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He Shall Not Fail Nor Be Discouraged

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Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D.C. · Aug 12, 1909

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 86, No. 32.

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“He Shall Not Fail Nor Be Discouraged”

SCHOOL was out, but one boy lingered. When the room was cleared, he made his way to the teacher’s desk.
“Well, John, what is it?”
“It’s no use,” said John, the tears choking his words, “I just can’t do these examples. I don’t understand a thing we have been trying to do, and my work is all wrong. If it wasn’t for having the other boys laugh at me, I would go back. I can’t get anything right.”
“Let me see your paper,” said the teacher. “See, this one is right.”
“Maybe it is, but I don’t know how I did it, and the rest are all wrong.”
“No, here is another that is almost right. You began well, and made just a trifling mistake. Let us correct that, and see how well it will come out.”
It would be too much to say that the teacher showed John how to do the work. He was too weary and discouraged to understand very much of what she showed him. But one thing he understood—the teacher had confidence in his ability to succeed.
“She thinks I can do it, and I believe I can,” was about the way he put the case. “The teacher is a brick! She has faith in me.”
That the teacher was not discouraged about him rebuked his own discouragement concerning himself, and gave him power to succeed. He was not a brilliant scholar, but he was a faithful student—a worker who needed just the encouragement his teacher gave him, to add hopefulness and outlook to the work.
Years afterward, in a time of perplexity and doubt, the lesson came back to him. He had suffered disappointment, and his faith was sorely tested. He was tempted not to try again. Then he found the prophetic words, “He shall not fail nor be discouraged.”
“I wonder if that means that God has faith in us,” he asked. “That is what it seems to mean. ‘A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench. . . .’ He shall not fail nor be discouraged.’”
His own lamp had been burning dimly enough, and sometimes had given smoke instead of light. He had been bruised, wronged, disappointed. Had God any oil for a lamp so nearly dry? Could God bind up so bruised a reed? Would God count himself to have failed if one poor man like him should let his light flicker and go out, or if a reed so bruised should die?
“He shall not fail nor be discouraged.” The words came back to him with the clear ring of assurance. He remembered the day when he stood, a big boy, ashamed to cry, but humiliated and discouraged, before the teacher’s desk, and how her faith in him had given him faith in himself. Man that he was, he sobbed again before the Great Teacher who giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not:—
“O God, if thou art not discouraged concerning me, I will not give up in despair of myself!”
Whenever periods of depression have come upon him since then,—and there have been many of them,—he has recalled these words, and they have always helped him, until now the habit of courageous fighting has become fixed, and a clear faith and a hopeful spirit mark his every-day life.—Selected.