Be faithful to the Lord’s call, do your very best, and leave the results up to him. You may labor your entire ministry in relative obscurity and by the world’s standards you’re unsuccessful. But following God’s call and faithfully preaching the gospel to a small congregation in a rural community means that in his eyes you are very successful.

We live in an age of celebrity where people become famous for merely being famous—they have little talent or significant skills. They have become adroit at taking selfies and giving people the impression that they’re someone to watch and emulate. Unfortunately, the same type of pattern emerges in the church where celebrity pastors and theologians dominate the scene. To be clear, just because a pastor or theologian has a presence on social media or takes selfies doesn’t automatically mean that he’s doing something wrong. On the other hand, I do think that too many in the church measure a theologian’s worth by the number of books, blog posts, tweets, or conference appearances he makes. People in the church sometimes measure success and fidelity by the wrong index of achievements.

The Bible does not present success in empirical terms—numbers of converts, the size of a church, the number of books written, or the like. Rather, the Bible presents success in terms of a person’s fidelity. Is the prophet or apostle, for example, faithful to God’s call? This is the ultimately measure of true success. The prophet Isaiah, for example, was by all worldly indices a failure. God called him to a ministry of judgment.

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