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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

John Shin

True Success

Please bow your heads with me and let's start with prayer.

Dear Heavenly Father, it is such a blessing and a privilege to gather on your Sabbath day to worship you.

And as a church, Lord, now we turn our attentions to you.

And I ask that you quiet our minds and that you fill our hearts with the message that we need to hear.

And Lord, for me, I pray that you will put your words in my mouth and that you will allow the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart to be acceptable in your sight.

How many of you here are starting your first year in whatever training program you're in?

I had a burden on my heart to share about this topic because When you just arrive on campus as a new student, what's first and foremost in your mind?

I'm like, well, let's look at it from the other angle.

So how would you define success in your life?

If I asked you what would have to happen for you to say, I am a success?

What would have to happen for you to consider yourself a success?

For those of you who raised your hands to note that you're students, I'm sure that involves doing well in your studies.

For those of you who are later along in your careers, maybe establishing a career or maturing and growing in your career, maybe that's how you will define success.

Maybe for some of you, success involves providing for your family.

In success, there might be a lot of dimensions.

And certainly, there's nothing wrong with these goals.

And I think we can all agree that they are good things to strive for.

But on that note, if I asked you to give me examples of people who you consider to be a success in the Bible, who would you name?

So Joseph, right, He started at the bottom of the totem pole as a slave, and then he rose through the ranks to become the second most powerful man in, at that time, the most powerful country in the world.

If that's not a success story, I don't know what is.

I also heard Daniel, right, brought as a slave and then served through multiple different administrations and had the ear of the king and of the monarch, right?

Paul started at the top of his career, a well-respected Pharisee, a leader in his social circle.

His career was stretched out right before him.

And then he gave up everything to live a life of pain and privation and persecution and was ultimately killed for his faith.

So then I think we can all agree that in the broadest sense, true success can only be defined as accomplishing God's will for your life, no matter where that path leads.

Whether it's the meteoric rise through the ranks and the accolades of the world, or pain and privation and ultimately martyrdom, regardless of where your road leads, can you agree with me then that you would say success is ultimately defined by, did I do what God placed me on this earth to do?

Did I walk the path that he wanted me to walk?

And if you say yes, then I have good news for you, because the Bible gives us a tried-and-true formula that we can follow to guarantee that we can be successful in this sense in life.

Would you like to know where that formula is found?

It is found in a verse that you all know by heart probably, Proverbs 3, verses 5-6.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.

In all your ways, acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths." Remember, we said having God direct our paths ultimately is our definition of success.

So then this gives us the formula for how to be successful in life.

And it ends with, he shall direct your paths.

So the prerequisites are the 3 clauses that come before that last clause.

And my whole message is just based on this passage here.

So the first part, trust in the Lord with all your heart.

What prevents us from trusting God with all our heart?

Why does this need to be spoken and spelled out?

Well, I think at some level we are afraid that God will let us down if we trust him.

We're afraid that if we trust in him and he doesn't come through we might have a shipwreck of faith.

Prayers where even if God doesn't show up, no big deal for our faith.

He hasn't disappointed us because we really, frankly, didn't give him the opportunity to disappoint us.

Another reason why we might not trust God or have a hard time trusting God is because we think our ideas are better.

And we might not think of it that way, but think about it.

If you have a hard time trusting in God, what you're implicitly saying is that, I trust in my own thoughts and my own wisdom, and I have a hard time outsourcing that to God.

I would submit to you that at the core, the only reason why we have a hard time trusting God is because we don't know Him.

If a random stranger walked up to you in the street and said, can I borrow your wallet for 10 minutes?

I don't know you, and you're forgiven for making such a ludicrous request.

Said, hey, can I borrow your wallet for 10 minutes?

Even if she gave no other explanation, would you give it to her?

And you would say, OK, well, this better be good.

Trust all boils down to how well do you know the person.

They say that love is freely given, but that trust is earned.

We cannot trust God by simply trying harder to trust Him.

Just like any relationship, our ability to trust God is dependent on the opportunities that we give Him to show Himself to be trustworthy to us.

We have to have experiential knowledge of saying, Lord, I'm giving you a chance.

And that he comes through, and then you say, wow, I know him to be trustworthy.

But you see, what this means is that we have to make ourselves vulnerable to being hurt and disappointed by God.

We have to take chances in this relationship.

We have to give God the opportunity to disappoint us.

And when he comes through and shows himself to be trustworthy, that is when our trust in him grows.

I like to tell the story of my eldest daughter, Sophia, when she was learning how to swim.

And as she's scared in the water, and I'm trying to get her to relax, I hold her, I bob her up and down, and eventually over the course of an hour, she loosens up a lot and she's enjoying it.

And to culminate our first swimming lesson, I placed her at the edge of the pool, and I say, now jump into daddy's arms.

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True Success

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