Have you ever thought about how you define success?
According to Trevin Wax, from The Gospel Coalition, success is often determined by a flourishing career or financial stability.
“We live in a culture in which a lot of people chart the story of their own life based on their accumulation of wealth, status, or moving up in their career. A lot of people will look at their previous year they’ve lived and they will ask questions based on, did they get ahead, did they fall behind, did they have any financial setbacks, are they moving forward.”
However, it is important that understanding of success is shaped by a Biblical perspective. What is God’s perspective on success?
“A Christian should be asking different questions. It’s not that questions about career aren’t important, they just can’t be at the center. We should be asking questions about the previous year to say have we become more like Christ in the previous year, have we grown in our discipleship?”
Sometimes what we see as setbacks in our career or in our finances are actually blessings.
“It could be that a setback in business is actually what propels us forward in our relationship with Jesus, and it could be that more success in business in one year, may actually set us back in our growth and our discipleship.”
As Christians, we have to think differently than those in the secular culture around us.
“We have to have an entirely different way of looking at the stories of our lives, how we judge success, failure, moving forward and backward. It’s so easy for us to slip into the patterns of the mindsets of the world to begin to interpret our own lives to tell our story in the exact same way as other people in our society tell their own story, and when we do that, we don’t look different from the people around us.”
When our culture is increasingly secular, it’s our job to stand out of the crowd.
