New Year: Pastor Gives Secret Guarantee to Success in 2012
Those looking for success in 2012 may first need to redefine what it means to be successful, suggests a Tennessee pastor.
Success from the standpoint of human success is entirely different from what God has planned for our lives, says church strategy consultant Ron Edmondson, who is a co-founding pastor at Grace Community Church in Clarksville.
Edmondson told The Christian Post that success is guaranteed for a person if one shifts from desiring their own will to God’s will in their life.
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“You have to define success before you can measure whether you have achieved it or not,” Edmondson said. “For me, success is only measured in the context of God’s will.”
In his recent blog post, “How to Guarantee Success in the New Year,” he said that the success he was writing about was in the context of God’s desire for our lives.
Edmondson used the example from the Bible of Abram being called by God to follow His plans for Abram’s life. In his post, Edmondson put in bold text the “I’s," “you’s,” and "your's."
“The Lord said to Abram:
Go out from your land,
your relatives,
and your father’s house
to the land that I will show you.
I will make you into a great nation,
I will bless you,
I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.
I will bless those who bless you,
I will curse those who treat you with contempt,
and all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” – Genesis 12:1-3
“The secret, for lack of a better word, for Abraham’s success, was moving from his will to God’s will. When the ‘you’ comes after the ‘I’ rather than before, we’ll guarantee our success,” wrote Edmondson.
“If you and I want the new year to be a success, let’s:
Drop our agenda … join His agenda
Get off our path … get on His path
Release our ambitions … embrace His ambitions
Ignore my will … live His will.”
Edmondson said that he would like to do something for God in the coming year that may not make sense to anyone else.
“I want to do something in my life, or be a part of something, that God is calling us to do that looks absolutely stupid in the eyes of man,” he said. “Leaving the business world and walking into ministry with not any income is that way. I’ve had those experiences that people around me said, ‘That doesn’t make any sense.’
“However, sometimes we move into this protection mode. So, the person I think about whenever I think about these sort of things is Abraham,” he explained.
Whether they are called “resolutions” or “goals,” Edmondson said it’s just a matter of semantics and it’s natural for people to want to do things better next year.
“It’s a daily thing for me. Sometimes, it’s getting up [in the morning] and saying, ‘God, today I want to follow you. I’m yours. I’m ready when you are,’” he said. “It’s a process of surrendering daily.
“In my heart I say, ‘God I’m going to follow your will before you even tell me what your will is.’ I think that God sometime hesitates with giving our assignment because we haven’t surrendered to His will yet.”
Edmondson plans to release a book next year that he began writing last month about the growing trend among youth who are dependent on the affirmations coming from other people. This dependency on approval has created a society of young people that are afraid to move forward with their lives, he said.
