This past weekend I had the opportunity to hear Pastor TL Rogers, from The Triumphant Church in Washington D.C., preach on the importance of being a single, whole person before getting married. It was a great message in and of itself (you can watch it HERE) and there’s a ton more that could be said about the importance of wholeness, but there’s one thing that he said that I’d like to key in on. He said, “Success is predictable.” He was talking about success in marriage, but the idea spans the whole of following Jesus and Christendom.
He pointed to Joshua 1:8 as evidence. In that verse God is commissioning Joshua to lead the Israelites after Moses death. God tells Joshua, “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. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success.” There it is. Follow the law then you’ll be prosperous and have good success. To be sure, God wasn’t simply talking about material success. He was telling Joshua what it would take to have success as His people and that started with following the law as He gave it to them.
If that’s true, we can extrapolate that out and apply it to the New Covenant in Jesus and use that verse as our guideline for success and prosperity. By the time Jesus hit the scene the Jews had over 600 laws that were required for “righteousness.” An impossible task, if ever there was one. When asked which is the most important, Jesus said, “And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” If all the other laws depend on those two commands, then the promise of success found in Joshua 1:8 requires our continued obedience to them.
What that mean in a practical sense is that as followers of Jesus our success, in everything, is dependent on not letting love depart from our lips, meditating on it day and night and being careful to do all that Jesus commanded surrounding love. That means being His witness to an unbelieving world by caring for widows and orphans, being agents of healing, loving each other well, displaying grace and forgiveness and not seeking to condemn others. Success looks like the love of Christ acted out by His followers.
Let’s be successful.
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