What Is Success?

By Dean Kelly

Harold is a multi-millionaire. He owns a Fortune 500 company. He flies from one of his mansions to another in his personal private jet. He has everything you could ever imagine. Everyone knows his name. Everybody looks at him and comments on what a successful person he is. Yes, he is a successful businessman. Yes, he has all kinds of things. 

But when he dies all those things will be left behind. He may be dressed in the most expensive clothes money can buy, in the highest-level coffin, placed in an expensive vault, with an impressive headstone marking his success in life. 

Sam has never had much in his whole life. He is a sharecropper who barely makes ends meet. He fights every month to try to make ends meet. He never has had anything extra in his life. He has always worn old, often second-hand clothes. He often has to deal with the holes in the bottom of his shoes until he can somehow purchase a new pair. 

Almost no one knows his name or who he is. But when he dies, he may be buried in an old suit, in the cheapest casket that his poor family can afford. But he will leave behind all of that. His meager headstone contains nothing more than his name with no epitaph.

After death, Harold and Sam will no longer be different. They will  have both entered into eternity where the things of this world do not invade, nor matter any more. Which one would be truly successful now? 

What makes one actually successful? Money? Fame? A loving family? 

We have a Sunday class I call my “Front Pew Crew.” Every week I ask them, “What is success?” and “What is failure?” They answer that success is going to heaven and failure is not going to heaven. Sam and Harold have the opportunity to be truly successful, if they came to the cross of Jesus in obedient faith. If they do not, then both of them failed in the end.

Dean Kelly is minister at Highland Home Church of Christ.