What Makes a Person Successful? — Morning Devotions

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Transcript

Have you ever wondered what makes a person successful? Now, we look at some people today and we think, yeah, they certainly are successful people. But then again, you can say, well, others haven’t. Why does one person succeed and another person in probably the same sort of situation fail?

Well, two people can be in the same type of business. They can have the same skills, perhaps the same basic education or education opportunities, and enjoy all these opportunities, and yet one is successful while the other fades, if you like, into failure. And we could ask the question today, what makes the difference? What is it that successful people always do?

What makes the difference between success and failure?

Is it that one has pleasure in what he’s doing while the the other person only puts in time, is that part of it?

Now, maybe to one person, it might be you or someone you know, all the work is hard, time-consuming and difficult, but to the other person, work, their job, say 9 to 5 is lots of fun. And they don’t like taking a lot of time off. They find it’s boring.

Well, it’s true that everyone needs time away from work, we need time to get away from the, the pressure, and we need time for holidays, certainly.

But are people who always fail looking to get away from it more than they are looking to succeed?

Now it has been suggested that if you want to succeed, you should make your work fun and then take your fun seriously. Now that’s worth thinking about.

Success is achieved by only a small number of people we’re told. There are only a minority of homes that are happy, a small group of husbands and wives who are still happily married, who enjoy each other after 20, 30, 40 years of married life.

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Only a handful of churches, businesses, clubs, and homes and organisations enjoy growth and fulfilment. That’s been proved by statistics, and we can ask the question, why is that so? Is it because success is really unnatural? Because what is it that we actually have to do? And I think that successful people or leaders or organisations or homes are scarce.

Because they do require a lot more time and dedication and energy to create that and then to maintain it, it takes a lot of work, doesn’t it? You must sacrifice the right to be yourself in order to succeed, to excel.

And I think we could look at in another way too here. You’ve got to be prepared to run the full race and not be distracted along the way. In fact, the Bible talks about that in the story of people trying to run the race. Too often people stop after seeing something that they’ve done. They may get discouraged and they think that they’re a failure.

Failure and success are at the opposite ends of the scale, and in between there are many people who fluctuate between the two things. Now why am I talking about that?

Did you know that Jesus made successful men and women out of ordinary people, people just like you and me?

And these were people who were human, people who succeeded and often failed. When we talk about the New Testament, talk about people in the Bible, we sometimes think that they were supermen, superwomen, people that had that extra special, but actually they were very, very ordinary people. They were made extraordinary and they were made successful because Jesus came into the life and they were prepared to experience a change in their lives.

And they had certainly things like dedication, faith in God. They had love for people. In fact, this was something that marked the New Testament church as different – people who loved each other. They had an enthusiasm, and as I said, they loved their fellow men. These things were obvious.

So this is the change that can occur. If you want to be successful, allow Jesus Christ into your life because Jesus never fails, and it doesn’t depend on how clever you are.

But we need perhaps to get a new perspective on life and realise that with God there is no such thing as failure.

Let’s Pray

Well, Heavenly Father, we realise the truth of this that sometimes we fail and we should succeed. Lord, help us to see that success is something that you can give us, not in dollars so much, but in the way that we can relate to others. And this is a prayer I ask in the name of Jesus. Amen.

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