Okay, well, let’s get started.
After these last three weeks of messages on fellowship, it’s actually very intimidating to stand up here and attempt to share something. Normally, it’s somewhat intimidating to get up here and feel like you have something worthwhile to share. But after hearing these messages on fellowship and the depth of those messages, it’s especially hard to get up here and think that you might have something worth sharing.
So, as you listen to me today, just imagine this is the famine after the feast.
What I want to share today is something that the Lord has been dealing with me personally about over the past several months, since about April or May, especially over this past summer. I’ve only recently come to resolution with the Lord on this issue. And when I say “come to resolution,” I mean that the Lord has really had His way with me on this issue.
Some of the things that I’m going to share strike very close to home with me still. It’s somewhat embarrassing to think that I’ve had these attitudes and conceptions in my mind, but they were there. Hopefully, you haven’t had them, but if you do, they may strike close to home with you also.
I’ve actually been struggling for about two months over whether to share this or not. I thought, you know, this is nothing important. This is just my little personal problem. No one else really has this problem. No one else really thinks the way I do, so no one else would really care about this.
Well, through some fellowship, I came to realize that some other people may actually be struggling with this issue also, or may need to struggle with this issue. And then the final catalyst for me being up here today is that somebody forgot to schedule the speaker for today. I got called on Tuesday evening saying, “Can you speak Sunday?” And here I am.
Let’s start with a word of prayer.
Father, just thank You, Lord, for You are powerful, but yet You are gracious and You are loving. And although the earth trembles and the seas roar at the sound of Your name, You have called us into Your presence, Lord.
I just pray, Father, that as I share today, Lord, what I share would be a benefit to the assembly here and would be a blessing to all those who hear it. I pray this in Your most wonderful, holy name. Amen.
Okay, could you turn to Matthew 20:20-28?
Then the mother of the sons of Zebedee came to Jesus with her sons, bowing down and making a request of Him.
And He said to her, “What do you wish?”
And she said to Him, “Command that in Your kingdom these two sons of mine may sit, one on Your right and one on Your left.”But Jesus answered, “Do you know what you are asking? Are you able to drink the cup that I am about to drink?”
And they said to Him, “We are able.”And He said to them, “My cup you shall drink; but to sit on My right and on My left, this is not Mine to give, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared by My Father.”
After hearing this, the ten became indignant with the two brothers. But Jesus called them to Himself and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. It is not this way among you.
“But whoever wishes to become great among you shall be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you shall be your slave; just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.”
What I want to talk about today is success. Now, this is kind of a strange word to be talking about in the church, but I believe that it has application in the church. This application is both a warning to us and an edification to us.
When somebody mentions success, there are many things that can come to mind. I think we all have a little different view of success and what success is. What I want to talk about today is actually like two and a half of those aspects of success.
You may view success as a very worldly topic, which success can be. But I want to talk about spiritual success. I think we need to talk about worldly success and spiritual success because we live in a world that is obsessed with success.
We need to be continually aware that the world can rub off on us personally and can rub off on the assembly. So, this obsession that the world has with success can rub off on us personally and can rub off on the assembly.
The world’s perspective on success, its measures of success, the outcomes of success, and the sources of success—all these measurements infect the church. We must be ever vigilant, on the lookout for these things and all these ways the world can rub off on the church. We must be vigilant to find them and remove them when they do occur.
I do believe there is such a thing as spiritual success, and it is not of this world. The acquisition of spiritual success and the outcome of spiritual success are completely different from the success of the world.
We can tell from this passage in Matthew that the disciples had an issue with success. They wanted to be successful. They wanted to sit at the right hand and the left hand of Christ in the kingdom. They wanted to be on the top of the heap.
They did what comes naturally: they mixed the world’s view of success with spiritual success. They had the two mixed and confused. That is the crux of what I want to talk about today: how do we mix these two successes, the world’s view of success and a Christ-like view of success?
First off, let’s define how the world views success, or how the world determines success. In contemplating this, I came up with four primary ways—maybe five primary ways—that the world measures success.
The first measure of success that the world typically uses is authority: how many people do you rule over? This is the big measure of success in corporations. People want to move up the ladder, not only to make more money, but to have more people to boss around and to have a bigger empire.
This can be a real incentive for me. This has been a real incentive for me in my professional life: to move up, to have people to boss around, to be called “boss” by more and more people.
I believe it is probably the primary motivation for most elected politicians to seek that career, because they want to have authority. The honor and the money mean something, but the power is what they are really after. That is how they really measure success.
Another way the world measures success is through honor. I guess I would define it as people knowing you, knowing the high quality of your work, knowing what a good person you are, and knowing your good reputation.
This is kind of the Nobel Prize method of becoming a success. You may be nobody’s boss. You may make almost no money working at a university, doing research, whatever. You may be basically almost completely unknown, but a few important people know your name and know your work. Therefore, you are a success.
The third measure of success the world uses is fame. Fame is similar to honor. It is having a lot of people know your name and know what you do. They may not necessarily like you or what you do, but they know you. Therefore, you are famous.
It is the Hollywood thing. You know, they say, “I don’t care what you write about me as long as you spell my name correctly.” That is fame.
The fourth way the world measures success is through financial capital. Basically, how much money do you have? How much money is in your bank account? It is a very nice quantitative way to measure whether you are a success or not.
You know, I have a giant bank account; therefore, I am a success. Or I have a tiny bank account; therefore, I am not a success.
This last way can kind of be divided in two. There is also the aspect of whether you are a craftsman or not. Do you do good work? Not, are you highly paid for it, but do you do good work? Is the outcome of your work very good? We can take pride and consider ourselves a success if we are craftsmen in what we do.
I hope, and I think, that we are all mature enough to recognize that all of these measures of success the world uses are from the pit. If any of us are overtly living our lives to attain these success factors, then we need to fall on our faces and repent before the Lord.
Attempting to attain these success factors will lead to death and destruction for your soul. There is no Christ in them at all.
Okay, that is the world’s measure of success. Let’s talk a little bit about spiritual success. When I talk about spiritual success, I mean: are we pleasing and satisfying to the Lord? Is our walk with Him meeting His expectations? Is He smiling upon what we do on a day-to-day basis?
Or are we not a success? Are we lacking in something? Are we not attaining the goal to which we have been called?
This whole issue of spiritual success is much more of an enigma than worldly success, as spiritual things are always intangible. We are living in very tangible physical bodies, and we struggle to get our hands around things that are spiritual and intangible.
How can you describe something? How can you put your hands around something that is beyond imagination, something for which we have no corollary here in our life?
The human mind is a very interesting thing. We confront it with something brand new that it does not understand, and it compares what little it knows about that to something that it does understand. It says, “Oh, because this is sort of similar to this in one way, it must be similar in a lot of different ways.”
We do that with spiritual success and worldly success. We think, “Well, to gain accomplishment in the world, you do this. To gain accomplishment spiritually, you need to do this.” Even though we do not quite understand it, we kind of map the two together and say they must be very similar.
So, what we do is end up wrapping this concept of spiritual success in a worldly veneer. Actually, we end up wrapping the world’s view of success in a spiritual veneer. We put a thin coating of spirituality on what is actually the world’s system.
As we try to deal with this issue of spiritual success, we struggle to find a measuring stick. What is it? How do we measure whether we are spiritually successful or not? This can manifest itself in a fairly destructive way in the church.
As we struggle to find a measuring stick, we end up choosing the measuring stick that we already understand: the measuring stick of the world. The world measures a person’s success by how much authority they have, and sometimes we bring that into the church. We measure a person’s spiritual success by how much authority they have in the assembly.
If we know somebody in the assembly who has a measure of authority, we immediately assume that they are spiritually successful. As that authority increases, we assume that they are more and more spiritually successful.
We can also apply this measure to ourselves. We can look at ourselves and say, “Well, I have no authority, position, or leadership in the church. Therefore, I must be a failure. I must be unsuccessful in my spiritual walk because I am just not making any progress.”
The Lord has not deemed it appropriate for me, at this point in my walk, to place anybody under my protection. I cannot shepherd anybody. I am not leading anybody, because I must be a total failure in the eyes of the Lord.
The opposite of that is that we may experience some measure of authority in the church. We may find ourselves leading a Bible study or in a position of leadership, and suddenly assume that we are successful—that we must be doing something very right because we have this position.
Knowing that we are successful feels good, and we like that feeling of feeling good. So, we may turn around and seek more authority because it feels good. It felt good to know that we were successful.
Another way the world measures success is by the amount of honor attributed to a person. You know, if somebody knows you have done something good.
I find myself falling prey to this. If I somehow manage to do a good deed—somehow, accidentally, I do the right thing—I want to go tell somebody. I really want that good deed to be noticed. I do not want it to go unnoticed because, you know, what good is it if it goes unnoticed?
It is really like I am seeking somebody else’s good opinion of me in order to think well of myself. If somebody else thinks well of me, then I can feel better about myself. So, I seek honor among my brethren so that I can feel better about my spiritual walk.
I end up basing my walk with the Lord not on what He wants me to do, but on what others think about me. Actually, it is not even what others think about me; I end up basing my walk with the Lord on what I think others think about me. So there is another layer of confusion, another layer of muddiness, that makes this whole situation bad.
The world also measures success by how many people know your name. We can sometimes do that in the assembly also. If a brother comes from another assembly to speak here, we suddenly assume that he must be spiritually successful because he is coming from out of town to speak to us.
We probably think more highly of him than his family back at home. The old thing of a prophet being without honor in his own country.
A couple of years ago, I spoke here, and amazingly, surprisingly, some people were blessed by what I had to share. I am sure that will not happen today.
There was one brother whom I knew and really respected. I thought very highly of this brother. Well, this brother was somehow blessed by this message, and he called a friend of his out in California and told him about the message.
Somehow, I found out about that phone call—that this brother I respected spread the word to this group in California about this message—and boy, I felt great. I was on top of the world. I mean, this was wonderful.
Not only did I bless somebody with a message, but people in California knew my name. I felt like a tremendous success. I must really have been pleasing the Lord that day because people in California heard about it.
Again, it is basing my spiritual walk not on the Lord’s will, but on the actions and thoughts of men.
Another way the world measures success is through financial capital. I think we sometimes measure success by spiritual capital. Examples of spiritual capital include the amount of knowledge you have about Scripture, the ease with which you can quote Scripture on any topic, and the readiness and ease with which you pray.
Or—and this is one that is big with me—the quality of your children. If you have good kids, you must be spiritually successful. We say to ourselves, “I must be really pleasing to the Lord because I understand God’s eternal purpose. I am very successful.”
When you look at our children, that issue of success by measuring our children becomes extremely potent. We pour so much love and effort into our children. I know, kids, it does not seem like that sometimes, but we pour a lot of love and effort into our kids.
Sometimes they become our primary manifestation of our spiritual walks. I mean, really, all of our ministry is put into our children. Well, if our children turn out well, we feel really great about ourselves. We must have really been following the Lord. We must be very close to the Lord because our children turned out wonderfully.
But what happens if our children do not turn out right? What happens if our children make the choice of going off and doing something else, something that may be contrary to what we want them to do? If they do not live up to our expectations?
Maybe we really wanted this child to be the next T. L. Sparks, but he is not going to be. He is taking up a career in computer science. He is not going to be T. L. Sparks.
That disappointment can be very deep and very destructive to a person’s spiritual walk, because they have put all their identity, all that work, and all that love into their children. They have measured themselves by their children, and now their children are not measuring up. Therefore, they are not measuring up.
Again, it is that same issue of basing our spiritual walk on the lives of others, this time on the lives of our children.
As I walk through these measures of success and how we try to measure spiritual success, I hope that you recognize that all these methods are flawed. They all have problems.
We cannot measure our own spiritual success or anyone else’s spiritual success by these measurements. Basically, all these measurements are imitations and duplications of what the world does. They are duplications of the world’s measurements.
Again, all we have done is take the world system and put a veneer of spirituality around it, saying that this is how we do things in the church.
Let me do a little sidebar here, an aside, and explain something. I just want to clarify that if a person has honor, fame, authority, or spiritual capital in the assembly, that does not automatically signify that they are a spiritual giant. We typically understand that.
But if a person does not have honor, fame, authority, or spiritual capital, that does not mean they are a spiritual runt.
We cannot measure ourselves or anyone else’s spiritual walk by these measurements. Let me try to explain it with a little different analogy.
Some cats have stripes. Actually, a lot of cats have stripes. But not all animals with stripes are cats. And not all cats have stripes. Therefore, we can conclude that the existence of stripes neither disproves nor proves that an animal is a cat.
You might need to walk through that logic again.
The evidence of these traits—honor, fame, authority, and capital—neither proves nor disproves that a person is a spiritual success in the eyes of the Lord. These traits neither prove nor disprove that you are a success in the eyes of the Lord.
Anybody confused? Okay, good.
Back to the topic at hand: measuring our success using a world system. Other than the fact that the system is not the Lord’s—which is the fatal flaw in it—there are a lot of other problems that have very bad practical results.
I want to go through a few of those because I think we might recognize them in our own lives.
The first outward flaw of using the world system is that all these measurements, all these success factors, are based on outward manifestations. They are all outward. They are all things that man can see.
But we know that the Lord does not judge us on the outside. He judges our hearts, and no man can judge another man’s heart. So our hearts are really what matters. We spend all this time working on these outward manifestations of success while our hearts go unattended and unkempt.
Because all these success factors are outward things that other people can see, they are actually all the work of our hands. As we seek to feel successful about ourselves spiritually, we are actually seeking to do that with our own hands.
All these factors end up being based on things that we have done or how we act. If there is one thing that we should know, it is that if we try to save ourselves or satisfy the Lord with our hands, we are doomed to fail. There is no way we can satisfy the Lord with the work of our hands.
Also, because all these success factors are outward things—things that are visible—they can all be imitated. A person with a particularly strong soul life can appear to be spiritually successful to those on the outside. He can even fool himself into thinking that he is spiritually successful because of his strong soul life.
But a strong soul life inhibits a strong spiritual life. There have been a lot of great and pious men who have grunted out a wonderful righteous life out of their own willpower, but they have been no closer to the Lord than the bum on the street.
Christ will not force His way into our lives. We need to step aside and allow Him to come into our lives.
We can use our intellects to pursue all these success factors and actually attain a measure of them, becoming somewhat successful. But we have wasted all that time seeking our own self-fulfillment and seeking these outward manifestations when we could have been seeking Him, seeking His life.
Another problem with this mixture of the world’s way and the spiritual walk is that we are actually looking to other people to feel good about ourselves and to measure ourselves. We are seeking an identity, a personal self-identity, in what other people think about us.
Basically, we are seeking to have standing with men. Scripture tells us to fear God and not to fear man. If we are seeking to serve the Lord not for the Lord’s sake, but to increase our stature with other men, in the eyes of other men, then we are fearing man and not fearing God.
There is also this whole thing of seeking another believer’s approval. When we seek another believer’s approval, we are setting ourselves up for sure failure, because there is no good outcome from seeking the approval of another believer.
First off, if we seek the approval of another believer, and I do something nice and Sally approves of me—she says, “That was a really good thing you did, Jack”—what happens to me? I get very proud, very puffed up. I did the right thing. Suddenly, I have an issue of pride because Sally thinks highly of me.
The opposite is true also. It is the no-good outcome. If I do something good and nobody notices, or I do something that I think is good and people disapprove of it, then I am devastated.
I end up feeling like a failure because this thing that I thought was good, nobody else thought was good, or nobody else even noticed. I can become offended. I can feel like a failure just because I did not get the approval of my brethren.
All these are problems, but there is an even worse problem that compounds itself in this mixing of the world’s measurement with our measurement.
Andrew, there’s a spider right above your shoulder, if you want it.
There is another problem, and that is that all these measurements are relative to one another. When we measure ourselves against others, we are measuring relativity. Let me explain what I mean by relativity. It is not that we are all related. Thank goodness we are not—at least not physically.
You know, this stick. Some people could probably say it is a long stick. If you are using it to spank your child, it is a very long stick. But compared to this stick, it is not a long stick anymore; it is a short stick. It is relative to this stick.
This stick is short. Well, this stick may feel very long now that this one is quite long, but there is another stick that makes this stick look short. So this stick is long relative to one, but short relative to another. That is what I mean by these measurements being relative.
So, using these measurements, how do we know we are a spiritual success? Well, we have more authority than someone else. “I am a success because I have more authority in the body than so-and-so.”
Or, “My children are better behaved than someone else’s children, so I must be more successful. I must be closer to the Lord than they are.” Or, “I know the Scripture better than anybody else in my fellowship group. Therefore, I am a real John Bunyan.”
Or, you get asked with five days’ notice to speak on Sunday morning. You must be very successful and very honored in the body.
Paul spoke about this in 2 Corinthians 10:12. He says:
For we are not bold to class or compare ourselves with some of those who commend themselves;
but when they measure themselves by themselves, and compare themselves with themselves, they are without understanding.
Paul is saying that if men are comparing themselves to one another, then they are basically foolish. They do not know what they are doing.
When you look at the world system of measuring success and the church’s interpretation of that, there is no way it can work unless we are comparing ourselves to one another.
When we start comparing ourselves to one another, big issues arise. If I rank myself as more spiritually successful than another believer, then I have pushed that other believer down into a low position. I have wrongly thought of them as lower than myself and myself as higher than them.
They are now a lesser person in our eyes because we are more successful than they are. As we deem ourselves more and more successful, we start to feel separation from those other believers who are not as successful.
Then who are they to come to us and bring a word of admonition? We know so much more of the Lord than they do. They are so much less successful than we are.
But if we rank ourselves below another believer, how can we fellowship with that believer? They know so much more of the Lord than we do. We have nothing to offer them because they are so much more successful than we are.
How can we encourage them? How can we admonish them? We are just navel lint down here. We do not know anything about the Lord.
We should know that no man can judge the heart of another man, and no man is a particularly good judge of his own heart. So when we use our poor judgment to start ranking believers and ranking ourselves among believers, we bring a caste system into the body of Christ.
Suddenly, there are levels of believers in the body of Christ, and this spoils the beauty and unity of the body of Christ.
Also in 2 Corinthians, shortly after that verse I just read, in 2 Corinthians 10:18, Paul speaks more directly to the issue:
For it is not he who commendeth himself that is approved, but he whom the Lord commendeth.
Man cannot approve of anyone, cannot commend anyone. Only the Lord can commend and approve someone.
We look at characters in Scripture like Gideon. Gideon was a nobody in the nation of Israel. He was the youngest son of a family with no standing. Nobody in the nation of Israel would think highly of this man Gideon because he was a nobody.
But the Lord approved of Gideon, and the Lord used Gideon to save the nation of Israel.
Our stature with the Lord is not based upon anything that we can see with our eyes and hear with our ears. Our stature with the Lord is only determined and commended by the Lord. He is the One who determines our stature.
The second problem with these relativistic comparisons is kind of the opposite of the first. First, we talked about what happens if we compare ourselves as higher: we push our brothers down beneath us. But what if we compare ourselves to other brothers and find ourselves lacking in comparison to another believer?
We set ourselves up for tremendous condemnation at that point. We see ourselves as not progressing as we should. We are frustrated because there are all these things that we should be doing, and we are not doing them.
We open ourselves up to the enemy to condemn us for these things. Like all condemnation, that condemnation is based on half-truths and vain imaginations. The condemnation does not lead us back closer to the Lord; it separates us from the Lord because we feel like failures. We feel like we have nothing to offer.
This result is usually the outcome when I start comparing myself to other believers. I think, “What a pathetic excuse for a believer, for a Christian, that I am.”
I do not know the Scripture so well. If it were not for my online Bible program, it would be really hard for me to find verses. I do not pray well. I have a hard time praying. And, just to make it all that much worse, my kid just beat up your kid. So, just a failure all around.
This past summer, as I mentioned in the introduction, I struggled with tremendous condemnation over this issue of success and over my lack of success in anything.
I felt like a failure at work. I had six jobs in three years and found myself back doing basically what I was doing when I graduated from college. So, I felt like I had made no professional progress whatsoever.
I looked at my home life, my house, and my family, and I felt like I was a total failure there. I looked at myself in the church, compared myself to other believers, and felt like a complete failure there because of all these issues.
I cannot pray. I do not know the Scriptures. I cannot quote these Scriptures off. All these other things. I knew my life was pathetic compared to all these other people’s wonderful lives.
I really fell into a very deep despair over my complete lack of success, my complete and utter failure. The whole issue was keeping me awake at night.
I would lie in bed at night wondering why on earth I was still here. It was driving a wedge between my wife and me because she could not say anything around me without me getting upset, because it just made me feel like more of a failure. It was just an absolutely pathetic situation.
One night, as I was lying in bed bemoaning my lack of success and my utter failure, the Lord cornered me. I guess He got tired of hearing about it. He cornered me and demanded to know, “What is a success?”
“Zach, what is a success? Why aren’t you a success?”
Well, in the light of His question, all of my answers came up short. I answered, “Well, somebody that has authority and responsibility in the assembly.” No, that is wrong.
“Well, how about somebody with good children? Is that a success?” Nope, wrong again.
“Well, how about a speaker who travels the world encouraging the church and writing books and encouraging the church? Are they a success?” Nope, wrong again.
About this time, I am feeling really good about myself because I cannot even answer a simple question correctly. What was I to do? I had lost any means of knowing whether I was a success or not, whether I was pleasing to the Lord or not, because my whole system of measurement had just been thrown out the window.
So, how does the Lord commend or approve us? Why does He commend or approve us? What brings us into His pleasure? How does the Father measure success, and who is successful in His eyes? These are all the questions that I came to.
I am here to tell you that the Father does not measure success by any subjective measurement of what we do. If He measured our success by what we do, we would all be found lacking. We would all be failures.
He measures our success by our position in His Son. His pleasure in us today is because we are found in His Son, because our life is inextricably bound up in the life of the Son.
Nothing more needs to be done to bring us into a successful spiritual life. Our life is in Christ. How much more successful do we need to be?
This world’s measure of success, and the church’s interpretation of that measurement, is all based on us seeking the Lord’s approval. But we do not need to seek or work to get the Lord’s approval. That approval has been bought with the blood of Jesus Christ.
When we recognize that our success has been assured and that we are successful in the Lord, it is an extremely freeing thing. We are no longer in competition with one another. We no longer have to rate ourselves. We no longer have to struggle to be better than so-and-so just to feel good about ourselves.
We no longer need to feel like we are falling short. We are no longer cursed to fall beneath another brother and feel like we are lower than they are, and we no longer curse one another by feeling superior to them.
We are freed from the world system of measuring success because it does not matter. We are not of the world. We are in Christ; we are a success. The world’s success does not matter. Even that does not matter anymore.
So praise the Lord. Our status with the Lord does not depend on what we do. It all depends on Him. And He is faithful. He is true.
Now, you say, “Jack, there is a problem with this. The Christian life is a walk. It is a progression. We are not there yet. We have not fully attained the goal. We have not been fully conformed to the image of Christ. Our minds have not been transformed yet. We are not successful yet. We are still walking. What is the deal?”
How do these two things mesh together? We know that there are problems. We know that we sin. Yet the Lord has made us successful.
I think the answer to this contradiction comes in the motivation for our actions. A person struggling with spiritual success is attempting to attain that spiritual success by his own works, to get that successful feeling by pleasing the Lord with his own works.
But a believer who has confidence in spiritual success, who knows that he is in Christ and is successful in the Father’s eyes, may do those same things. But he does them because he is successful, not to become successful, but because he is successful.
Let me put it in a little different way. I got this from a book that my brother shared with me this summer:
Who we are is not determined by what we do.
Instead, who we are determines what we do.
Our salvation is not determined by what we do. Our sonship is not determined by what we do, and our priesthood is not determined by what we do. But our salvation determines what we do, our sonship determines what we do, and our priesthood determines what we do.
Do you like that sound? You approve of that? Okay, good.
So again, who we are is not determined by what we do, but who we are determines what we do.
I thought of it this way as I was mulling over this whole issue: Christ bent down and snatched us by the collar from the raging flood. He has acquired us for Himself. He is holding on to us, and He is not going to let go.
He is faithful. He is strong. His grip will not fail. No matter what we do, He is not going to drop us.
As we are hanging there, Christ has us. He has acquired us for Himself. We have a choice to make. We can hang there like a side of beef and just let Him hang on to us for the rest of our lives, or we can try to grab hold of Him.
We are not trying to grab hold of Him to save ourselves or to secure our situation. We are trying to grab hold of Him because He is the Savior.
Trying to grab hold of Him is not because we are trying to save ourselves, but because it is a reaction to His loving action of saving us and giving His life for us.
When we are struggling for spiritual success, if you think about it, all that time you are struggling, your eyes are on yourself.
How am I doing? Did I do the right thing? What do others think about me? What does Christ think about me?
It is just like that old joke where a couple goes out on a date, and the guy spends two hours talking about himself—how wonderful he is, how magnificent he is. Then he turns to the young lady and says, “Well, enough about me. What do you think about me?”
That is how we behave when we are struggling for spiritual success. Our eyes are on us. They are just focused on us. But this whole walk is not about us. It is about Him.
The sooner we stop striving for our own position and our own success, and the sooner we start striving after Him, the sooner His life will be freely and obviously manifested in us. We take our eyes off ourselves and put them on Him.
We will find it natural to serve others because, when we look at Him and fill our field of view with Him, He is all that we see. He is all that we have to imitate.
We will imitate Him—His service to the body and His service to others.
So finally, in conclusion, just to wrap things up, let’s stop using the world’s measuring stick to measure ourselves and to measure others.
Let’s stop comparing ourselves to ourselves, comparing ourselves to others, comparing others to others, and comparing others to ourselves. We have all been measured. The Lord measured us all, and He found us all lacking. So He sent His Son, and He filled the gap.
He brought us into His approval. So instead of focusing on ourselves, let’s focus on the immeasurable Christ, the immeasurable fullness of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Let’s just live in that success that He has already purchased for us.
Let’s pray.
Father, I just thank You, Lord, for filling the gap. Lord, we could never measure up. We could never meet Your approval, Lord. But You provided Your Son to bridge that gap and to bring us into approval with the Father.
We just praise You, Father, and praise Your most holy and wonderful name. Amen.