Defining Success
Jesus said to them, "My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to finish His work."
John 4:34 (NKJV)
Success is a very subjective concept among men. We each have our own idea of what it means to be a success in life; we have created metrics and symbols for it, and if they are absent from our lives we are marked as failures. This is the social construct of a fallen world, blinded by the illusion of time. To understand truly what success is, God must be our reference point, for He is the personification of success.
Only God has the authority to say what is and is not success, and only His definition and His measure of it matter, because human success is deceptive, sensual and filled with pride. If I were to ask you now who the most successful person ever to live is, your mind would race to the most famous or the richest person you know, or to someone who has produced, achieved or done something noteworthy and been recognised for it in the world. But the truth is that there are many unknowns who are very successful, and many well-known people who are failures. Fame, riches and accomplishments alone do not define success.
Without a doubt, the most successful human being ever to live is Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Yet Jesus never did anything humanly "significant." He did not invent the car, discover how to produce electricity or launch the industrial age; He could not code, and He did not run a multibillion-dollar business. He is the most successful person ever to live simply because He finished and fulfilled His calling perfectly. He was not a failure, even though, humanly speaking, He did not have it all or do it all.
Beloved, true success is living and doing the will of God for your life. Everything else is secondary. God deems you a success or a failure not on the basis of how many possessions or how much fame you have, but on how much of the will of God for your life you have proved. The snare of society is to think that you need to be successful in the eyes of men. No; you need only concern yourself with being successful in the eyes of the Lord. To think this way will free you from the chains of false constructs.
The Scriptures reveal three stages, or dimensions, of the will of God: the permissible, the good and the perfect will of God. You can access and live in these different dimensions according to the development of your soul, the renewal of your mind in the Word and the things of God. The more of God and His Word you know, the better placed you are to live in His perfect will, and that is the best place to be in life. By contrast, the worst place to be is in the general, or permissible, will of God. That is the dimension where failures in life are produced. It is the easiest dimension to live in, and most of humanity has built its whole life there, because their souls have not been transformed by the Word and the Spirit of God to understand what matters in life.
Ask yourself one question: How much of God's will for my life do I know, and how much of it am I accomplishing? The answer will tell you whether you are succeeding or failing in life. If you have not yet found out, seek God with all your heart concerning this matter, and the revelation of His Spirit will come to you. Otherwise you may grope through life in the dark, chasing shadows. Chase the will of God, not the opinions of society, and go and be successful.