God Desires Your Success - Part 1

Welcome to this weekend's In Touch Podcast with Charles Stanley. True success is more than just coming out on top. Let's begin a series of messages that reveals the path to success God's way. Is it right to want to be a success in life? And can you live a godly life and still be a success? In fact, is God even interested in our being a success? And can I count on Him in any fashion to help me to succeed in whatever He's called me to do? Are there any scriptural principles or any instructions in the Word of God that will help me succeed in whatever I'm doing in life? And is success really sort of limited to a certain group of people or a certain segment of society? Or can anyone succeed at what they're doing in life? Well, all of these are good questions and they're relevant questions because you and I live in a world where there are many people out there who claim to be successful.

We don't want to be like them. And yet the same people oftentimes look with disdain upon people who want to live a godly life. So this is the beginning of a series entitled, Success, God's Way. And I want you to turn, if you will, to Joshua chapter one, the title of this message, God Desires Your Success.

And in this first chapter of Joshua, God certainly has made it very clear that He has given to Joshua an awesome responsibility and that God is certainly committed to His success. Now you may be thinking, well, success at what? What am I doing in life? And how important am I?

And why should I be thinking in terms of success? Well, we're going to get to that. So let's look, if you will, in this first chapter of Joshua, beginning in verse one, remembering that Moses has died and now God has spoken to Joshua about carrying on the work that Moses began. So the Scripture says, It came about after the death of Moses the servant of the Lord, that the Lord spoke to Joshua the son of Nun, Moses' servant, saying, Moses, my servant is dead. Now therefore, rise, cross this Jordan, you and all the people, to the land which I am giving to them, that is, the sons of Israel. Every place on which the sole of your foot treads, I have given it to you, just as I spoke to Moses.

From the wilderness and this Lebanon, even as far as the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites, and as far as the great sea, toward the setting of the sun will be your territory. No man will be able to stand before you all the days of your life. Just as I have been with Moses, I will be with you. I will not fail you nor forsake you. Be strong and courageous, for you shall give this people possession of the land which I swore to their fathers to give them. Only be strong and very courageous. Be careful to do according to all the law which Moses my servant commanded you.

Do not turn from it to the right or to the left, so that you may have success wherever you go. This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it. Then you'll make your way prosperous. Then you'll have success.

Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not tremble or be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go." Well, the first thing that I want to talk about in this whole series here and especially in this message is the confusion that oftentimes surrounds this whole idea of being success. Now, sometimes a Christian will read the Bible and then they'll hear about all these quotes that people give about being a success in life. And they'll say, see there, I don't know how in the world you could be a godly person, walk in the Spirit and be concerned about being a success in life. And they'll bring up things like this. They'll say, well now, doesn't the Bible, and they'll come to some passage of Scripture and maybe they'll flip through and they'll find a verse or two over here and they'll say, well now, I know that somewhere in the Bible, the Bible talks about not being concerned about tomorrow and they can't quite get that right.

And so then they'll just say, but the folks who are into this goal business and this success business, they talk about setting goals. But does not the Bible say, take no thought for tomorrow? Looks like a contradiction.

And so then they'll bring up the idea, well, if you talk about success, you've got to talk about self-control. And doesn't the Bible talk about spirit control? Another seemingly contradiction. Or they'll say, well now, anybody who talks about success talks about self-confidence. And doesn't the Bible talk about the whole idea of having no confidence in the flesh? Another contradiction.

And is it not true that people usually think in terms of success is being number one? And doesn't the Bible say, humble yourself before the Lord? So see there, you can't walk a godly life, you can't be concerned about being a success in your life and walking in the Spirit and being a godly person. Well now on the surface that may appear what it seems to be, but let's go back to what happened to Joshua. God said to Joshua, I want you to take this awesome responsibility of the leadership of the nation of Israel, over two million, I want you to take them across this Jordan into the Promised Land and win this land, this is the home of my people. So Joshua, you have a big responsibility, this is how you're going to do it. And if you'll do what I tell you, you will be successful.

He said it twice, you will be successful. If God were opposed to success, he certainly would not have said this to Joshua. And so when we think in terms of what success is all about, usually it's because a person, first of all, does not understand what a true genuine meaning of success is from God's viewpoint.

And secondly, they confuse the verses of Scripture. So if I should ask you, somebody should come up to you and say, well, tell me, what is your idea about success? Or if they said to you, would you please give me a definition of success the way you see it? More than likely, many people would sort of stumble around and say, well, you know, it's setting a goal and accomplishing that goal. Well, now that could be an evil goal as well as a good goal, a financial goal or whatever it might be. And so just necessarily setting a goal and accomplishing a goal doesn't necessarily mean that you would be a success. And so when I think about success, you have to think about in the light of what God says it is, because you and I know some people who would claim to be successful.

We wouldn't swap places with them for anything in this world. And so when I look to see what God said to Joshua and he said to him here, he says, I'm going to make you successful. Here's what he said to him. He said, now, here's the task.

Here's the way you do it. And you will be a success. Be strong and courageous.

And I'm going to be with you. Now, when you look and see what Joshua did and how God worked in his life, God worked in his life in a marvelous way. God said to him, I want you to be successful at what I called you to do, because getting my people out of this wilderness in the Promised Land, which I promised Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, that listen, I want you to be successful. I've planned you to be successful. I've chosen you to do this, and I'm going to be with you to see to it you succeed in what I've called you to do. The question is, do you and I have a right to ask God? Do we have the right to expect God to anticipate, to be able to call upon Him? Do we believe that God is on our side enabling us and desiring that you and I succeed in whatever He's called us in life? Now let's deal with something that I know that a lot of folks think about right up front.

They say, well, now, wait a minute. Here I am, I'm just the homemaker. What's this success business got to do with washing dishes and cleaning beds and taking care of my children? It has a great deal to do with it, because every great man and woman out there had parents somewhere, and if they were really and truly great, and especially if they were great, godly men and women, they had parents that instilled something within them that helped to make a difference.

Even though they may have come out of a bad home, there was something about the character they got instilled with those children. So you can't take your particular position or where you are in life at this point and say, well, you know, success at what? Well, it's success at whatever God has chosen for you to do in life. Whatever He's chosen for you to do in life, He desires that you succeed at it. He has planned that you be a success. And so when I look at the Scripture and see what God said to him, and then I think about how people interpret the whole idea of success, depending upon where they come from in life, then I can understand why people have difficulty in defining it. So somebody says, well, success is setting a goal and having the satisfaction of achieving that goal.

Well, that's true up to a point. But you and I are not just goal setters. You and I are the sons and daughters of the living God. And if by chance you happen not to be, I want to challenge you to listen to this message very carefully so that you ask yourself an honest to goodness question. Would it be possible for me to have far greater success and what I may consider success if I were a follower of Jesus Christ? So I'm going to look at this from a point of view of a believer and think in terms of this way. So when we talk about success, here is what success is from God's viewpoint, and He is the one who knows more about success than anybody else. What is success from God's viewpoint? Success from God's viewpoint is this. It is a continuing desire to be the person God called me to be and to achieve those goals that God has helped me to set.

It is the continuing desire to be the person that God wants me to be and to achieve the goals that God has helped me to set. You cannot be successful and leave God out of your life. Now you and I could look back in history and look around us and see all kinds of people out there who from the world's viewpoint would be considered a success because they've achieved lots of fame, they have achieved lots of wealth, and so lots of notoriety in every single aspect of life, whether it is the computer world or the rock music world or some other part of the world, it doesn't make any difference. You've got people out there who appear to be very successful. And so what we have to ask is what's involved in success? Is success just simply achieving certain goals in life? Is success simply a matter of amassing so much fortune or having your name on picture and enough magazines and newspapers out there and enough variety that you become a very famous person? Is that what success is all about? That's what the world thinks because the two words that best define the way they look at success is fame and fortune. If they have enough fame and enough money, then surely that's a success. So when you think about the world's idea of success, you don't want that. You want success, listen, that when you have reached your goal, you have contentment, peace, a sense of joy and sense of satisfaction, a sense of fulfillment that you have done what God has asked you to do in life. And I don't mean just once in a while, but I mean annually, because remember what we said? We said a continuing growing, a continuing achieving the life that God wants us to live in this life.

It's something that goes on and on. It's not something that's separated from me because you see real genuine success is something that happens on the inside of us. And as you look at Joshua, certainly God gave him a goal. He gave him the encouragement.

He told him exactly how to do it. And he said, I'm going to be with you. And he said to him, he said, you will be a success. Now, with that in mind, I want to thank you for just a moment about this whole idea of how God gets involved in this issue of our success.

I think there are three ways that God certainly is an encourager, three ways that He provides and works in your life and my life to enable us to be a success because He desires that we be. Now, let's look in the scriptures for a few moments. When you look in the scriptures and you go through the Bible, let's just go through some characters of the Bible.

And I won't take time to give you all the scriptures because you know, most of these people are by heart. So let's begin back there with Joseph. And now what I want you to see, I want you to see that God desired the success of each one of these men and he planned it.

And listen, the truth is, and we'll come to this later, the principles that make for success, you can find them in these men's lives. All right, first of all, let's go back to Joseph. Joseph, you will recall, found himself in Potiphar's household as a slave. You know what Joseph did? He set as his goal to be the best slave he could possibly be.

And what happens? The Bible says he ended up in charge of his whole household. He was learning the principles of administration.

He was learning how to run. He ends up in jail. Before long, he's in charge of the whole jail.

And what happens? Because of his faithfulness, because he set a God-given goal in his life to be the best he could be no matter what, he ends up prime minister of Egypt, second only to Pharaoh. God made him a success.

Then here is Joshua. God is the one who chose him. Listen, he was Moses' general after fighting war after war after war. And now, because of his administrative abilities, God has chosen him and because of his commitment to God to lead the nation of Israel across Jordan to the Promised Land. God gave him those abilities, showed him how to do it, and he practiced the principles that God had given him.

And he says, I'm going to be with you all the way. And then, of course, there was Nehemiah. Nehemiah came from Babylonian captivity and back to the Promised Land and back to Jerusalem by another king, a Persian king who was certainly an ungodly person. But he let him go. And he provided what he needed and what he did. He rebuilt the wall.

He rebuilt the gates. God gave him a goal. God was with him. And God encouraged him. God made a success out of Nehemiah.

And then, for example, you could just go on through the Old Testament. Let's go to the Apostle Paul. When God saved him, he had a lot of things going against him. In fact, he had all the religion around him against him. Even the Christians suspected him.

But he had a goal. What was his goal? He had such a passion for Jesus Christ, such an awesome compassion to get the message out. What did he do? He didn't say, well, I'm just going to go somewhere and preach.

No. He looked at the map of his day, and he plotted out where he wanted to go. And he went to the big cities primarily because he knew, according to the plan that God had given him, that was the place, the established churches, to get the gospel to the most people as quickly as possible, as clearly as possible. He was a man who was an absolute awesome success. But you look at all them, they had their moments of defeat.

But great successes in life. Did they all end up with lots of plaudits from the world? No, they did not. Many of them ended up, listen, being killed because of their faith. Were they failures because they were killed?

No, they were not. What made them a success? They found out what God wanted them to do.

They committed themselves to it. They followed godly principles, and they accomplished it and achieved it, and God made them a success. How do I know that God wants you and me to succeed in what we're doing? It's very interesting that the patterns of success are all through the Scriptures, and men and women alike who were willing to follow God's leadership and guidance and the plans and the goals that God had set for their life. Listen, oftentimes we make the mistake of saying, well, but you know, I'm not one of those biblical characters, right? But here's what you and I must think about, and oftentimes we forget this.

This is a real comfort to me. When I go through some situations and circumstances, I think, okay, all right, how did the Apostle Paul feel on a day like this? Were all his days glorious?

No. Did he have those mundane kind of days that were sort of drab days that must have been cloudy and things weren't going exactly like he wanted? Did he have those kind of days?

Yes, he did. You see, when we look, for example, the life of Moses, what an awesome, tremendously inspiring life it was. But what you forget sometimes is 40 long years.

Forty long years, a whole generation of years. All he did was feed sheep, watch over sheep, out there on the backside of the desert, an absolute nobody until he was ready. And so we're all going to have those moments and have those periods in our life. But it's very clear from Scripture what God has done in the lives of those people and is still doing in the lives of people today. Listen, he is still desiring and planning for his people to succeed in whatever areas of life he's called them. And yet so oftentimes we accept defeats as becoming a failure and oftentimes people give up. Listen, don't give up. It doesn't make any difference how many defeats you have. You should ask Edison, how many times were you defeated about a light bulb? How many times were you defeated? What was it, 2,000 times? You think about all the inventions.

Did people just invent something the first time? No. And you see, here's what I want you to remember. It is in our moments of defeat. It is in periods of defeat. It is in those trying difficult times in life. Listen carefully. It is in those times we decide whether to fail or whether to succeed.

And here's what happens. When we decide we're not going to give up, we're going to be persistent. We're going to keep at it.

We're not going to say I quit. We're going to keep hanging in there no matter what. No matter what somebody says, no matter what somebody does, no matter how they treat us, no matter what happens, I'm not giving up and I'm not quitting. I'm moving on, doing what I believe God's called me to do.

Here's what happens. You develop, listen, in those trying difficult adversity times, you and I develop the very characteristics, the very characteristics that make for success. Listen, if it were easy, it wouldn't work. It is in those difficult times where you have to be persistent when everything around you is against you. When you've got to be trusting and believing in God when nobody else believes in you. When you've got to have confidence when everything around you, somebody is striking at your sense of self-esteem. It is the very adversities in the midst of the trials and circumstances that build the very qualities that make for success in a person's life. Thank you for listening to God Desires Your Success. If you'd like to know more about Charles Stanley or In Touch Ministries, stop by intouch.org. This podcast is a presentation of In Touch Ministries, Atlanta, Georgia.