• http://lockwoodchurch.org/media (Listening time: 27 minutes.)

Ann Arbor has one of the weirdest museums on the planet: The Museum of Failed Products. The museum’s shelves and aisles look like a supermarket—except there’s only one of each item. But these items aren’t in a supermarket nowadays: they are all failures, products withdrawn from sale after a few weeks or months, because almost nobody wanted them.

Clairol’s A Touch of Yogurt shampoo is there. It was an abject failure. Gillette’s short-lived For Oily Hair Only is also there, a few feet from a now-empty bottle of Pepsi AM Breakfast Cola (born 1989; died 1990). The museum’s exhibits include discontinued brands of caffeinated beer; TV dinners by the toothpaste manufacturer Colgate; Fortune Snookies, a short-lived line of fortune cookies for dogs; and self-heating soup cans that had a tendency to explode in customers’ faces.

If the museum has a message, it’s that failure isn’t a rarity; it’s the norm. According to some estimates, the failure rate for new products is as high as 90 percent.

I wonder what the failure rate of Jesus’s people is? My guess would be 100%. The question is not whether we will fail but what we’ll do after we’ve failed. Because of God’s grace, there is an “after.”

In this message we look at John 21:1-22 and think about the third key for winning homes: Taking advantage of second-chance opportunities.