Addicted To Success by Steve Shipley

You can't look at the bookstores best sellers without finding several on "being a success". While many in today's society, including Christians, are fixated on success, they are clueless on exactly what being a success really is. The average person will quickly tell you that success involves being rich or being famous. They will sacrifice friends, family and integrity to find their idea of success. But in the end, there is no satisfaction in this success and they long for the things they sacrificed to succeed. It may sound tripe, but the old saying is true, "the best things in life are not things."

In her book, "ASHES TO GOLD", Patti Roberts ( formally married to Oral Roberts son ) addressed the success mentality that has found it's way into the Church. She wrote:

We are a nation addicted to success, and a large segment of the Christian Church appears to have acquired an insatiable hunger for that which so characterizes our culture. If you doubt that, ask yourself how many sermons have you heard or books have you read that promise in one way or another to convey the secrets of success? Then try to remember how many you have seen or heard on the subject of holiness, building Godly character, or repentance?

If the Church adopts the world's value system and the world's method of accomplishing it's ends, then it will also acquire the world's problems.

Every vice of the secular world: drug and alcohol abuse, immorality, child abuse, sexual perversion, mismanagement of funds, can be found at every level of many Christian ministries.

To many of the Saints who have gone before us, success was being found worthy to die for the name of Christ. To others, it was walking for days in the desert to preach the Gospel to those who had not heard it. To some it was a life lived mostly on their knees. Still others found their success in ministering to the needs of the poor, the sick, or the helpless.

I wonder, by what standard, do you measure success? Do you care what man thinks of you, or what God thinks? Do you seek after money and the pleasures it can buy, or do you seek first the Kingdom of God?
Sad to say, many would imitate Donald Trump rather than the Apostle Paul. Which one do you think pleases God?