A lot of the time we Christians like to talk about the heroes of our faith in the Bible. But really, the Bible isn’t a book full of moral heroes, it’s a book full of moral failures. It’s a book full of moral failures and how God worked on them, with them, and through them anyway because God can change people and/or just work with what they give Him regardless. While not everyone in the Bible was a complete failure and some of them did quite well, I’d like to talk about some of the struggles and failings of a few prominent people of faith. We’ll look at Hebrews 11, where we see a list of people noted for their actions by faith in God, though when you read their stories in Scripture, we see it took some of them quite some time, pain, and pretty bad mistakes before they got there.
In James 2:3, Abraham is called “the friend of God,” but the Bible also tells us that Abraham sometimes behaved as if he didn’t trust God like a friend would. Abraham’s wife Sarah is said to have judged God faithful in Hebrews 11:11, but at one point she didn’t seem to think God was going to do what He’d said. See Genesis 15-16 for a painful account of their doubt.
In Judges 6-8 Gideon won a battle stacked severely against him because God told Him he could, though at first he struggled with believing he was the “mighty man of valor” that God had said he was, and later ended up making some vengeful and detrimental decisions.
In Judges 13-16, we see Samson didn’t much care about the position to which God had predestined him, and his participation in God’s deliverance of His people was at times quite involuntary.
David is called “a man after God’s own heart” in 1 Samuel 13:14, but David was also an adulterer and a murderer, among other significant issues. See 2 Samuel 11:1-12:14 for part of those offenses.
The Bible is quite honest about the people within it. These people were real people with real struggles, things that people still struggle with today. If God can work in, on, and through these people’s lives, then He can certainly work in ours!
Related:
God’s Forgiveness – Aaron the Priest
Sovereignty of God and Volition of Man
God’s Forgiveness – Paul the Apostle
Learning from Failure
Your Redeemable Past