As you may have noticed, this season, we’re talking a lot about failure. About falling. Over on the blog, I wrote a piece about the single most important piece of advice for when that happens. It’s this: Get back up. You can read it here.
In that piece, though, I mentioned something in passing that I want to hone in on here. It was that while we have to recognize we’re all going to fall, there are some failures that are well within our control. Sure, things will pop up out of nowhere – there are always those struggles that surprise us. But those aren’t the ones I want to talk about here. The ones I want to address are those that we know to be a problem – we’ve identified them – and yet we still give in. We still give them control.
For some, that may be pride.
It may be procrastination.
It may be drinking too much.
It may be porn.
It may be [fill in the blank].
Whatever it is, I think too many times we fall because we haven’t decided to fully make war on the issues in our lives that are obvious to us. I know that’s been true in my life. I’ve recently cut something completely out of my life that I had identified for years as a problem but wasn’t willing to take the drastic measures I needed to loosen its grip on my life and stop failing because of it.
I think this is exactly what Jesus is talking about in Matthew 5:29: “If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.”
Friend, we all have eye issues. Your eye issue may look different than mine (pun intended). But whatever that issue is, we can’t be afraid to take drastic measures to “gouge it out.” If we fail to do so, we can be our own worst enemy.
But Jesus is offering us an answer to those problems. That answer isn’t always easy. It wasn’t for me. But can I be honest? Since I’ve made my own drastic decision, my life has been transformed. I didn’t fully even realize how much my issue was holding me back until I “cut it out.”