December 3, 2025 Devo

You learn more through failures than you do through successes. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but it’s true. Think about things that you messed up. Think about decisions you made that were really dumb. Think about things that you did that you now look back and say, “I’ll NEVER do that again!” Your failures taught you. Painful lessons are lessons we remember for a long time. It’s like Mark Twain once said, “If a cat jumps on a hot stove, it won’t jump on a hot stove again. It won’t jump on a cold stove either!” Cats learn that stoves aren’t something you ought to jump on.
But failures are only treated like failures if there is some kind of pain or consequence to them. Take a look again at what the psalmist says at the beginning of this verse. “My suffering was good for me, for it taught me to pay attention…” It was the suffering that taught the lesson. It was his suffering that made him say, “Maybe I ought to do this God’s way.” It’s a life principle that I think most of us understand. Except when it comes to other people.
Many of us have a hard time letting other people fail. Our kids forget their homework, so we take it to school for them. Our grandkids didn’t save their money for the fair like they were supposed to, so we reward them by giving them more money. Our employees or co-workers don’t follow through with what they were supposed to do, so we do it for them. Then we wonder why they do the same things over and over again. Why should people change their behavior if there are never any consequences for their actions? By rescuing them, we are teaching them that they can make any kind of decision that they want or be as irresponsible as they want, and someone will bail them out. By sparing them the suffering, we are robbing them of the lesson. What’s funny is, we often get frustrated with THEM, but WE are the problem! If we want them to learn, we have to let them fail. We have to let them know that it’s a failure by allowing them to suffer the consequences of that failure.
God loved the psalmist. He loved him enough to put guidelines in place for the psalmist to live by so that he could live a full and satisfying life. But God also loved him deeply enough not to spare him from the suffering that came if he tried to live outside those guidelines. It was the suffering that brought him back to his senses. It was the suffering that brought him back to God. It was the suffering that taught him that life was full of choices and consequences, and he needed to choose carefully. We would do well to love the people around us that much, too. That’s God’s Word for you today.