Welcome to the InTouch podcast with Charles Stanley for Thursday, August 17th.

No one likes to fail, but sometimes it can be the best thing for us.

Here's part two of the message explaining how failure can be the first step to victory.

Many of us could testify today that out of our defeats, out of our desperate failures,

out of our continuous defeats, God has brought to birth the greatest sense of freedom,

the greatest sense of liberty, the greatest sense of victory, the greatest awareness of spiritual

success in our life that was born after continuous over and over and over again attempting to ward off

spiritual defeat and spiritual failure. It's when finally we gave up in utter desperation

through up the white flag of surrender and said, God, I can't try any longer, I quit.

That was the first day of the beginning of the best days of our life.

So I want to say to you, my friend, that failure and defeat can be the beginning of success

and victim your Christian life. So I want you to jot a few things down if you will concerning

our spiritual defeats that we oftentimes experience. Number one, that is that these defeats

sometimes are engineered by God. Can you blame it on Satan? They're engineered by God.

When you think about who the Apostle Paul was and you read Corinthians and Galatians and see his

background and the heritage he had, let me tell you something, the Apostle Paul, Saul of Tarsus was

very proud of his heritage, of his background, of his accomplishments and of his achievements.

He was on his way to drag more Christians out of their homes and put them in jail when God

finally brought about the ultimate defeat of the self-will determined, sincerely, wrong man.

It took defeat, failure, humiliation, embarrassment, pain to bring into the beginning of the first

best days of his life. Secondly, I believe that defeat is oftentimes essential to God fulfilling

his great purpose in our life. He engineers it, secondly, it is essential to God accomplishing

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