Whose God is Greater?

There’s a problem with success. We assume that success assumes the process was a good one, nay a great one, that got us the success. For example, we might think assume that steady business growth of 15%—which means the business doubles every five years—means that our marketing strategy, our product/service development strategy, our franchising, our financial controls, our talent recruitment strategy are all working together and working well...because we’re getting the results we want. We assume the strategies are working well because the results are as expected. This is called Outcome Bias. The outcome validates the process and causes us not to question if we’re missing something or have just been lucky.

We build our future forecasts on the past success.

We believe our strategies are great because the results are great. And then...our revenue shrinks one year even though we haven’t changed any of the strategies nor any of the related processes.

Assume you were to asked, “How do you know so-and-so is operating in God’s will?” You probably would answer based on their circumstances: financial, emotional/relational (e.g. they’re still married), level of power or influence, etc. You might ask a similar question regarding nations and have similar criteria in order to formulate the answer.

But it is this thinking that gets the church in trouble. God’s favor is never determined by their status. Christ said, “The Son of Man does not have a place to lay His head.” Paul, as a missionary, repeatedly suffered. And, in chapter 10, the prophet Isaiah shares God’s view that Assyria would say its god was more powerful than all the other kingdoms’ gods, including Israel, Judah and Samaria’s YHWH, because it had decimated any other nation it came up against. No one living in the ancient times would have said that YHWH, who selected Israel to be His ambassadors, was anything but a backwater god. He didn’t have many followers and His followers weren’t influential nor powerful nor rich. They were constantly getting beaten up by Babylonians, Egyptians and, just before Christ’s arrival, the Romans. And they were still getting beaten up for centuries after Christ’s arrival.

But what do we do in churches? We promote the wealthy and successful. We promote them into greater pastoral responsibilities from small churches to larger ones. We promote large company business leaders into being elders/deacons on our churches’ governing boards. We promote the writings of those writers/leaders with large followings. We promote mimicking successful people’s leadership styles—even though we can’t say that they’re behaving, deciding, prioritizing and morally viewing situations with God’s eyes and heart.

So the next time you choose who to follow, listen to, promote, christen as a good, true ambassador of YHWH’s, ask yourself, “What is my criteria for knowing if he/she is just such a person favored by God?”