What should Christians think about success?
What should Christians think about success?
This is a hard one to write because I don't want to say too much. The concept of success is a sticky wicket and if I just un-stick the wicket then I am likely handing you a fish as opposed to teaching you to fish (you know that old chestnut). Here are a few questions to consider:
• How do you define success?
• How will you know if you've been successful at "life"?
• What do you want to be remembered for?
These aren't easy questions to answer. Success can and does look many ways, though there are some general things that can be said about how people typically define it. Most stereotypically, success is about accomplishing the things you set out to accomplish and being rewarded for it. This alone is tough to reconcile with faith- because faith promises very little in the way of rewards. We are promised to one day commune with God and people and in a new creation. But that isn't a "reward" per se- it's more just the final phase of the plan God has put in motion. So to think of success and faith in terms of rewards is a bit of a non-starter, because faith requires that we stop thinking about rewards.
Success is too often connected to the idea that we have our lives together, that we are stable and can buy the things or experiences that we want, or that we have something that other people are envious of. It's too often connected with our work (see the paragraph above). A lack of certain kinds of success can send us into a tailspin. And this probably shouldn't be the case- but since when has knowing what "should" be the case ever solved a problem for any of us?
24 Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 25 For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. 26 What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?
~ Matthew 16:24-26, NIV
This is one of my favorite passages, but it's frequently misused. And it's confusing. Big picture- I think what Jesus is trying to say is something like, "In order to live a life of faith you have to be willing to sacrifice the things that don't align with a faithful way of seeing the world."
In other words there is, potentially, a great cost that comes from prioritizing the wrong things in life. However, prioritizing the "right" things comes with a reward. (Didn't you just say faith isn't about rewards?) The reward here is not some trinket that says, "Job well done." The reward is the discovery of life itself, life as it is meant to be lived.
But that only brings us to another question: How is life meant to be lived? How do I know if I am prioritizing the right things?
Well, I wish I could just answer those for you so we could all be done with it. I mean, yes, I could point to values as they are outlined in scripture, but I don't think you actually need that. You already have some idea of the attitudes and characteristics that we would call "Christ-like" so I don't see any point in rehashing the obvious. The part that isn't obvious is: What do you want to do about it?
What kinds of things do you want to treat as "most important" in life?
There's a lot of different ways to define success. You can define it in terms of work, or in terms of family, or in terms of personal characteristics, or physical health. It could simply be movement in a direction you want to go in. You could define it in terms of your ability to reflect God's love. How you define it is really up to you. I'm not going to tell you what to choose. But my recommendation is that you choose something, and try to find a way to move towards it.
