success on Jealousy

In life, whenever someone achieves success, criticism usually follows—regardless of their skill or the effort they’ve invested. An old story illustrates this truth. A woman crafted artificial fruit so...

If a man is forever concerned first and foremost with his own interests then he is bound to collide with others. If for any man life is a competition…then he will always think of other human beings as...

Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.

In his book, Scary Close , Donald Miller acknowledges that over time he developed a mask, or a persona that kept even those closest to him from experiencing with him. As he began to peel back layers ...

Father, we confess to boasting in success and security. We have denied you rather that desire you. We have cowered when we needed to be courageous. Jesus, we long to be people who follow you, no matte...

While exploring an experience of deep guilt and shame with her spiritual director, the author of Madeleine L’Engle, wrote One time I was talking to Canon Tallis, who is my spiritual director as we...

One of the greatest struggles we face in this life is the temptation to compare ourselves to others. As Teddy Roosevelt famously said, “Comparison is the thief of joy.” But in the final part of ...

The pressure to succeed is greater than it has ever been—People feel that they must pursue that goal been…people feel that they must pursue that goal even if it means crawling over the bodies of cowor...

It’s rare when celebrities acknowledge anything but the carefully crafted image that’s on view to the public. But this excerpt by the singer Madonna reveals that all of us, even celebrities struggle w...

Lord, we confess that we are tempted to be relevant, to be popular, and to be powerful. In our pride, we seek to be recognized as great. Humble us and remind us that we are your beloved children, who ...

Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. Success, popularity, and power can indeed present a great temptation...

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.

Ambition has no rest.

We pastors don't drive fancy cars or rake in the dough (most of us, anyway). But there is still a temptation to a skewed version of "holy success" that we need to watch out for, the idea...

We want everyone around us to believe we have it all together—and we don’t. We fear everyone else is living the lives they post and we are the only imposters. And so, the race is on. The race to perfe...

William James, in a famous letter to H. G. Wells in 1906, credited what he called American “moral flabbiness” to “the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That—with the squalid cash interpr...

My wife, Susan and I were sitting in the office of a fellow pastor, Jack Harrison, in the fall of 1992. The recommendation of friends had led us to Jack’s office. “He’s an amazing counselor,” they sai...

We can prostitute our very souls in our attempts to be successful. We can sell out, cave in and go morally bankrupt chasing the god of success. Knowing this perilous potential, Jesus himself warns us ...

J.B. Phillips was a successful pastor and prolific author in the mid-twentieth century. He was a colleague and friend of C. S. Lewis’s, and it was Lewis who personally endorsed Phillips’s translation ...

In his highly insightful work, Inside Job , Stephen W. Smith shares the sobering truth of what happens to many leaders when they climb the “ladder of success”: The ground at the foot of the ladde...

All of us struggle with our own desires for accomplishment and ambition. Christians especially find it difficult to discern their own worldly ambitions vs. following Jesus’ comand to seek first the ki...

Harold Kushner wrote about a very bright, driven pre-med student at a very competitive college. While traveling in the East the summer before his junior year, he met a guru who said, “Don’t you see yo...

There is a peculiar gratification in receiving congratulations from one’s squadron for a victory in the air. It is worth more to a pilot than the applause of the whole outside world.

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.

If our identity is in our work, rather than Christ, success will go to our heads, and failure will go to our hearts.

Success is full of promise till one gets it, and then it seems like a nest from which the bird has flown.

When we’ve had a good year in our own kingdom, we aren’t necessarily looking for God’s Kingdom.

Those who have arrived at any very eminent degree of excellence in the practice of an art or profession have commonly been actuated by a species of enthusiasm in their pursuit of it. They have kept on...

Since failure is our unforgivable sin, we are willing to ignore all forms of deviance in people if they just achieve the success symbols which we worship.

It is a sprinting, squirting, shoving age.