Join for a Bible Study that Bro. Duke Jeyaraj leads for Modern Young Working Professionals, the Google Gen, from different companies, at his base in the Tirumalgiri area of Secunderabad, India, once a month, on a selected Sunday evening. Text +91-888-604-0-605 for details. The notes of this Bible Study are at www.freshbiblestudy.wordpress.com
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Join for an evangelistic outreach to the Google Gen in Hyderabad once a month with Duke on a weekend. Call/text +91-888-604-0-605 for details. Ministry reports are at www.g-4mission.blogspot.com
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WELCOME
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Welcome to the official
website of Grabbing the Gadget Generation from Gehenna Mission (G 4 Mission)
– a ministry to modern youth founded by Duke Jeyaraj, a young Indian Engineer
turned Bible College Gold Medalist turned Youth Speaker.
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What The Bible Teaches About Sex - Duke Jeyaraj
A message that Duke gave to Google Genners of NLAG Church in 2007
IF YOU HAVE FAILED…
How youth can handle failure in examinations
The results are out. And you are down and out. The reason? You’ve failed. Flunked.Your friends who’ve passed with flying colors call you up to ask how much you’ve scored. And you turn sour. Or it is possible that you failed to make it to the MBBS course by just 1 mark. Or that Engineering seat in a coveted college by a whisker. How do you deal with such a predicament? Such heart-breaking pain? Here are some Bible-baked steps you might want to consider: 1. DO NOT CONDEMN YOURSELF!
If it is true that you had tried hard and if it is true that you had done your best then – please listen – do not condemn yourself. Swim away from thoughts of suicide! (Each year out scores of dejected students take their lives when the results fail to turn out the way they wanted it to be). If Jesus is the “author of life” who are you to take it away (Acts 3:15)? After having failed in our exams why should we fail in our faith also (by committing suicide)? Jesus has already prayed that we must not (Luke 22:32)!
See your failure through God’s eyes I invite you to see the sad scenario of your flop in the exams, God’s way. Who said that 40 was pass and 39 marks was fail? It was man. The Education Board, correct? How does God view things? Hit the rewind button on the Parable of the Talents that Jesus narrated and you will get to know. The one who is given ten talents is rewarded for getting another ten. The one who had just one talent was taken to task for not bringing any. The point Jesus was making was this: You’ve got to do your best with what’s is given you and that is what will count on the Big Day of Judgment! Suppose, if the fellow who was given five just brought in just four according to Jesus he would not have been “good and faithful.” Let’s switch back to the talk about examinations and marks. If you have had the God-given IQ to score a steepling 90% but scored hey-that-is-more-than-enough 70% because of your laziness, God will tell you that you have not been “faithful.” The world may go bananas over such students, but God will not be impressed. Not one bit. Absolutely! According to His Plumbline you have “failed.” On the other hand if you had the Heaven-endowed capacity to score just 35% and you burned the mid-night oil to make a 39%, all of Heaven will stand to give you a thunderous applause! Celestial cheers will certainly await you! If the academic world and your parents brand you as a failure in such a case, take it in your stride. What God thinks about you only finally counts (Gal 1:10). You have not failed in God’s eyes! (I have borrowed this brilliant thought from the writings of Dr. Lilian Stanley of Blessing Youth Mission).
2. DO NOT BE CASUAL HEREAFTER!
If you’ve goofed up in your exams, take a good look at what you had done in the academic year that has just gone by. And analyse how you have passed the time. Ask yourself these questions (it does not matter it they make you sit on pins and needles): Have I been casual in my approach to studies? Have I taken things too lightly? Have I been over-confident (Tried to crack and consume the entire syllabi the night before the exam and hoped that God will give you a photographic memory? Merely glanced through the worked out problems/numericals a few times out instead of solving them step-by-step time and again?)
Tiny Ai – Titanic Lesson A Bible story comes to my mind at this juncture. The story of how tiny Ai defeated the mighty Israelites who had just soundly beat Jericho “and all its mighty warriors” (Josh 6:2 NLT). The spies who returned from inspecting the miniature city of Ai cockily had said, “It’s a small town, and it won’t take more than two or three thousand of us to destroy it. There’s no need for all of us to go there” (Josh 7:3 NLT). That presumptuous attitude was the reason for the prompt defeat. May I humbly suggest that it is quite possible that the reason for your failure in your entrance exams or School Final exams is your over-confident attitude? God allows defeats in our lives to teach us lessons which we will not learn otherwise (Check out Lev 26:17 & Duet 28:25). You know it.
Copied? Come clean! Or check if you have copied in your exams – an ungodly thing to do for which we can have no excuse whatsoever – in a desperate attempt to pass. But when the results came you heart skipped a beat – you had miserably failed. Gamaliel told those who were working overtime to oppose the followers of Jesus not to break into sweat. His logic was this: that which is not of God will automatically fail (Acts 5:38). Any of our efforts outside the will of God to ‘somehow pass’ is bound to ultimately fail too. Even if you have passed after having copied that doesn’t make it right, buddy. Repent and ask God to cleanse you. Never do it again. Dogged determination! Drape yourself with a dogged determination to work hard as you get ready to take your exams again. “Hard work never killed anybody,” our School Principal often told us. And I found it to be true when I put in those late nights of hard work to pass my calculus papers! “Nothing is so common as unsuccessful men with talent. They lack only determination,” wrote Charles Swindoll (The source of this quote is misplaced). He was right. The next time you have a crack in the same set of exams you have flunked cut away all the unnecessary and excessive TV-watching, Internet-browsing and Music-listening. Concentrate. It will show in your results if you do. Surely!
3. DO NOT BE CLOSE-MINDED!
God’s unique plan for you! Just because you did not make the grade in the MBBS entrance, you need not blindly conclude that you should stay at home and take a shot at the Medical entrances, the next year out. You don’t have to jump to such close-minded options! The world we live in is big. The options available before the students are diverse. If it is true that God’s got variant life-plans for each of us, then it is definitely not possible that all of us should necessarily end up as doctors. Or Engineers. God’s plan for Jeremiah wasn’t the same as his plan for Ezekiel. Or God would not swap His plan for Paul with what he had worked out for Peter. Oh yes! God chose Jeremiah to prophecy to the people of Judah left behind in Judah after the Babylonians invaded them, while God had Ezekiel prophecy to the people of Judah who were carried away into exile in Babylon – did you know? (Read Jer. 29:11). Paul was to preach to the Gentiles while Peter was to go after the Jews in God’s scheme of things.
Both Books and Life Learnt! North India’s Christian colleges look for applications from Christian students. Who knows? You – a believer from a South Indian State or North East Indian State – may be God’s Moses or a Daniel or an Esther – in your campus. Esther, a Jew, went to Persia to join its National Institute of Fashion Technology (Esh 2:12)! Moses joined ranks with the Egyptian University (Acts 7:22)! God gave Daniel and his pals who studied in the far-from-home Babylonian University “knowledge and skill in both books and life” according to the Peterson Version (Dan 1:17, The Message)! I studied in Uttar Pradesh’s Allahabad when I could have settled down to study in Vellore (my hometown) or close-by Chennai itself. And like Daniel and his pals I too learnt “both books and life”. My burden for bringing Christ and His Word to today’s trendy youth was born in that needy campus in the heart of North India. If I just sat and sulked when I failed to get into a college with my preferred branch of Engineering – Chemical Engineering – just think what I would have missed!
Listen – We have got a God who has never once failed. In anything (I Chron 28:20). And you can bet that he will carry us through the tumultuous times such as plus two exam failures and preferred-course entrance exam flops!
