Our Blog

May 01, 2008

Success, Experience, Choices

Contained within each of us is a desire to succeed. We all would like to be winners...as opposed to losers.

Ask any successful person for their success secrets and they will answer you that the secret of success is experience. But my question is...how do you get this experience? Again they answer the question: to be successful you must rely upon your experience. To get experience, you have to make right choices. OK. But how do you learn to make right choices? Their answer: By making wrong choices!

Herein lies the key: We learn from our mistakes...or...if we choose to not learn from our mistakes we are then destined to keep making those same mistakes. Successful people learn from their mistakes. Unsuccessful people don’t.

Case in point. Over 100 years ago Emperor Menelik II ruled Ethiopia. He did a lot of good things for Ethiopia but he failed miserably in one very critical area. He had a distorted belief about God’s healing power. He believed God’s word had healing power...and every time he felt sick he would actually eat the pages of scripture. During one illness he prescribed for himself a strict diet of 1st and 2nd Kings. He ate both books of the Bible, page by page...which led to internal complications resulting in his death. He should have used Jell-O instead! This wasn’t his first bout with internal problems. He should have learned from his poor decisions of the past...but he did not.

Amazingly, contained within the written pages of 1st and 2nd Kings that he consumed, was the story of another great king...King Josiah. Josiah’s rule over Israel spanned over fifty years...during some of Israel’s darkest days. But Josiah chose to learn from his mistakes and from the mistakes of his predecessors...and led his nation out of darkness and into some of its greatest days! Josiah’s epitaph reads: “Throughout his lifetime the people did not turn away from following the Lord God.” The teaching of the Bible is quite clear. God wants us to be successful! He’s pulling for us. He desires to assist us in this pursuit. In fact, He even provides excellent guidelines for Right decision making so that we don’t have to keep making the same poor choices millions of others have done before us. We can gain from the poor experiences of others, and, we can glean phenomenal guidance from a divine source: the Bible. No, we’re not going to literally consume the actual pages of the Bible, but we can devour its truths.

Hence...we are Blossom Valley BIBLE Church on purpose. God has great wisdom available for us on every page. His truths have withstood the tests of time and hundreds of generations. God is dedicated to our success...and He’s even written the book on it...and give it to us. Come discover these truths with us every Sunday at Blossom Valley Bible Church. You’ll be glad you came.

Pastor Tim