What About Success?

Two years ago, A.J. Brown finally won the Super Bowl. He had spent years in the league chasing it — the training, the losses, the offseasons — all of it pointed at the one thing everybody told him was the greatest thing a player could do. And then he won it. Afterward he wrote something honest on Instagram: "I've had time to reflect on being a champion. I tried to feel how everyone made it seem that a champion should feel, but unfortunately, it was short-lived. Two days, to be exact."

Two days. A lifetime of striving, and the satisfaction lasted a long weekend. Then the only question left was: when do I get to do it again?

This is not a problem with football. It is the oldest problem in the world, and the wisest, richest man who ever lived already ran the whole experiment for us. Solomon had the throne, the treasury, and zero restrictions. "Whatever my eyes desired, I did not keep from them," he wrote. "I kept my heart from no pleasure." He could buy, build, and taste anything. And when he stepped back to survey the whole glittering pile, his verdict was brutal: "Behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun."

Striving after wind. You can run as hard as you want at it; your hands close on nothing. That is what acquisition-success feels like on the back end. You get the job and discover you want a different job. You get the relationship and find it isn't what you pictured. You get the ring, and forty-eight hours later the ache is back.

Here is the mercy hidden inside Solomon's gloom: God let the smartest, wealthiest man in history prove that the wind can't be caught — so that you wouldn't have to spend your one life proving it again. The emptiness you've felt at the top of the ladder isn't a sign you climbed wrong. It's a sign the ladder was leaning against the wrong wall.

Before you define success this week, let Solomon and A.J. Brown save you some years. The trophy was never going to be enough. It was never built to be.

Jesus asks a question that cuts straight through every success seminar ever given: "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? What could a man give in exchange for his soul?"

Notice what He assumes. He assumes you could actually win — that the whole-world scenario is on the table. He doesn't argue that the world is worthless or that ambition is sin. He simply does the math nobody else will do out loud: even if you gain everything, if it costs you your soul, you have made the worst trade in human history. You walked away from the table having lost.

We miss this because we forget what we are. We are not bodies that happen to have a spiritual side. We are souls who happen to live, for now, in bodies. There is a desire inside you for God that was programmed in at creation — designed, built, woven in — and it cannot be satisfied by anything else. You can pour the whole world into it and the gauge never moves past empty.

That is why the flesh is such a liar. The flesh is real and good; God gave you a body and it has genuine needs. But you can feed the flesh over and over and over, and your spirit will still be starving, because satisfying your flesh was never going to satisfy your soul. It is like trying to fill a bathtub with the drain wide open. More water is not the answer. The drain is.

The story of the Bible begins with humanity in perfect relationship with God, and then sin opens the drain — separation, the fall, everything broken. And the entire rest of Scripture is the story of coming home. God sends His Son to be the unifier, the one who reconciles, who carries us back and restores the relationship we were built for.

So before you ask how to be more successful, ask a deeper question: what have I been trading my soul for? The promotion is not worth your soul. The image is not worth your soul. The whole world is not worth your soul — and Jesus is the only one offering to give you back the very thing all your striving keeps spending.

Every definition of success we admire has the same engine under the hood: do more, achieve more, earn it. So when we come to God, we instinctively bring the same engine. I'll pray the right prayers. I'll clean up the obvious sins. I'll earn my standing. And then Paul writes one sentence that pulls the engine out entirely.

"For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast."

Not your own doing. A gift. Nothing to boast about. The most important relationship in the universe is the one thing you are categorically not allowed to earn.

Paul's picture for this is adoption. Think about what a child actually contributes to their own adoption: nothing. A child does very little for themselves. They are completely dependent on their parents to feed them, shelter them, protect them, name them, and tell them who they are. The child doesn't interview for the family. The child doesn't earn the last name. The family simply reaches out, brings them in, and says: you're ours now.

That is what God has done with you. He brought you into His family. You take His name. Your provision comes from Him. Your identity is no longer something you have to manufacture by out-achieving the people around you — it is something you receive, the way a child receives a home.

This is the great reversal at the center of the Christian life. The world says you are what you accomplish. Grace says you are who God says you are, and He said it before you had done a single thing to deserve it. Your worth is not a verdict still being decided by your performance. It was settled at the cross and handed to you as a gift.

If you have been trying to earn a place that was already given to you, you can stop. You don't claw your way into this family. You get adopted into it. Today, rest in being a child who is held — not an employee on probation, anxiously hoping to keep the job.

Grace is not the end of the sentence. Paul keeps writing: "For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them."

That word — workmanship — means masterpiece. Something made on purpose, by hand, with intention. When you build something yourself, you love it, you know every part of it, and you made it for a reason. That is how God regards you. You are not mass-produced. You are not an accident the universe coughed up. You are a deliberate work, and a work always implies a purpose.

Think about shopping for a car. What makes a car "good"? At a minimum it has to get you from A to B. But there are a million cars, so the real question isn't "is it good?" — it's "good for what?" That gorgeous Corvette is a great car right up until you have three kids; then it gets you nowhere, because they can't fit. Need to haul dirt and tow a boat? Get the truck. Carpooling the whole team? You want the van. The vehicle isn't good in the abstract. It's good when it's doing the thing it was built to do.

You are the same. God did not just save you; He built you for specific good works that He "prepared beforehand." Before you ever walked into church this Sunday, He had already assembled the raw material of your purpose — your particular gifts, your abilities, your personality, your affinities, even your education, your past, your mistakes, and your wins. None of it is wasted. All of it is being woven into the assignment only you are shaped to carry.

So success is not becoming a generically impressive person. Success is discovering the thing God built you to do, and then doing it for His glory. The Corvette is not failing because it can't tow; it was never meant to. And you are not failing because you can't be everything — you were made to be something, on purpose.

Today, stop asking "how do I look more successful?" and start asking the better question: "What did my Maker build me to do — and am I doing it?"

Here is something strange about most of our lives: we will spend hours arguing about success, comparing ourselves to others over it, losing sleep about it — and never once sit down and define it. We don't have it written anywhere. No personal mission, no clear goal, no sentence we could read back. And when you have never defined success for yourself, you don't escape the question; you just let the algorithm and the neighbors answer it for you. Keeping up with the Joneses. The elite school. The next promotion. You end up chasing things you never actually chose.

Paul refused to live that way. Writing from prison near the end of his life, he says, "Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own." Catch the order. First: Christ made me His own. The identity comes before the effort. Then, out of that settled belonging, comes the drive: "One thing I do — forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus."

This is the man who called himself the chief of sinners and then said, "but in Christ I have all things." That combination is the engine of a redeemed life. He knew exactly who he was in Christ, and he knew God had redeemed him *for* something — so he ran. His last words were not a list of trophies. They were: "I have fought a good fight, I have kept the faith, there is laid up for me a crown."

So here is your assignment this weekend. Write your own definition of success. Not Dale Carnegie's, not Tony Robbins', not your father's, not even your pastor's. Yours. But build it on the two anchors this week handed you. One: you cannot be successful outside of Christ — your soul was made for God and nothing else will satisfy it. Two: He has redeemed you for something specific, and your job is to seek Him until you know what it is.

Get a piece of paper. Write the sentence. "Success, for me, is ___." Then spend the rest of your life pressing on toward it — not striving after wind, but straining toward the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.