The Dangers Of Success
3/18/95 GNLCC Samuel 13:1-15 Revelations 2:1-7 2 Chronicles 26
Success is something that we all want to obtain. We want to have it, we want to keep it, and we usually want others to know when it was that we received it. Success in and of itself is a good thing. All of us should strive to be successful in whatever it is that we are doing for it reflects on the kind of God that we serve. The Bible encourages us to go out and be successful. The Bible tells us in Prov 13:4 The sluggard craves and gets nothing, but the desires of the diligent are fully satisfied.
There is an element to success that can cause us to lose friends, family members, and associates. Some become envious and others jealous of what another has done, but that’s not a danger we need to be overly concerned about. The danger of success is not what does our success do to others, but rather what does our success do to ourselves. How many of you can think of person who went out and did it, be it as small as winning a race, or marrying a person, or building a house, or landing a job, o r becoming famous, and after it happened the person changed?
There was something on the inside of that person that died, and it was replaced by another image that was fed by the person’s success. You may have thought in the language of today’s youth "Oh he ain’t all that." You may not know exactly what that "that is", but you know he or she isn’t what he or she thinks he is. There is a chance that our success can make us unfit for God’s service.
When God began searching for a man to become king of His people, he saw a man with a very humble spirit and heart. Samuel the prophet went up to this young man by the name of Saul and told him, "the desire of the people is for you to become their king." Saul responded to him by saying, "who in the world am I, the least of the least, that you would even say such a thing to me." In other words, you must have the wrong person, because I’m just a nobody. Saul was so embarrassed by what Saul had told him, when He got home and his father asked him what had happened, he wouldn’t even mention what Samuel the prophet had said.
Samuel called all the tribes together to show which person God had called to be the new king. They cast lots for each tribe. The tribe of Benjamin won. They cast lots for each clan in the tribe. The clan of Merari won. They casts lots for each family in the clan. The family of Kish won. They cast lots for each person in the family and Saul won. Even though he won, he was so humbled they could not find him. In fact God had to show them where he was. Saul was hiding in the baggage because he did not consider himself worthy of being the king. He saw himself just like everybody else.
They took Saul and made him their king. The people shouted long live the king. That sounded pretty good to him. When he went home that day, some valiant soldiers provided him with an escort. No longer would he go in and out without protection. After all, he was the king. It was not long before he led the army in battle against the Ammonites, and they destroyed them in battle. The people gave a great banquet in his honor. This was the kind of things that a person could get to enjoy. Then it happened without the Bible giving the slightest hint that something was about to go wrong.
God’s people’s enemies, the Philistines were gathering together to prepare for battle at Micmash. Samuel was to come to Saul and his army at Gilgal within 7 days to offer a sacrifice on behalf of the soldiers going into battle. The Philistine army was getting larger. Samuel wasn’t coming soon enough for some of the soldiers, so they started to desert the army. Saul was getting afraid as he got word, some of the men are deserting and running away.
The seventh day had come and still no Samuel. Saul felt he had to do something. After all, he was the king and the king should be able to do as he pleased. The man who once thought himself to humble to be the king, was now ready to declare himself, God’s special priest. Priests are never self appointed. They are called by God. Success had gone to Saul’s head. He gave the order, "bring me the burnt offering and the fellowship offerings" They brought it to him, and he offered the sacrifice. No sooner than he had finished, Samuel arrived.
You can look at all the duties of the king in the Old Testament, and not once do you find that they have authority to offer sacrifices before God. But when you get high on success, you start to do what you want to do, regardless of what God says. Samuel ask Saul, "What in the world have you done." Saul told him, "I felt compelled to offer the burnt offering." My friends, there’s no such thing as feeling compelled to do wrong in the name of the Lord.
Saul figured out that it was no big deal. After all he was the King, and somebody had to get the job done. Little did he know that this thing that he considered no big deal, would cost him his future. Samuel saw the situation a little differently. 1 Sam 13:13-14 "You acted foolishly," Samuel said. "You have not kept the command the LORD your God gave you; if you had, he would have established your kingdom over Israel for all time. But now your kingdom will not endure; the LORD has sought out a man after his own heart and appointed him leader of his people, because you have not kept the Lord’s command."
It’s not our opinion of our actions that really count, no matter how sincere we may be. It’s what God thinks of our actions that really matter. Is what we doing in accord with the revealed will of God in the Scriptures. You can read all about the rest of Saul’s life, and the one thing that is missing throughout is humility and a willingness to serve God all the way. God had brought him from hiding in the baggage to sitting on the royal throne. That kind of success had made a tremendous difference in his life, but not in the right manner.
Today you will hear people say, God brought me from a mighty long way. From hardly any food on the table, to a freezer full of food. From a place of no account, to a nice bank account. From shoes with holes in them to get me to where I’m going, to two fine cars in the garage to take me where I please, and from a beat up of a shack of a home, to a fine house complete with landscaping.
Thank God that God has brought them so far, but the question remains:"If God has brought them so far, why have they left God so far behind." They’ve got time for everything but obedience to the word of God."
We began today with the hymn, "He leadeth me, He leadeth me." Have you stopped to think who the "He" is that’s really in control of your life today When success hit Saul, it was no longer God that was leading him. The Bible offers two leaders of our lives. Two and only two. We are either being led by the Lord Jesus Christ or we are being led by the god of this world who is Satan. For those who say, "I’m leading myself", the word of God says you fall under the second leader. Satan’s goal is to keep you from following the leadership of Jesus Christ. He is quite content with whatever method you may choose, because in the end is death, and that’s where he ultimately will win.
Success will not only alter an individual, it can get a whole church out of line with the will of God. The church at Ephesus seemed to have everything in the world going for it in terms of its ministry, doctrine, commitment and faithfulness. Jesus himself said, your deeds are wonderful, your hard work I have seen, your perseverance is just what it out ought to be , your doctrine and discipline is excellent and you get rid of false teachers, and you endure hardships like a champion without growing weary.
It would be hard to stand toe to toe with the church at Ephesus, and yet Jesus declares, I have this against you. You have forsaken your first love. Somehow in the midst of their business and activities, they lost the genuine love they had for Jesus Christ and substituted good deeds in its place.
It’s possible that instead of us getting to know Jesus Christ , and allowing Him to change us on the inside, we can begin to settle for doing good deeds. When people ask us how do we know we’re Christians, we don’t tell them about a relationship with Jesus Christ, instead we tell them about the things we do or the sins we don’t do anymore.
The measure of a Christian is not how many good deeds has he or she done, but rather how committed is the person to obeying Jesus Christ. Not only when it’s easy, but also when its hard. There are a lot of first round Christians. The first time someone says something or does something, first round Christians can overlook it. They feel good that they were a witness for the Lord. But if the situation happens again, they forget that the Lord is calling them to still be a Christian, and instead they will get right on that other person’s level.
Ministry or serving the Lord can be a strange thing. Just when you think you have it, you discover that you didn’t have as much as you thought you had. That’s why success can be dangerous for a believer. People may have been pushing your buttons left and right, but praise God you’ve been able to handle it and thank the Lord that He’s keeping you.
After a while you look back at where you use to be and where you are now and start to believe, I really got that under control. It’s not long before you let the Lord know, God I don’t have to keep working in that area of my life. I appreciate what you’ve done, but I’m ready now for the deeper things of the Spirit. Success can cause us to believe that we are where we are, because of who we are, rather than because God is continuing to be merciful to us.
There ’s another person in Scriptures that Success dealt a blow to in 2 Chronicles 26. His name was Uzziah. Uzziah was just 16 years old when he became king. . He’s going to be the king for 52 years. I believe that was the longest reign of any of the kings. The bible says of him in verse 26:4-5 He did what was right in the eyes of the LORD, just as his father Amaziah had done. He sought God during the days of Zechariah, who instructed him in the fear of God. As long as he sought the LORD, God gave him success.
There are three things in those two verses that let us know that Uzziah is going to have a problem with success. The first one is that he was like his father in doing right. Well if you go back into chapter 25 and see what it says about his father Amaziah, it says "that Amaziah did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, but not wholeheartedly."
How many of us are like Amaziah today. We’re doing what’s right but our hearts are not into developing a relationship with Jesus Christ. At the moment, during right is the convenient thing to do. But when we get the chance, we plan to really let another side of us come out. Parents, just like Uzziah watched his father, your children are watching you. If you don’t serve the Lord wholeheartedly, they probably will adopt that same attitude. Ultimately, Amaziah got to the point that he felt God had no right to tell him what to do. His success in battle led him to make up his own rules. He was eventually assassinated.
The second thing that tells us that Uzziah is going to have problems is that he was willing to seek the Lord as long as Zechariah instructed him in the fear of the Lord. Zechariah was a godly advisor to the king. Somehow though the God of Zechariah never quite became the God of Uzziah. When Zechariah died, so did his influence. Uzziah saw God as a way to get what he wanted, not as someone worthy of His obedience. Many people today see God as a means to an end, rather than the Creator who is to be obeyed. They serve God as a means to success. Once success is obtained, God is no longer further needed.
The thing that tells us that Uzziah is going to have problems is that he knew there was a tie between seeking the Lord and God giving him success. In the beginning of his reign, the country of Judah was in bad shape militarily and financially. Their northern enemy had defeated his father in battle, came to Jerusalem, took all the gold and silver articles in the temple, took all the palace treasures and took hostages from among the important people of the land. Sometimes when you don’t have anyone to rely on but God, you do a much better job of relying on God.
The more he relied God, the more powerful he became as a king. He defeated the Philistine army, he defeated the Arabs, the Meunites, and the Ammonites. The people in Egypt heard of his fame. He started rebuilding the towers in Jerusalem and fortifying the cities in his land. He built a well trained army with a third of a million soldiers , ready to go at a moment’s notice.
His entire army was equipped with shield, spears, helmets, coats of armor, bows and slingstones when others had nothing but spears to stop them. His military was on the cutting edge of technology. Let’s read verse 15 together 2 Chr 26:15 In Jerusalem he made machines designed by skillful men for use on the towers and on the corner defenses to shoot arrows and hurl large stones. His fame spread far and wide, for he was greatly helped until he became powerful..
It says that Uzziah was greatly helped until. Who do you think was greatly helping him? Who do you think was leading him up until this time? But then he became powerful. Some one has said, "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." What is there about us, that we can not be content with being humans in need of a Savior. We want to believe that we are in control and nobody has the right to tell us what to do. "I hear young and old saying, "you shouldn’t have to do it if you don’t want to."
2 Chr 26:16 But after Uzziah became powerful, his pride led to his downfall. Let’s not think that we are beyond becoming a Uzziah. Sometimes the worse thing God can give to us in ministry is success. We forget that we belong to God and God has the right to use us as he so pleases. Like little children, we start to say, if you’re not going to play the game by my rules, I’ll take my ball and go home.
Pride leads to our downfall. Before we got good at it, we’d sing for the Lord, dance for the Lord, or lead a group for the Lord anytime God wanted us to. God blessed us with the gift or talent, and within a year, we started to say what we would and would not sing, what we would and would not dance to, or what we would and would not do in terms of our service. We forget that God called us to be a part of a body.
This same element of pride works in the destruction of our homes. We decide for our selves what’s a good husband, or a good wife, or a good parent, or a good child. Unfortunately, God doesn’t call us in any one single role in the home, and may require us to do things that we feel others ought to be doing. Pride says, I’ve done my part now you do yours. Jesus says, do your part and go the extra mile in helping those who need it and don’t expect them to turn around and do something extra for you. Don’t let success in your area to think you’re so much better than the rest. We are all still sinners saved by grace returning to the dust of the earth.
Someone has said, our ministry ought not to get in the way of our being a Christian. In other words, we can be so busy doing things for God, that we forget, the first thing God wants to do us to work a change within us so that we might love people in the way He intended for us to love him. What good is our success in doing what we do for God, if we’ve not allowed Jesus Christ the honor and privilege of working in us the proper attitude in the situation.
The most dangerous place for a Christian to be is the realization that he or she has become powerful and can do things without having to rely on the Lord anymore. Uzziah had gotten all of the wealth and military power that he needed to keep his position strong. There was no way anyone could take from him what he’d taken his lifetime to achieve. Here was a man that had defeated everyone that he had challenged. He was discovering that He could basically do as his please.
There were two doors of opportunity before him. He could attempt to challenge himself as to how faithful He could be in serving the Lord, or he could challenge the very idea, that he , the king, had to follow God’s rules just like everybody else. He chose the latter challenge. He decided not only will I be the king, I will also be the priest.
He entered the temple of the Lord to burn incense on the altar of incense. Now God had made it clearly known, the only people allowed to burn incense on the altar were the priests. Uzziah didn’t care. He had brought all the gold and silver back in to the temple and he’d do whatever he wanted to. Well Azariah and 80 other courageous priests followed him into the temple and confronted him. They told him, it is not your place to offer incense. Only the sons of Aaron are allowed to do it. You have been unfaithful in coming into this area, you will not be honored by God, so leave this place at once.
It took a lot of courage to stand up to Uzziah like this. Uzziah was a king out of control and he would have had no trouble ordering that everyone of those 81 priests be struck dead. He became angry, with rage and started lashing out at the priest with his words. And then something happened that he had not counted on. God decided to speak up. When success goes to our head, we never know when God is going to decide to speak up and do something that drastically changes the situation.
All that which we have worked so hard to obtain and to build up can be wiped out in an instance. We are never in as much control as we think we are regardless of how much money we have in somebody’s bank, or of some position we hold in a group or organization. This afternoon our lives and our independence can be drastically changed forever.
While Uzziah was ranting an raving about he could do what he wanted to and nobody was going to stop him, the disease of leprosy broke out on his forehead. The priests immediately hurried him out of there, and the bible says, Uzziah himself was eager to leave, because the Lord had afflicted him. He had leprosy to the day he died. Leprosy was a disease in which you had to live alone. They built him a separate house. Never again did he enter his splendid palace or the temple of the Lord. If he had of known then, what he knew now, I doubt if he would have ever challenged the authority of God over his life. He had allowed his own success to do him in.
God gave Uzziah one last chance to change through the warning of the priest. He wouldn’t take it. How many of us today are in that point where we are doing wrong, but insist its okay to keep doing it, because we won’t get caught. My friends, God already has an appointed day to expose us if we don’t repent. Is this your last opportunity. Uzziah never was the same again.
Jesus Christ died so that you could be set free from the things that keep you from receiving what God has in store for your life. There are but two options in life. Either you are serving Jesus Christ or you are serving Satan. There is the kingdom of darkness and the kingdom of light. There is no kingdom of gray while one seeks to make up his or her mind. Success may cause us to believe that we can do without God. Hell is an awful place to discover that you needed God after all. Jesus said that He came that we might have life and have it abundantly. There’s nothing wrong with success, so long as we realize the greatest success is found in daily serving the Lord Jesus Christ.
