07/06/2026
Message: Lord over my failures
Preacher: Dr Phuthego.
Main scripture; Luke 5:1-5
Jesus is Lord over creation, over our mistakes. He is Lord over our failures. There’s a type of failure you experience when you’ve still done your best. Failure isn’t the end of your story.
God is sovereign over our mistakes, He redirects our steps towards His ultimate purpose.
3 foundations;
1. Gods redeeming grace, Psalm 145:4
God doesn’t abandon us when we make mistakes, He catches us when we fall.
2. We are not defined by our failures, Proverbs 24:16
How do you rise up after you’ve failed?
3. Our weakness is His power, 2 Corinthians 12:9
Failure strips away self reliance. Sometimes God allows us to fail so that we can rely wholly on Him.
in this text, Peter and his crew were professionals, despite their skill and hard work, they had nothing to show for it. They had toiled all night and caught no fish.
Disappointment often leads to spiritual exhaustion.
When you fail, you clean up and pack, it’s a norm but Jesus Has a plan for you. In your failure don’t stay away from Him.
Things to note:
1. God steps into our emptiness.
God doesn’t interject in your life when you’re winning, He shows up after disappointments has settled in. He stepped into Peter’s boat. God isn’t afraid of your emptiness, what didn’t work in your life. He enters after the loss. When our nets are empty, thats when He steps in,
The majority of time, the things that have hurt us the most isn’t that we’ve sinned much but that we’ve tried so much, and yet nothing to show.
He is Lord in our isolation, in our loneliness, in our most frustrating moments. When you’re empty, expect Him to come.
2. He is Lord who challenges our experiences.
Jesus Christ shows up and Simon gives Jesus the boat to preach to the people. Jesus used Peter’s empty boat as a pulpit to preach to the people. Jesus can use your boat to turn it into a testimony.
When Jesus says launch into the deep, this is an audacious claim. Jesus is the carpenter and Simon is a fisherman, a professional of note. Simon has been doing this all his life yet failed. Jesus here is saying, “Peter! Trust my revelation over your experience”
Peter responds with an honest line, “I hear what you’re saying but I’m a professional at this, we’ve toiled all night and caught nothing”.
Sometimes we fail because we rely on what we have seen, every now and then we can’t get a miracle if we’re stuck on what was. We doubt God because of what we know. When God wants to raise the level of your expectation, He’s going to open doors for you because of your resume.
When God wants to expand you, He won’t look at your resume.
According to Simon’s resume, the best time to catch fish was in the evening, Yet Jesus tells him to launch out into the deep in the day.
We need to surrender our experiences and our resumes to God, in order to experience the miraculous.
The problem with us is we’re comfortable with the shallow water, move away from the shallow water and launch into the deep. In the deep there’s no tadpoles that you find in the shallow waters.
He is Lord who steps into our experiences, God wants to take you deeper, let Him be God.
3. God commands us to execute,
A miracle didn’t take place because Peter worked harder or had a great work ethic, a powerful prayer life or that he was being obedient to the devotionals. The miracle happened because Peter obeyed again, He followed instructions.
It was the same net, same boat, same water, the only difference was the one WORD from the Lord. The one Word from Jesus made the boat to be fu to the point it was sinking.
When you obey God, lives that are attached to you benefit from it. One word from God brought the harvest, a net breaking harvest. God specializes in taking our empty moments and turning them into abundance.
4. He calls us from failure to evangelism.
Jesus gave a revelation about catching fish, it was time for Peter to realize who Jesus was. He became a fisher of men. Jesus shows up, and calls us in our failures.
Jesus gives you your assignment in your failure. When failing, it’s not time to make your exit, but to draw to Him. Failure doesn’t mean you’ve missed to hear God, it may mean it’s time to deepen your dependence on Him. God might want you to develop your language that, “nevertheless at His word, you’ll do it”.
If we surrender our brokenness to Him, He has the supernatural ability to turn our great failures into powerful testimonies. He will push you forward.
