What Does the Bible Say About Success?

6‑minute read · June 8, 2026

You can lose a whole day over a scoreboard you never chose.

Here's a strange thing about most of us: we'll lose sleep over success, measure ourselves against it, reorganize our weeks around it - and never once stop to define it. Ask yourself right now: what does success actually mean to me? One sentence. Could you say it? Most of us can't. And here's the problem with that - when you never define success for yourself, you don't escape the question. You just let the world answer it for you. The algorithm answers it. Your neighbors answer it. The person you went to high school with, posting their highlight reel, answers it. And you end up sprinting after things you never actually chose.

This past Sunday at Christchurch Miami, guest Pastor Jeff Sullivan opened up exactly this question - and pointed us somewhere most success advice never goes. The whole conversation is anchored in Ephesians 2:8-10:

"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. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them."

- Ephesians 2:8-10

Hold onto that last word - workmanship - because it changes what success even is.

The scoreboard you didn't choose

Pastor Jeff started with a confession most of us can relate to: he's terrible at golf. He got a one-month membership to a golf simulator and, on his first hole, swung again and again and again - 22 times before the ball dropped. Across 18 holes he took around 160 shots. And he walked away happy. Why? Because he'd defined success as "I'm just here to have fun and maybe hit one good ball" - not "I'm here to beat par." Same round, same score; had he measured himself against par, he'd have been throwing clubs.

That's the whole point in miniature. As Pastor Jeff put it, how you define success changes how you feel about your entire life - how you feel about yourself, about your work, about your worth. And most of us have quietly absorbed a definition we'd never have chosen on purpose.

When the win runs empty

Here's the part that should stop us. Even when you win the world's game, it doesn't pay out the way it promised. A couple of years ago, A.J. Brown finally won the Super Bowl - the thing he'd chased his entire career. Afterward he wrote, honestly, that he tried to feel the way everyone said a champion should feel, but it was "short-lived. Two days, to be exact." A lifetime of striving; the satisfaction lasted a long weekend.

That's not a football problem - it's the oldest problem there is. Solomon, the wisest and wealthiest man who ever lived, denied himself nothing his eyes desired, then surveyed the whole glittering pile and concluded:

"Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun."

- Ecclesiastes 2:11

Striving after wind. You can run at it as hard as you want; your hands close on nothing. Maybe you've felt it - you get the promotion and discover you want a different job; you get the relationship and it isn't what you pictured; you get the thing, and forty-eight hours later the ache is back. If you're a new Christian reading this, hear the relief in it: the emptiness you've felt at the top of the ladder isn't a sign you climbed it wrong. It's a sign the ladder was leaning against the wrong wall.

You were made for more than the world can give

So why does winning keep coming up empty? Because we keep forgetting what we are.

You are not a body that happens to have a spiritual side. You are a soul - and there's a desire for God built into you that nothing else can satisfy. Jesus asked the question that cuts through every success seminar ever given:

"For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?"

- Mark 8:36

He doesn't say the world is worthless or that ambition is sin. He just does the math nobody else will do out loud: even if you gain everything, if it costs you your soul, you've made the worst trade in history.

Why the flesh can't fill the soul

This is where Pastor Jeff was blunt, and it's worth sitting with: satisfying your flesh will never satisfy your spirit. Your body is real and good - God gave it to you, and it has genuine needs. But you can feed your appetites over and over and still feel starved, because the hunger underneath was never for the next thing. It's like trying to fill a bathtub with the drain wide open. More water isn't the answer. The drain is.

So what is success, then? Centuries ago, believers answered it in a single line: the chief end of humanity is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. Set that next to everything the world sells. Success isn't mainly what you can acquire, control, or feel. It begins with the question underneath all the others - the one written, fittingly, over the door to the kids' hallway at church: what were you created for?

You are God's workmanship - built on purpose

Here's the turn, and it comes in two movements straight out of Ephesians 2:8-10.

First: you don't earn your way in. "For by grace you have been saved through faith… it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast." The most important relationship in the universe is the one thing you are specifically not allowed to earn. Pastor Jeff's picture for this is adoption. Think about what a child contributes to their own adoption - nothing. A child is brought in, given a name, told who they are, and provided for. That's what God has done with you. You're a child who is held, not an employee on probation anxiously trying to keep the job.

Second: you were built on purpose, for a purpose. "For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works." That word - workmanship - means masterpiece. Something made by hand, on purpose, with intention. You are not mass-produced. And a work always implies a purpose.

Good for what?

Pastor Jeff illustrated it with car shopping. 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 is never "is it good?" - it's "good for what?" A gorgeous sports car is a great car right up until you have three kids; then it gets you nowhere. Need to haul and tow? Get the truck. Carpooling the 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're the same. God didn't just save you - He built you. Your gifts, your personality, your experiences, even your failures and your past, were assembled in advance for specific good works that He prepared beforehand. Which means success isn't becoming a generically impressive person. It's discovering the thing God made you to do, and doing it for His glory. For a new believer, that's freeing: you don't have to be everything. You were made to be something, on purpose.

Write your own definition

So here's where Pastor Jeff left us, and where we'll leave you. This week, actually write your definition of success. Not Dale Carnegie's. Not Tony Robbins'. Not your father's. Yours. But build it on the two anchors this message handed us. One: you cannot be truly successful outside of Christ - your soul was made for God, and nothing else will fill that space. Two: He has redeemed you for something specific, and your job is to seek Him until you know what it is.

The apostle Paul wrote his own definition near the end of his life, from a prison cell:

"Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But 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."

- Philippians 3:13-14

Notice the order: identity first ("Christ Jesus has made me his own"), and only then the drive. That's the engine of a life that doesn't run empty. So get a piece of paper. Finish the sentence: "Success, for me, is ___." Anchor it in Christ and in what He's redeemed you to do - then spend the rest of your life pressing on toward it. That's not striving after wind. That's running toward the only finish line that was ever going to be worth it.

New to faith, or just want to figure this out alongside other people? Start the free 5-day devotional series on this message at app.christchurchmiami.org/devo, and find a community group where you can keep working it out together. You don't have to write your definition alone.

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