Is it wrong to want to be successful? Not necessarily. Success can be good, if it’s achieved in godly ways. If not, it’s thinly disguised idolatry, which is always a failure, no matter how widely we’re praised.
Success is measured differently in the eyes of God. For sure what He values most is not what people call success, but what God Himself calls faithfulness: “Now it is required that those who have been given a trust must prove faithful” (1 Corinthians 4:2).
He could’ve said we “must prove successful,” but He didn’t. He said we must prove faithful.
We all have limited control over our success. I have written 68 books, but I have never had the power to make them best sellers. Some are, and some aren’t and never will be. Some are out of print and will never be back. What I could control was my hard work and diligent research and honest efforts and prayers that God would use them as He saw fit. That applies as much to the books that I seldom get letters about and are out of print as it does to the bestsellers.
I know a lot of writers, some of whom are extremely successful. But most are never satisfied. If your book sells ten thousand copies, you wish it were one hundred thousand.
If you sell a million, you want it to be ten million. If your book lands on the bestseller list, you wish it were number one; if it makes number one, you want it to stay there. If we get what we wish for, instead of being happy, we usually wish for more.
But if pleasing God is our aim, our desire for success is on solid ground. Jesus put it this way in His parable: “His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master’” (Matthew 25:23).
May we stive to be found faithful with what God has put us over. In doing so, we will experience the joy of our Master in the fun times and the not-so-fun times.
J. R. Miller wrote, “Christ is building His kingdom with earth’s broken things. Men want only the strong, the successful, the victorious, the unbroken, in building their kingdoms; but God is the God of the unsuccessful, of those who have failed… He can lift earth’s saddest failure up to heaven’s glory.”
Regardless of whether we are successful in the world’s eyes, and whoever we do and don’t please, let’s seek to please the Audience of One, whose “opinion” is truth and is ultimately the One that matters.
