces that overwhelms you, stop, and talk with someone you trust: a pastor, a mature friend or a counselor. Kingdom Essentials Sessions 18 through 21 walk through forgiveness and freedom in Christ. If you’re carrying guilt over something you did, bring it to God first: “But if we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous, forgiving us our sins and cleansing us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). You don’t have to write down every detail to complete Step 17. You can name a hard season in a few words, note that God was there, and come back to it later. This course can wait while you get the help you need.
God has spoken promises over your life, in Scripture and often through other believers, and He keeps every one of them. That’s why this course puts your failures and your promises side by side.
Near the end of his life, Joshua gathered Israel’s leaders and reminded them of something they had watched with their own eyes for decades:
“Look, today I am about to die. You know with all your heart and being that not even one of all the faithful promises the Lord your God made to you is left unfulfilled (נָפַל); every one was realized – not one promise is unfulfilled!”
Word Study
נָפַל nāpal H5307
“unfulfilled” · Joshua 23:14
Range. To fall. It’s one of the most common verbs in the Hebrew Bible, occurring about 435 times, and Strong’s calls it a word used “in a great variety of applications”: falling by accident or in battle, a building collapsing, a person falling on their face in worship, an army falling on its enemy. Brown-Driver-Briggs lists a special sense for words and promises: to fall, meaning to fail to be accomplished.
The sense here. The Hebrew says, literally, “not one word has fallen from all the good words the Lord your God spoke concerning you… not one word of them has fallen.” The NET renders it “left unfulfilled.” A promise that fails is a promise that falls to the ground. The same idiom appears in Joshua 21:45, at the end of the conquest, and in 1 Samuel 3:19, where the NET says of the young prophet Samuel, “None of his prophecies fell to the ground unfulfilled.”
Why it carries the argument. Joshua’s audience had lived through forty years in the desert, a generation of funerals and seven years of war. From inside those years, plenty of God’s promises must have looked like they were falling. From the end, Joshua could see that not one had. That’s the perspective Step 18 asks you to borrow. Some of the promises you’re holding may look, from where you stand, as if they’ve hit the ground. They haven’t. God’s words don’t fall.
Source. Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon; Strong’s Concordance via Bible Hub.
One man in an actual group that worked through these steps was living in the middle of that kind of season. Two years earlier he had sensed God promising him work that would greatly help the homeless community. Since then, he wrote, “every door keeps closing on me… I wonder if I made it up or if I am waiting for nothing. Is this Goal too High for me?” His coach reminded him how long Joseph waited, and Moses. By the end of the course, his mission statement still had the homeless at its center. From inside the waiting, a promise can look as if it’s falling. That doesn’t mean it has.
Paul says the same about every promise God has made: “For every one of God’s promises are ‘Yes’ in him; therefore also through him the ‘Amen’ is spoken, to the glory we give to God” (2 Corinthians 1:20). Kingdom Essentials Session 5 studied that verse and the word promise in it. Every promise of God finds its yes in Christ.
Step 18 asks about two kinds of promises.
Promises in Scripture that God has made personal to you. Most believers have a few verses that God has used, again and again, to speak to them: a verse they held on to in a hard season, or one that seems to leap off the page every time they read it. Kingdom Essentials Session 9 called this a rhēma word. Read those verses in context. God’s promise to the exiles in Jeremiah 29:11, “I have plans to prosper you, not to harm you,” was spoken to a people who would wait seventy years to see it (29:10). It still reveals God’s heart for you, but it doesn’t promise you a comfortable year.
Prophetic words spoken over you by other believers. Joel promised that a day was coming when God would “pour out my Spirit on all kinds of people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy” (Joel 2:28). Peter announced at Pentecost that the day had come (Acts 2:16–17), and I believe the gift is still given today (Kingdom Essentials Session 10 makes that case). Timothy had received words like that. Paul reminded him of them twice: “Do not neglect the spiritual gift you have, given to you and confirmed by prophetic words when the elders laid hands on you” (1 Timothy 4:14), and “I put this charge before you, Timothy my child, in keeping with the prophecies once spoken about you, in order that with such encouragement you may fight the good fight” (1:18). Notice what the prophecies were for: they were encouragement to fight with. When Timothy was discouraged, Paul handed him back the words God had spoken over him.
That’s what prophecy is for. “The one who prophesies speaks to people for their strengthening, encouragement, and consolation” (1 Corinthians 14:3). A true prophetic word will usually confirm something God has already been doing in you rather than introduce something completely foreign, and it will almost always leave you strengthened rather than afraid.
Don’t be discouraged if you can’t think of one. In an actual group that worked through these steps, three of the nine people who answered Step 18 said they weren’t sure anyone had ever spoken a prophetic word over them. “Honestly, I don’t know,” one wrote, and listed the Scripture she had clung to through her family’s hardest years instead. That’s a complete answer. Another was surprised to realize that something people had said about her for years might count. The closest thing to a prophetic word she could think of, she wrote, was a former boss telling her she had a heart for God, and “I’ve been nicknamed Barnabas more than once.” Barnabas was the nickname the apostles gave a man named Joseph, and Luke explains it: “which is translated ‘son of encouragement’” (Acts 4:36). When the people around you keep naming the same thing in you, it may be worth testing whether God has been saying it through them.
Pause & Reflect
What’s one promise, from Scripture or spoken over you, that you’ve held on to through a hard season? Has any of it already come true?
This question matters, and the concern behind it is serious. People have said all kinds of things over me “in the name of the Lord.” Some of it was encouraging. Some of it was strange. One person told me God said I’d marry someone I barely knew. Another “word” felt like a way to get me to do what the speaker wanted. And I’ve watched churches get hurt by prophecies that never came true. How am I supposed to know which words were really from God, and why should I build anything on them?
Much of that should be acknowledged plainly. False and careless prophecy is real, and Scripture warns about it directly: “Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to determine if they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1). Jesus said, “Watch out for false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are voracious wolves” (Matthew 7:15). People have been manipulated, frightened and misled by words that were never from God.
But notice that Scripture’s answer to bad prophecy isn’t no prophecy. It’s tested prophecy. “Do not extinguish the Spirit. Do not treat prophecies with contempt. But examine all things; hold fast to what is good. Stay away from every form of evil” (1 Thessalonians 5:19–22). And in the church at Corinth, “Two or three prophets should speak and the others should evaluate what is said” (1 Corinthians 14:29).
Here’s where I land, and why. I believe God still speaks prophetically through His people, and that the words He speaks are meant to be tested, not simply swallowed or dismissed. Here are the tests I’d apply, drawn from those passages and from the witnesses you learned in Session 2:
Where this stays unresolved. Two questions don’t resolve neatly. First, timing: some prophetic words in Scripture were fulfilled quickly and others took generations, so “it hasn’t happened yet” doesn’t prove a word false. Second, conditions: some prophecies depended on how people responded. Jonah announced, “At the end of forty days, Nineveh will be overthrown!”, and when the city repented, “God relented concerning the judgment he had threatened” (Jonah 3:4, 10). Christians also disagree about whether the gift of prophecy continues at all; Kingdom Essentials Session 5 lays out that disagreement fairly. What everyone can agree on is Paul’s instruction: examine everything, and hold on to what is good.
Everything above has been explanation. Your failures and trials are treasure in clay jars: the cracks let the light through, and make it plain that the power is God’s. God works both kinds of stray lines into the picture, the ones others drew on your page and the ones you drew yourself, as He did with Abraham and John Mark. And He keeps every promise He speaks: not one of His words falls to the ground.
Now you look honestly at your hardest seasons, and then at the promises on the other side of them.
Before you begin Step 17, go back to your Session 8 timeline and look below the line.
Draw a line down the middle of a fresh page. On the left, write the trials and failures that affected you most, a few words each. On the right, across from each one, write what God built in you through it, if you can see it yet. If you can’t, leave the right side blank for now and write, Not yet.
Then pray over the blanks. Ask God to show you what He was doing, and, if any of them still hurt, to heal them. Finally, write one promise from Scripture across the bottom of the page. Step 18 starts there.
Discovery Steps · Steps 17 and 18
Use the Listening Rhythm for each step: ask to be searched; do the work; sit with it; test it with the witnesses; sleep on it.
Step 17 · My Failures
The prompt. What trials or disappointments have most impacted you? Why and how?
What to do. Start with The Experience and your two columns. Include both kinds: trials that happened to you, and failures you caused. Choose the three to five that shaped you most. For each one, write what happened (in as few words as you need), why it hurt, how it shaped you, and what God built in you through it, or “not yet” if you can’t see it. If a failure involved your own sin, note whether you’ve brought it to God. If it involved someone else’s sin against you, note whether forgiveness is still in process. If any memory overwhelms you, stop and follow the Caution above.
What to produce. Three to five trials or failures, each with its what, why, how and what God built. Mark any that are still “not yet.”
Surface answer: “Lost my job in 2009. It was hard, but God got me through it.” (True, and good to say, but it names no hurt, no shaping and nothing God built.)
Deep answer: “Lost my job in 2009. Why it hurt: I’d built my whole identity on being the one who provided, and I hid it from my kids for a month. How it shaped me: it broke my pride, and it’s why I now lead the job-transition ministry at church. What God built: I learned my worth isn’t my paycheck, and I learned to ask for help. Still ‘not yet’: I’m not sure I’ve forgiven the manager who let me go.”
Worked examples.
You’re done when …
Time: at least two days. Don’t rush this one. It’s the hardest step in the course for many people.
Step 18 · My Promises
The prompt. What prophetic words have been spoken over you, or what promises in Scripture do you cling to?
What to do. Make two lists. First, the promises in Scripture God has made personal to you: the verses that keep catching your eye and imagination, or that carried you through a hard season. Look each one up and read it in context. Second, any prophetic words other believers have spoken or prayed over you. For each one, write who spoke it, roughly when, and what they said, as close to their words as you can remember. Then test each prophetic word using the six questions in this session’s What About, and mark it held fast, waiting or set aside. Finally, go back to Step 17 and look for any promise that answers one of your failures. Two cautions. Make sure each verse is a promise rather than a command; a verse that tells you to be something is God’s call to you, not His pledge to you. And if no one has ever spoken a prophetic word over you, say so, and give your time to the Scripture list. Ask your witness, too: What have people said about me, more than once, that might have been God?
What to produce. Three to five Scripture promises (with references, read in context), and any prophetic words you’ve received, each with who, when, what, and your test result.
Surface answer: “Jeremiah 29:11.” (A good verse, but with no context, no story of how God made it personal, and no test. It was also the verse named most often in an actual group that worked through these steps. Read it in context, as this session suggests, and then ask which verse is yours.)
Deep answer: “Isaiah 43:2, ‘When you pass through the waters, I am with you.’ My pastor’s wife read it to me the week of my father’s funeral, and it’s come back to me in every crisis since. A prophetic word: at a conference in 2016, a woman I’d never met told me I’d ‘teach young mothers to hear God’s voice.’ Tested: it strengthened me; it fits my passion from Step 7; my witness confirmed it. Held fast. Two years later I started leading a moms’ group.”
Worked examples.
You’re done when …
Time: at least one day; longer if you need to find old journals or ask people what they remember speaking over you.
Big Ideas
Kingdom Principle
God wastes nothing: He turns your failures into the cracks His light shines through, and not one of His promises falls to the ground.
Closing Prayer (Say this aloud!)
Father, thank You that You didn’t take the page away when I drew the wrong lines, and that You’ve been with me in every trial. I give You my failures and my disappointments. Heal what still hurts, and use every crack to let Your light through. Thank You for every promise You’ve spoken over me. I hold them fast, and I trust that not one of Your words will fall to the ground. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Go Deeper
Accessible
Charles Colson, Born Again (1976). Colson’s own account of his conversion and his months in prison. Honest about failure, and a vivid picture of grace.
Substantial
Jack Deere, Surprised by the Voice of God (1996). A former seminary professor’s careful case for how God speaks today, including prophecy, with practical guidance on testing what you hear.
Academic
Wayne Grudem, The Gift of Prophecy in the New Testament and Today (1988; rev. ed. 2000). A widely cited study of what New Testament prophecy was, how it was evaluated, and how it differs from Scripture. Read it to hear the strongest careful case for testing prophecy rather than dismissing it.
Leading This Session
This may be the most tender session in the course. Read the Caution aloud before you begin, and make clear that no one has to share anything from Step 17. If people do share, receive it without fixing it; don’t rush to the silver lining. Failures come before promises on purpose, so make sure the group gets to Step 18 before you close. The What About will draw out people who have been hurt by careless prophecy; honor that, and walk through the six tests together. Group questions: What crack in your jar has let the most light through? and What promise has God spoken over you that you’re still waiting for? Two notes from an actual group that worked through these steps. At Step 17, almost everyone listed trials that happened to them and very few named a failure of their own; gently invite people to look for one, without pressing anyone to share it. At Step 18, a third of the group weren’t sure they’d ever received a prophetic word. Make sure they leave knowing that a Scripture-only answer is complete. If someone is waiting on a delayed promise, point them to Joseph and Moses, and to the nāpal word study. Don’t offer a reason for the delay. Scripture rarely gives one, and a guessed reason can become a blame mechanism.
If you have questions or comments about this content, or about your personal situation, email us at feedback@thedisciplespath.com.
Next: Session 11, Your Name, asks who God says you are, and then asks you to gather Steps 13–19 into your Shaping statement.
Session 10 · Kingdom Purpose
Your Refining
What did your hardest seasons build in you, and what has God promised on the other side of them?
Treasure in Clay Jars
Failures are the cracks the light comes through, so the power is plainly God’s.
Stray Lines
God doesn’t erase stray lines; He works them into the picture.
Promises Kept
Not one of God’s words falls to the ground. Test prophetic words; hold fast to the good.
So · Now
God wastes nothing: He turns your failures into the cracks His light shines through, and not one of His promises falls to the ground.
Make your two columns, then complete Step 17 (your failures) and Step 18 (your promises).
Discovery Steps · Steps 17 and 18
Kingdom Principle
God wastes nothing: He turns your failures into the cracks His light shines through, and not one of His promises falls to the ground.