Jeff Sullivan, a pastor from Granada Church, bought himself a one-month membership at a golf simulator to find out whether he could learn the game. He cannot play. He will tell you that up front.
What he likes about golf is that it hands you a definition of success before you swing. Every hole has a par. Nobody plays defense. The ball is not even moving. It sits there, and the only question is whether you can hit it well enough.
His first hole took twenty-two shots. Across eighteen holes he took about a hundred and sixty. And he had a great time — because he was never measuring against par. He went in knowing he was terrible, and decided that if he hit one or two good balls, that would be enough to make him think he was a golfer and come back again.
Had he walked in there to win, he would have been throwing clubs. Same swings, same score, a ruined afternoon.
How you define success changes how you feel about your life. And most of us have never actually defined it. We have never written it down. So the definition gets supplied for us by the algorithm, or by the neighbors, or by whatever everyone around us has decided a person is supposed to want.
Borrowed scoreboards
Jeff went looking at how successful people define it. Dale Carnegie: success is getting what you want, happiness is wanting what you get — real wisdom in there about contentment. Tony Robbins: doing what you want, when you want, where you want, with whom you want, as much as you want — notice how much of that is control. Maya Angelou: liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it — a people person's answer rather than a task person's.
And Jon Bon Jovi: success is falling nine times and getting up ten. Which is lovely, except Proverbs 24 already said the righteous man falls seven times and rises again, so Bon Jovi appears to have added two and put his name on it. And the math does not survive contact either. If you get up ten times, you fell ten times.
They are good definitions, most of them. But none of them is yours.
The two-day trophy
Solomon had the resources to test every one of those definitions. So I became great and surpassed all who were before me in Jerusalem... Whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them. I kept my heart from no pleasure. He was the king. He could do what he wanted, when he wanted, with whom he wanted — the Tony Robbins definition, executed at scale. And his verdict is this: 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.
If that feels remote, here is a modern version. A.J. Brown played years in the NFL before he finally won a Super Bowl with the Eagles. Afterward he wrote something remarkably honest: he had tried to feel the way everyone made it seem a champion should feel, and it was short-lived — two days, to be exact.
Two days. For the single thing he had been told was the greatest thing a man in his profession could do. And then: I need to win it again.
You have had a smaller version of that. The grade you fought for. The job you wanted, that you did not much like once it was yours. The person whose attention you worked to get. We keep being told that getting the thing will fill us, and we keep finding out how fast it drains.
What you were made for
Try this instead: success is doing what you were designed to do.
We read the Westminster Catechism together that morning, and its first question is essentially this question. What is the chief end of man? What are we for? What counts as a life well spent? The answer: man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.
Sit with the shift. Every definition above points inward — what I can obtain, what I can control, how I feel about myself. This one turns the whole thing around and asks why you were made at all. You are a soul before you are anything else, and the hunger in you for God was designed in and cannot be fed by anything else. You can satisfy your flesh over and over. It will never once satisfy your spirit.
That is why Ephesians 2 starts where it starts. 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. That is an adoption. Think of what a small child actually does for himself — nothing. He is given his name, his shelter, his provision, his sense of who he is. That is your standing with God. You did not earn your way in and you cannot boast your way up.
Created for good works
But it does not stop at the profession of faith. Verse 10: For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. Workmanship means masterpiece — something made on purpose, by hand, for a reason.
Think about shopping for a car. Any of them will get you from A to B, so the real question is what it is for. That Corvette is a wonderful car right up until you have three kids, at which point it will get you exactly nowhere. If you are hauling dirt bikes and towing a boat and finishing a room, you need a truck. If you are driving the team and half the neighborhood, you need a van. Good is not an abstract quality. It is fitness for the purpose.
God gifted you before you ever walked in on a Sunday — with abilities, with affinities, with your education, your experiences, even your mistakes and your past. All of it assembled, because there is something he put you here to do.
So write your own definition of success this week. Not Carnegie's, not Bon Jovi's, not Jeff's. Only two guardrails: you cannot be successful outside of Christ, because your soul wants God and will accept no substitutes. And he redeemed you for something in particular.
What is that something? Go ask him.
