Your vision of the future and your understanding of success guide EVERYTHING you do, every choice you make, and every attitude you adopt. To be counted successful is the desire of every man.
As a full-time vocational Christian minister, I have huge ambitions. I want familial, local, regional, national, and worldwide revival! World-shaking revival is my ambition, but it isn't my definition of success as an individual. My aspirations are well beyond my capabilities, which could lead me to despair. But success is well within my grasp, giving me the peace to tackle my “impossible” ambitions.
My ambition is to spread my success to the end of the earth. But if I lose my vision of success, my aspirations will kill me.
Success is love, being loved, and loving others. I can be successful in this task anytime and anywhere. I love because God has first loved me. (1 John 4:19). So long as I know I am a success and I am satisfied with this definition of success, my ambitions will thrive because I am working out of rest in God’s love. But should I fail to remember God’s love for me and my responsibility to walk in that love, my ambitions will become my idol and destroy me, as ambition has destroyed countless men before me.
The Apostle Paul said it best:
If I speak with the tongues of mankind and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. And if I give away all my possessions to charity, and if I surrender my body so that I may glory, but do not have love, it does me no good.
1 Corinthians 13:1-3 NASB
The most important thing any man can do is to accept God’s love for Him and then to live His life as if He is loved. THAT man will love his wife and children. THAT man will love his neighbor as himself.
THAT man will stand in integrity and holiness. THAT man will be a pillar in his community. THAT man will be a fountain of life. The world is groaning and weeping, wrestling in prayer for the emergence of men like THAT.
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