True Success: Live and Lead Without Losing Your Soulਨਮੂਨਾ

I confess. For years, I was a card-carrying member of the “Bless Me” club.

Each morning, I’d pray through my goals, meetings, and to-do lists, then ask God to come with me that day and do great things.

• Bless this email, Lord, and help it open the right door
• Bless this project, and let it bear fruit
• Bless this work, and make it count

It sounded spiritual. I was doing good things. Serving good people. But deep down, I wasn’t really asking for God’s will. I was asking him to co-sign mine.

As Christ-followers, we are people of purpose. Whether we serve in ministry, the marketplace, or both, we want our lives to count. So we dream big, make a plan, and get to work.

If we were to place that strategy into a New Testament scene, it might have looked something like this…

Early one morning, as Jesus walks along the shore, he passes Peter getting his boat ready to fish. Peter has been dreaming of a successful fishing business that would feed his family and help hungry children everywhere.

Spotting Jesus, he sees the opportunity of a lifetime and calls out, “Jesus, hurry up—jump in my boat! I’ll share my plan, and you can come along and bless me.”

But that’s not exactly how it happened, is it?

Instead, Jesus, armed with God's plan and purpose, walked along the shore and interrupted Peter and the disciples with their self-made lives and said, “Follow me.”

In other words, he called them to leave everything—their careers, plans, possessions, security, and comfort zones—to go where Jesus went, do what he did, suffer what he suffered, and eventually die the way he did.

As they followed, Jesus would supply all their needs and fill them with unspeakable joy. They would change the world.

Thankfully, they followed him.

Those are definitely two different paths. The first one involves setting our plans and saying, “Bless me.” The second path is answering Jesus’s radical call: “Follow me.” Those two paths have profoundly different results.

I was chasing what looked like success, but I rarely paused to ask the only question that really matters: Lord, what is your will for me today?

It’s easy to take charge and then charge ahead. After all, God has called and gifted us to serve, and we want to be faithful. So we grab the ball and start running. Then, almost as an afterthought, we ask the Lord to come along and bless our work.

But is it his work? His plan? His way? With his power?

Jesus said, “If anyone wants to follow me, they must deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me” (Matthew 16:24).

“Follow me” doesn’t necessarily mean God wants us to leave our jobs or move across the world. But it does set the tone. It reminds us who is leading and whose voice matters most.

And yes, this is much easier said than done. God’s ways are not always our ways. After all, this is the same God who said:

• March around Jericho seven times and then blow trumpets
• Face down the giant with only a slingshot in your hand
• Build an ark in a world that had never seen rain

God’s will may not always make sense to us in the moment, but obedience to his voice is the very definition of success.

When we look at the results of those moments of radical obedience, we see cities conquered, the giant defeated, and humanity preserved. And it reminds us of the power of following God.

God’s call can be radical and counterintuitive, or it can be ordinary and quiet. Either way, following him is the only truly successful way to work and live.

Scripture reminds us that “when we obey him, every path he guides us on is fragrant with his loving-kindness and his truth” (Psalm 25:10, TLB). That’s the kind of success we want—not the kind we manufacture, but the kind that grows from following God.

Prayer
Lord, I confess that I often choose the way I want to go and then ask you to come behind and bless me. Today, I want to let you lead while I follow. Show me your will, and give me the courage to obey.

What if we’re doing all the “right” things, but missing the part God cares about most? Tomorrow, we’ll explore one of the most overlooked elements of success and why it matters more than anything else.