Faith to Face Failure, or What’s so Great about Success?

Last spring a seminarian and I had a long-running conversation on the meaning of success. He wondered what difference it would make if he flunked his courses and was recorded as a dropout. What difference would it make if he failed to achieve those vocational goals that family, church, and seminary seemed to regard as successful? What is failure, anyway?

And, what is success? Worldly success is one thing; spiritual success is quite different. Worldly success is judged without reference to God or eternity. Spiritual success is judged by God from the perspective of eternity, without reference to the world’s evaluation.

Let’s take worldly success first. We need to make a further distinction. The world judges a person from two perspectives: private experience and public impact. A person may be enviously successful in his private life. He earns enough money to meet his needs and even gratify some of his desires. His neighbors respect him, his friends like him, his family loves him. He enjoys a maximum of pleasures and suffers a minimum of pains. He has good health and peace of mind. He is free from guilt, depression, or regrets. At a ripe old age he dies in his sleep, is decently buried, and is mourned. That is a successful person. Yet, since he makes no public impact, he could be called a failure.

Consider the reverse. A person may be famous but a failure. Fame has little to do with a person’s emotions, intimate relationships, or qualities as a human being. To be publicly successful someone must be superior in some way—in beauty, brains, or brawn. Such a person has a higher status in society. He is admired, perhaps envied. Popularity, fame, influence, political power, rare creativity, enormous wealth—these mark the successful person.

In each of us is a desire for recognition, a desire to be important or influential. Paul calls it the pride of life. It’s a desire to be noticeably superior. And it explains our winner complex. As Vince Lombardi, one-time coach of the one-time invincible Green Bay Packers, put it, “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.” This desire makes Hertz boast, “We’re Number One,” and Avis pants, “We try harder.” That motto inspires the Horatio Alger message of such books as Bound To Rise, Rags to Riches, and Struggling Upward. Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie counseled aspiring young men in his famous The Road to Business Success to “ ‘aim high.’ I would not give a fig for the young man who does not already see himself the partner or the head of an important firm. Do not rest content for a moment in your thoughts as head clerk, or foreman, or general manager in any concern, no matter how extensive. Say to yourself, ‘My place is at the top’ ” (The American Gospel of Success, Moses Rischin, Quadrangle Books, 1965, p. 92). That is what motivates business and industry today. Peter Kohen in his study The Gospel According to the Harvard Business School says that the apparent ethic of that sophisticated institution is “the American way … which urges people to compete for the sake of competing, win for the sake of winning, and which honors him who does all of this without pause or letup—the fastest, the nicest, the sportiest, the artiest; because things wouldn’t be the way they are unless God meant them to be” (Doubleday, 1973, p. 328).

I could just as easily have used education or government or military defense rather than business and industry for my examples. And unless I am mistaken this is the philosophy that the Church operates with. We have allowed the world to impose on us standards of success that are not biblical; and here I mean American evangelicals. We may criticize Norman Vincent Peak’s theology but we buy his psychology and methodology. We agree that the right thinking plus the right programming and motivation plus the right techniques will change any failure into a shining success. We agree with him that faith turns losers into winners. Faith? Well, positive thinking. Faith? Well, confidence in one’s own potential. Didn’t Jesus assure us that if we seek God’s kingdom first everything—everything!—will be added to us? Then why drive a Volkswagon when, as God’s successful servant, you ought to be driving a Cadillac? Why shepherd a little flock when, as God’s successful servant, you ought to occupy a commanding pulpit and be a magnetic television personality? Why remain satisfied with a small but sufficient income when as God’s successful servant you ought to eventually retire to Florida in comfort and security and play golf until you are welcomed into heaven’s country club?

But perhaps I am too sarcastic. To borrow a biting phrase from philosopher William James, evangelicalism is bowing before the bitch goddess of success. It worships at the shrine of sanctified or unsanctified statistics. We are sinfully concerned about size—the size of sanctuaries, the size of salaries, the size of Sunday schools. We are sinfully preoccupied with statistics about budgets and buildings and buses and baptisms. I repeat: too many of us are worshiping the bitch goddess of success.

In our colleges and seminaries we infect students with the virus of worldly success. We communicate the message that success in God’s service is to be an evangelist like Billy Graham or an author like Hal Lindsey or a pastor like Robert Schuller or a visionary like Bill Bright. Maybe we have been failing to communicate a clearcut biblical understanding of success. And, therefore, we fail to prepare our graduates for failure.

First, God’s standards of success differ from the world’s. In Luke 16:15 Jesus affirms that “What is highly esteemed among men is an abomination with God.” Second, the Bible turns values topsy-turvy, puts first what men put last and last what men put first. It praises the failure that is success and denounces the success that is failure. Paul warns us in First Corinthians that the achievements prized by the world—gold, silver, and precious stones—may be written off by God as wood, hay, and stubble. And when the writer of Hebrews in the eleventh chapter lists successful people, the overwhelming majority turn out to be worldly failures—people in conflict with their societies, people like Jesus and Stephen and Paul and Peter who died as criminals, not the sort of ecclesiastical big-wigs who get invited to a Presidential Prayer Breakfast.

Third, God has established certain standards of success. His criteria are not pulpit eloquence, communication skill, penetrating insight, remarkable gifts, encyclopedic knowledge, mountain-moving faith. His criterion is Christlike love (1 Cor. 13:1–3). Matthew 20:25–27 tells us that service inspired by a Christlike love is a mark of success. And in Matthew 25:21 a third criterion of spiritual success is the faithful use of the talents God has given us. Whether we have five talents, two or one, we are to use and multiply them in God’s service.

Most of us will work without ever becoming well known. Do we have faith to face failure? Do we really believe that worldly success is wood, hay, and stubble? We need to remember how often the Church will judge us the way the world does. Before anyone decides on a full-time ministry, for example, they must realize that God may be calling him or her to a ministry of tedious mediocrity. Regardless, God’s approval is the important point. It is far more important to follow God’s blueprint for your life than to be another Billy Graham or Hal Lindsey or Robert Schuller or Bill Bright. Each of us needs the faith to cling to biblical principles or success despite possible worldly failure. And each of us must have the faith to keep serving even if unappreciated, unsung, and unapplauded—in short, we need the faith to face failure.

All of this can be summed up in an anecdote about the great conductor Arturo Toscanini. One evening he brilliantly conducted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The audience went mad; people clapped, whistled, and stomped their feet. Toscanini bowed and bowed and bowed. He signaled to the orchestra, and its members stood to acknowledge the wild applause. Eventually the applause began to subside. With the quieting applause in the background, Toscanini turned, looked intently at his musicians, and almost uncontrollably exclaimed, “Gentlemen! Gentlemen!” The gentlemen in the orchestra leaned forward to listen. Why was the maestro so disturbed? Was he angry? Had somebody missed a cue? Had the orchestra flawed the performance? No. Toscanini was not angry. Toscanini was stirred to the very depths of his being by the sheer magnificence of Beethoven’s music. Scarcely able to talk, he whispered fiercely, “Gentlemen, I am nothing.” That was an extraordinary admission since Toscanini was blessed with an enormous ego. “Gentlemen,” he added, “You are nothing.” That was hardly news. The members of the orchestra had often heard the same message in rehearsal. “But Beethoven,” said Toscanini in a tone of adoration, “is everything, everything, everything!” That is the attitude we need toward ourselves and toward Jesus Christ.

D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

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