Welcome to Kingdom Culture #5! Let’s talk about success. Everybody wants to be successful… including Christians. Everybody wants to accomplish something. We want to have a good job and be able to afford nice things. Or maybe we are a little more spiritual and we want to win souls for Christ and become a preacher, evangelist or apostle. Church leaders want to have a growing congregation and a big building. We all have a goal; a vision in our head of what success will look like.
The question is: Is it God’s vision? Does God have the same vision of success that we do? Let’s be honest, is our vision that much different from everybody else’s. Does the man who doesn’t serve Christ not also dream of riches and titles and big organizations? Is what drives us not the same as what drives them?
I have at least five friends who have special needs children and through them I’ve learned a lot about this accomplishment culture that is in our veins. I see the pain that parents go through when their child cannot do what other children can do. I see the fears of how society will treat their children. Will they have a successful life?
This hit me one day so hard and I had to take a step back and ask God to see things through His eyes. Does God measure the success of a human life by their accomplishments? If my child cannot read or write or even talk by a certain age does God see failure? NO! God sees more! Jesus sees the human being that He died for; that He accomplished all for, so that that precious child could call Him friend.
The value of a life is not in accomplishments. The value of a life is how much God paid to redeem that life. The value is the life of His Son. There is no other qualifier. We don’t have to achieve to be valued. We walk in great purpose and destiny because we are already valued!
Let us examine ourselves. If in our hearts we worship success, if pictures like the one above turn us on, then let us ask God to adjust our hearts and tune it to His value-system. There is a popular way of thinking that says that we must project success to attract those who don’t know God. It actually does the exact opposite. There is even a pastor in my country that puts up a billboard on the highway with a picture of his children and their academic qualifications every time one of them does well! I am sure he is well-intentioned but I am not so sure that that is the message that God wants to send. Was Jesus successful according to world standards? The truth is, He lived a humble life and died a most undignified death. He lived his life not for Himself but to please His Father.
Any culture that idolizes success and glorifies anything but the King of Glory is not the culture of the Kingdom. It is some other culture. Our Father runs out to meet the failure like the prodigal son and holds a homecoming celebration in heaven! Our King delights in using the frail, weak, foolish things of this earth to confound the wise!
We aren’t trying to draw attention to our great accomplishments mistakenly thinking that this will attract others to our God. Rather, like Paul, we should boast in our weaknesses so that the power of God may shine through us. We ought to humbly and sacrificially expend our lives to glorify Christ and Christ alone!
