Success?

Everyone wants to be successful.

That may be one of the few things all people have in common these days. Regardless of political affiliation, social background, religious belief, etc., every person wants to experience success. Whether a person’s goals are objectively right or misguided, everyone wants to “win.”

No one woke up this morning and said, “I hope today is the day that I fall flat on my face, nothing works, and I end the day where I started.” Failure is undesirable; success is what we all want.

However, that does beg a question: what is success? More specifically, what defines success when it comes to parenting?

This is an idea I’m chewing on as an expectant dad. Is success always “up and to the right”, so to speak? Is success our future child doing “better than us” financially? Is success that my child makes it further in athletic pursuits than my wife or I did?

Culture would say “Yes” to all those things. The way our culture thinks is that success is…well, being successful. Culture would argue something like this: If my child doesn’t make straight As, get a college degree, have a stable job with high income, and have dozens of friends, then that means Grace and I are failures as parents.

Even in the church, the idea can be very similar: if your child isn’t a fully devoted follower of Jesus by the time they are out of elementary school, and if they haven’t been on at least two mission trips by the time they are 16, and if they aren’t reading the Bible through in a year by the time they graduate, then Grace and I haven’t done our job.

Now, I am not saying those are not fine goals that perhaps we should shoot towards…but do they really define success as a parent? More broadly, does God define “success” as “success” to begin with?

Let’s consider the case of the prophet Jeremiah.

In Jeremiah 7, God told Jeremiah to go to gate of the temple and call the people their to repent- or else God’s wrath and judgment would be executed against them for their wickedness and idolatry. Then, after God gives Jeremiah the words to say, He tells Jeremiah this:

In other words, God told Jeremiah that after Jeremiah did exactly what God told him to do…Jeremiah’s words would fall on deaf ears.

Was Jeremiah, then, a failure when He did what God told him to do…and the people rejected the message?

No.

God measures success much differently than we do. He does not measure success by whether things are “up and to the right.”

The person that God says has done well, according to Matthew 25:21 an 23, is not the successful servant. It is the faithful servant. Sometimes faithfulness will include great effectiveness. But sometimes- in fact, many times- faithfulness is simply doing what God has called you and I to do- regardless of what the results look like at the end of the day.

As a result, we can both appear to be failures, yet be successful in God’s eyes is we are faithful, AND we can appear to be successful, but be failures in God’s eyes if we are faithless and disobedient.

So when it comes to parenting, it’s not primarily about how my child turns out. At the end of the day, while Grace and I have a tremendous role to play, whether my child follows Jesus or does well in school or discovers their calling and gifting will be primarily on them.

Our role is to simply do our best to help them understand the Gospel and give them all the information and the opportunities we possibly can to respond to it. I know we will not get this perfect (because no one does)- but that’s the target on the wall for us to shoot for. That’s the target on the wall for every parent to shoot for.

And if we’re faithful in it, then THAT is success. And I believe if we are faithful in it, our children stand a much greater chance of following Jesus than they do if we are faithless!