You Messed Up at Work: Is the Power of God Really Made Perfect in Your Weakness?

Some thoughts regarding Paul's theology of failure, what it means to embrace weakness in our work, and why "washing our nets" is so important.

**painting above is “Hawaiian Fisherman” by Lionel Walden.

I will never forget where I was the evening that I received an email with the subject line, “ATTN: Ben Nussbaum lied to us”, with my CEO & VP of Sales cc’d on the message. It was a bit of a “pit in my stomach” moment (to say the least), and for the first time in my sales career, I was facing one of those watershed rites of passage as a young professional: failure.

To spare you the large majority of details, I sold a software deal where I had misled a customer. While not intentionally malicious, the point was that I had failed - and that I certainly had a bit of runny egg on my face (as did my boss, and my boss’s boss). I’d have to face the residual fallout of my failure, come Monday morning.

Now, 24-year-old me went into quite the tailspin that weekend — at a church men’s retreat, of all places! I experienced a panic attack for the first time. I asked a couple dozen people to pray for me throughout those two days. I went back and listened to the customer call over and over again to see if I really was culpable (shoutout to call recording software - I was indeed culpable). The sterling reputation of professional success that I strove after each and every day came crumbling down in a moment. I had failed. There wasn’t any way to reverse the failure.

If you are reading this, my assumption is that you have faced some sort of professional failure in your career. Failure in the workplace feels paralyzing. Many of the working professionals I get to live alongside here in Chicago would voice the same. Oftentimes our professional blunders feel like a close relative to one of the Hebrew definitions of sin: khata’, meaning “to fail” or “to miss the mark.” The honest among you would say that “failing” and “missing the mark” in your work is almost an everyday occurrence.

And yet failure typically leaves us frozen, reeling, and panicked. Why is that? Why are Christians so ill-equipped to face and deal with their professional failures?

My suspicion? The people of God have a hard time embracing a Pauline theology of “weakness”. We believe that “embracing weakness” applies only to “matters of the heart” (sin against a spouse or friend, pride/greed/lust/envy, errors between us and the Lord, etc). We may be willing to admit a failure in the confines of our own quiet times; we’re quite sheepish to admit failure before a customer, a boss, or a colleague.

For Saint Paul, this would not make any sense. Each and every one of Paul’s failures were occasions for the public nature of grace to be showcased:

“…but on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses— though if I should wish to boast, I would not be a fool, for I would be speaking the truth; but I refrain from it, so that no one may think more of me than he sees in me or hears from me” (2 Cor. 12:5-6).

"But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 12:9-10).

Paul’s theology of failure is not limited to his second letter to the Corinthians:

“But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong…” (1 Cor. 1:27)

“The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. But I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life” (1 Tim. 1:15-16)

“For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! (Rom. 7:23-25).

Paul makes a case — in nearly all of his epistles — that our failures and weaknesses are actually the exact things we are to boast about. A theology of weakness is not limited to our “spiritual lives”, reserved only for a confession to a friend about a shameful, passing thought we had this week. For Paul’s part, the Christian’s theology of weakness must make its way to the workplace — anything else would have been a logical fallacy.

Now, I want to address where “embracing” a theology of weakness can also go off the rails. Our culture has embraced an absurdist, cathartic romanticization of failure: “I stink, you stink, the world stinks, we all mess up, we all stink.” Failure has become almost a kind of proxy-excuse for the fallenness of mankind. “We’re all just a bunch of failures. Oh well.” Failure for failure’s sake is just a depressing spin cycle of modern meaninglessness. But, this is not the same kind of “embracing of failure” that Paul is talking about.

Perhaps Jon Foreman — Switchfoot lead singer and the great Christian alt-rock poet of our time — can shed some light (pun intended) on what the Apostle Paul means, from his song “Where the Light Shines Through”:

You try to keep the wound camouflaged. The stitches heal, but the years are lost. Another bottle on the shelf can't numb the pain.

Why're you running from yourself now? You can't run away.

Your scars shine like dark stars. Your wounds are where the light shines through. So let's go there, to that place where we sing these broken prayers where the light shines through.

The wound is where the light shines through. The wound is where the light shines through.”

What I needed to know as a scared, 24-year-old trying to deal with my first big professional failure was that “the wound is where the light shines through.” Or, as Paul was conveying, “the power of God was made perfect in my weakness.”

My encouragement to each of you is to see your failures — whether they be sins of omission, commission, or just plain-old messing up — as an occasion for the grace of God to be on full display in the life of one of His saints. Otherwise, it is possible that you might continue to preach a “grace” or a “gospel” of your own accomplishments, but under the guise of a false humility. This is why most of the bible studies you’ve ever been to tend to deal with very surface-level sins: we’re scared to tell one another our failures. We’re allergic to real, bona-fide weakness.

Yet, failure is the very space where testimony begins. Anecdotally, I thought it was interesting that as much as I shared the gospel with my colleagues over the years, the moments that gave them the best sense of my Holy and Powerful God were the moments where I was willing to admit my own failures. I’ll never forget admitting this exact instance to a colleague who then laughed and retorted, “it’s actually helpful for me to know you’re not perfect, but you still find a way to be OK with that.”

While her analysis was overly-generous, the point was that her sense of God had increased in light of learning about my own failure. In other words: we cannot sing to our colleagues about “how amazing grace is” unless they see some tangible evidence of our desperate need for it. Our platitudes about grace, mercy, and forgiveness have to become vocationally enfleshed. This is why we “boast in the wound” (my Pauline paraphrase) — because it is the precise location through which the grace of God shines brightly.

God made a point to teach me all those years ago about failure. To put an exclamation mark on the weekend, one of the guest speakers for the retreat was the Reverend Charlie Dates, of Progressive Baptist Church here in Chicago. If you know Dr. Dates, you know that his voice may be the closest thing to prophecy you’ve ever heard in your life. I found it telling that the text he chose to preach on was from Luke chapter 5, when Jesus called his disciples to become fishers of men.

What’s fascinating (and what Dr. Dates aptly/prophetically pointed out) is that Jesus calls these fishermen to be his disciples on the heels of vocational failure. The disciples are “washing their nets” because, as Simon Peter said, “…we toiled all night and took nothing!” (Lk. 5:5) They had failed. They had nothing to show for their midnight angling session. They would bring home no money for their families from the fish market that day.

Dr. Dates summarized it this way: “the only thing that qualifies you to be a follower of Jesus is that you have failed!” Our professional failures, our sins, our khata’ — these are the spaces for the name of Jesus to be made great in our lives, lest we preach a gospel of our own abilities and adequacies (…a false gospel).

May your weakness & failure be an occasion for the grace of God to be made manifest in your life. As the old Audio Adrenaline hymn goes:

“In your weakness, HE is stronger. In your darkness, HE shines through. When you're crying, HE is your comfort. When you're all alone, HE is carrying you.

I get down. HE lifts me up. I get down. HE lifts me up.”

Amen. Be weak.

Keep going.