That is Why You Fail
In solidarity with my sister, this week I am going to expand on the scene Nikki referenced in her last blog Forget Yoda, Just Try because in addition to the profound thoughts she shared with “Do or do not - there is no try,” there is another point that should be emphasized.
And so - I shall widen the net.
Obi-Wan, Luke’s Jedi Master teacher, has just died, and the Force leads Luke to the swamp of Dagobah. There Luke will meet his new Jedi Master and teacher, Master Yoda; however, rather than the serene, profound first meeting Luke was expecting, his X-wing plane crashes in the swamp.
Nevertheless, Master Yoda proceeds to try to teach Luke to harness the power of the Force, but Luke is a whiny quitter who would rather throw a tantrum than listen to Yoda. For those whom I have now offended - I’m not sorry. Luke IS a whiny quitter who would rather throw a tantrum than listen to the wise green puppet who knows everything - especially how to growl and shake his head in disappointment like a BOSS!
Luke is balancing Yoda while using the Force to levitate a stone, and Luke’s droid R2D2 starts beeping and bopping because Luke’s X-wing is sinking into the swamp.
Here’s the transcript of what happens next:
LUKE
Oh, no. We'll never get it out
now.
Yoda stamps his foot in irritation.
YODA
So certain are you. Always with
you it cannot be done. Hear you
nothing that I say?
Luke looks uncertainly out at the ship.
LUKE
Master, moving stones around is
one thing. This is totally
different.
YODA
No! No different! Only different
in your mind. You must unlearn
what you have learned.
LUKE
(focusing, quietly)
All right, I'll give it a try.
YODA
No! Try not. Do. Or do not.
There is no try.
Luke closes his eyes and concentrates on thinking the ship out. Slowly, the X-wing's nose begins to rise above the water. It hovers for a moment and then slides back, disappearing once again.
LUKE
(panting heavily)
I can't. It's too big.
YODA
Size matters not. Look at me.
Judge me by my size, do you?
Hm? Mmmm.
Luke shakes his head.
YODA
And well you should not. For my
ally in the Force. And a powerful
ally it is. Life creates it, makes
it grow. Its energy surrounds us
and binds us. Luminous beings
are we...
(Yoda pinches
Luke's shoulder)
... not this crude matter.
(a sweeping gesture)
You must feel the Force around you.
(gesturing)
Here, between you... me... the
tree... the rock... everywhere!
Yes, even between this land and
that ship!
LUKE
(discouraged)
You want the impossible.
Quietly Yoda turns toward the X-wing fighter. With his eyes closed and his head bowed, he raises his arm and points at the ship. Soon, the fighter rises above the water and moves forward as Artoo beeps in terror and scoots away. The entire X-wing moves majestically, surely, toward the shore. Yoda stands on a tree root and guides the fighter carefully down toward the beach.
Luke stares in astonishment as the fighter settles down onto the shore. He walks toward Yoda.
LUKE
I don't... I don't believe it.
YODA
That is why you fail.
There are several takeaways from this scene we can apply to our walk with Christ in addition to the one Nikki already wrote about, and all of them stem back to Luke and Yoda’s final exchange of:
Luke: I don’t…I don’t believe it.
Yoda: That is why you fail.
We don’t believe it, and that is why we fail. Not the failure of trying our best and still falling short, but the failure that comes with not believing God is who He says He is, and can and will do what He says He will do.
We don’t believe that God…
Is in everything.
Has the power to affect our lives.
Cares about us at all, never mind enough to bother with the things that matter to us.
Is always in control - even when we refuse to give Him our lives.
Let’s take a closer look at Luke’s failure.
When the X-wing first sinks, Luke whines that he’ll never get it out, and Yoda’s response is, “So certain you are. Always with you it cannot be done.”
It’s the same with us, isn’t it? When something goes wrong, or there’s a very serious issue, we think God can’t tackle it. Why? God created the universe out of NOTHING, but we think he can’t handle things like us losing our job, trying to find a place to live, or putting our kids through college. That kind of unbelief is for those who do NOT walk in Jesus’ footsteps.
Remember Elijah? The prophet who went toe-to-toe with King Ahab and his prophets of Baal? They cried out to their god, who remained silent (no surprise there, as he didn’t exist), and then it was Elijah’s turn. But rather than just call down fire from heaven, Elijah set the stage by dousing the altar and sacrifice in enough water to lift Noah’s ark off its landing site. The non-believers laughed and said it couldn't be done (figuratively speaking), and Elijah showed them it could by calling on the ONE (the Force if you will). Without hesitation - BOOM! The bonfire was ready for the s’mores!
With evidence like that - why don’t we believe?
Next, Luke focuses on the SIZE of the problem. Luke can move a stone around, but an X-wing is massively bigger. Yoda tells Luke size doesn’t matter, and the only difference between a stone and an X-wing is in Luke’s mind because the power and strength they harness to move these objects exists all around them and in them. The Force, Yoda says, is his powerful ally.
Our Force is God - THE most powerful ally there is! There is a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln that says, “Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side, for God is always right.” There is also a story surrounding George Washington and the American Revolution. When the Continental Army was trying to survive the winter at Valley Forge with threadbare clothes, holey shoes, and dwindling food and supplies, a young soldier came running up to a fellow soldier in excitement and exclaimed, “We are going to win the war!” His fellow soldier scoffed in disbelief because by then morale was so low that all seemed lost, and surviving the winter was probably not going to happen much less win the war. But he asked anyway, “How do you know?” The first fellow answered, “Because I just saw General Washington on his knees praying!”
Romans 8:31 says, “What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?”
How shamefully quickly we forget the power of our God when faced with a smoke-and-mirrors problem of this world.
This leads me to Luke’s final failure. Luke says to Yoda, “You want the impossible.”
We say the same to God, don’t we? God wants us to spend time with Him, but we’re too busy. God wants us to forgive those who hurt us, but we can’t because the pain is too deep. God wants us to tithe, have a ministry, spend time with other believers, etc., and we can’t, we can’t, we can’t. We don’t. We say it is impossible.
Then the oft-quoted Matthew 19:26 pops up. “Jesus looked at them and said, ‘With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.’”
Matthew 19:26 has become a cliché; an over-quoted, oversimplified representation of the power of God.
I growl and shake my head like Yoda, and I encourage us to look closer at what that means.
Hebrews 10:4 puts it into perspective: “It is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.” THAT is what is impossible - for us in our sinful nature to be restored to God.
But Jesus, God WITH us, accomplished just that on the cross.
We HAVE to believe it! We stand in defiance of Satan. We are the gatekeepers who say, “This far, and no farther.” We are the ambassadors, the voice crying in the wilderness, and the light on the hill.
We are David asking, “Who is this uncircumcised Philistine that he should defy the armies of the living God?” (1 Samuel 17:26)
David, whom the Bible calls a man after God’s own heart, never wavered in his belief. Never. God was always with him - even when he sinned.
I’ve been reading a book titled Goliath Must Fall: Winning the Battle Against Your Giants by Louie Giglio, and in it, Louie talks about the famous scene between Goliath and David, and how David kills Goliath. My favorite part of that scene is when David says to Goliath, “You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. This day the Lord will deliver you into my hands, and I’ll strike you down and cut off your head. This very day I will give the carcasses of the Philistine army to the birds and the wild animals, and the whole world will know that there is a God in Israel,” (1 Samuel 17:45-46). David is so tough! He’s so confident about God! In Louie’s book, he points out we always think WE’RE David in that story. But WE are not - JESUS is!
I love that! It brings me back full circle to Master Yoda and Luke. I once heard the difference between knowledge and wisdom as this: Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad! Luke knows the Force. He knows it exists, he knows it’s there, and he knows he can use it. But he has no wisdom of the Force. He doesn’t allow it to consume him, he doesn’t allow himself to be absorbed by it, and he certainly doesn’t have the inherent understanding of it that Yoda has.
This is exactly the way we are with God.
God is all around us, in everything and a part of everything, and we as children of God have the right to be saturated in God’s love and power.
But we have to BELIEVE it.
If you find yourself failing to see God in every aspect of your life, or feel His presence in good times and bad, or see His guidance and/or direction in the decisions you make, or putting off spending time with Him because you can’t, or any number of other things that cause you to be disconnected from God…
If we fail - we know why.
AMEN.
