Success Is… Following God’s Calling over Good Ideas

Everyone wants to be successful – but what does that even mean? The world tells us success equals money, power, and influence. But Jesus defines success differently. His version of success is, in many ways, opposite to the world’s. Achieving it might even make us appear unsuccessful. If you follow God’s calling, it might look to others like you’re wasting your life, but as we’ll see in the stories of Jeremiah and Jesus, it’s the ultimate path to success and, counterintuitively, exactly what we should be aiming for.

God says to Jeremiah, ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations’ (Jeremiah 1:5). Yet despite this incredible proclamation from God, Jeremiah felt totally inadequate – the way you and I might. It probably didn’t help that the only guarantees God gave Jeremiah were that (1) he would be strongly, even violently, opposed, and (2) God would be with him. If you only had those two guarantees, would you follow God’s calling? What if God calls you – as he called Jeremiah – to do something that won’t earn you the world’s acclaim?

God’s measure of success for us is our willingness to follow His call – even when it contradicts the world’s view of success. By this standard, Jeremiah was successful. He understood that God doesn’t always call the qualified, but He does qualify the called. Jeremiah was obedient for the long haul: four decades of unglamorous ministry, preaching the same undiluted message. He didn’t move on or give up when things became less exciting, when he heard about a new move of God somewhere else, when he was misunderstood, or when he didn’t see any obvious fruit. His reward for faithfully sticking to God’s calling is the same reward we are promised: a deep sense of God’s presence (Jeremiah 1:19).

What if that’s the only thing that truly matters?

When Jesus hung on the cross, abandoned by His disciples, He looked like a failure. But if we look at Jesus through the only metric that matters – obedience to God’s call – the facts tell a different story. He yielded to the Father’s will; the resulting response from humanity is, in a way, irrelevant. Jesus paid the highest price to bring forth potential for new life. Then, He rose from the dead and left the disciples with the Holy Spirit. His followers preached fearlessly, healed the sick, cultivated a subversive community, pioneered the redistribution of wealth and racial reconciliation, prayed until walls shook, and carried a movement that changed the world. That’s a success!

Take time to reframe the question of calling. Success is less about what you do and more about who you’re becoming. What if your unique contribution to the world is not your numerical results or qualifications but your talent, training, or temperament? Your unique contribution to the world – the most successful thing you can ever do – is first and foremost, to say yes to Jesus.