Being successful is something we all desire. Everyone, at least everyone I know, wants to succeed at what they are doing. Most of all they want to succeed in life. In the world there are several things that mark success. You can take all kinds of courses on being successful. You can watch infomercials, purchase books, read articles, listen to a motivational speaker, and the list goes on and on. In fact, the business of being successful has become an entire industry in itself. This tells me that people want to succeed.

I want to succeed. If I were a betting man, I’d think it to be a sure thing to bet that you want to succeed too. I’ve had my fair share of success and failure. It’s been said that to know success requires a good deal of failure. Thomas Edison failed at so many things that the average person would have simply given up. I probably would have.

I recently talked with a man who had retired from the real-estate business. He had experienced a very successful career. During his last year he kept track of his quotes and offers on onion skin paper. He had a stack for sales and a stack for failures. During the course of that year he had sold fifty properties and had made a handsome commission from his sales. But as he was cleaning out his desk in preparation for retirement, he compared the stacks of successes to the stacks of failures. Remember this was on very thin onion skin paper. His success stack measured about a half inch in thickness. But his failure stack measured nearly four inches in thickness. That meant that it had taken eight to ten failures to produce one success.

Life is very much like that. We all want to succeed in life, not just in our business or our jobs, but with our families, our children, our hopes and dreams and for believers in Jesus Christ, our salvation experience with the Lord. We don’t like to fail the Lord. But we do. When we have a genuine and deep relationship with the Father it hurts us when we fail Him, and it should. All too often after failure people just quit. They come to believe that they aren’t cut out for it or that they just don’t have the right stuff to succeed in a Christian experience. But in order to succeed even in Christ we must determine that regardless of failure we will go on with Him. We will not turn back and we will not quit.

One of the first things we must do even in our Christian experience in order to succeed is to have a good positive attitude. However, having a positive attitude for Christ is a lot different than having what the world considers to be a positive attitude. In order to have a positive Christian attitude we must learn humility. Being humble is not considered a strong trait to the world. I know from experience that if we don’t learn humility right off the Lord has a way of making us learn this quality. When the spotlight is beaming down on you, there is a big temptation there to think that we are finally something. It is very tempting to feel important and that we must really be somebody. I’ve had problems with that. But the Good Lord above has always put me in my place real quick like. I couldn’t tell you the times when I’d be feeling all important because of a big speaking engagement and I’d get up with a zit on my face the size of a marble. Or I’d sleep the wrong way and no matter what I did I couldn’t get a lock of my hair to lie down. Or I’d spill coffee on my nice white shirt on the way to the service and have to stand in front of all those people with an ugly brown stain blaring out.

Jesus told His disciples (and ultimately us as well) in Mark 9:35 that if we want to be first we must learn to be last and servant of all. In other words to get to the top of the totem pole we’ve got to be satisfied at the bottom. In order to lead we’ve got to be humble enough to be the servant of everyone. We can succeed in our Christian life but it will come by first being God’s humble servant, demonstrated by a life of service. Hang in there; you are going to be a great success!

Jerry D. Ousley is the Author of five books, “Soul Challenge”, “Soul Journey” “Ordeal” “The Spirit Bread Daily Devotional” and his first novel “The Shoe Tree.” Find out more by visitingwww.spiritbread.com or email us at jousley@spiritbread.com