Success by Lowering the Bar

Posted by admin on May 24, 2010 in Church, Featured, Gospel, Leadership | 1 comment

One of the great things about being free from the desire to succeed is you don’t have to lower your expectations for success.  For those of us who find our identity in success, we will do anything in order to achieve it — including “lowering the bar.”

We may start our organizations or our work with high expectations, but the slow process of missteps and failures easily gets us to see how unrealistic those expectations are.  So we begin to lower the expectations to try to have some semblance of dignity and identity.

And other people often reinforce this.  Take a common statement in church-world: “You church may not be growing numerically, but if just one person is saved through this ministry then it is a success.”  Most pastors smile and nod at this, but deep down they know it’s not really true.  One person being saved is not the reason they got into ministry.  No leader could hang their weight of their effort on such a small definition of success.

No leader, however, can hang their weight on a larger definition of success.  Our definitions of success, whether large or small, can’t carry the weight of our identity.  Only Jesus can do that.

But when we begin to see that our life is in Jesus and not success, we can pursue our expectations, however high and lofty.  We may reach them or we may not, but we are now free to try, without our success or failure ultimately saying something about us.  We don’t need to lower the bar to prop up our ego.

So today are you tempted to lower your expectations about what you want to accomplish because it will preserve your ego?  If so, then remember, it wasn’t your definition of success that is the problem, it is that you think accomplishment is what defines you.