Quotes about Achievement

What is the big vision that you're working toward? What is the big dream you are investing in? What is your definition of the "good life"? When will you know that you have been successful? If you had it all, what would "all" look like?

what is success?

Could it be, in your leadership community, that there are signs that the glory of achievement has begun to replace the glory of God as the most powerful motivator in the hearts of your leaders and of the way leadership plans, assesses, and does its work?

That one special thing that you always wanted to accomplish never gets done because you lived each day under the tyranny of the urgent.

God's saving grace ignites in the hearts of all his children a radical shift in ambition. Where once our thoughts, desires, words, and actions were motivated and directed by our ambition to achieve our definition of personal happiness, by grace they are now shaped by our ambition for the kingdom of God to achieve all God has designed for it to achieve. Where once we were ambitious for what we want, we now are ambitious to do the will of God.

We should never become achievement satisfied, because there is always more gospel work to do. But we must always remind one another that achievement is a spiritual minefield. Achievement has the power to change us—to change who we think we are and what we think we are capable of doing. Sadly, achievement can turn humble servant leaders into proud, controlling, and unapproachable mini-kings. But there is powerful, right-here, right-now grace for this struggle.

Healthy ministry communities, which leave a legacy of long-term gospel productivity, have longevity and fruit because they are, at their core, communities of grace. Rather than achievement forming how the leadership community forms itself and operates, the gospel does.

If you imagine someone with 100 percent determination and 100 percent intelligence, you can discard a lot of intelligence before they stop succeeding. But if you start discarding determination, you very quickly get an ineffectual and perpetual grad student.

The way up to the top of the mountain is always longer than you think. Dont fool yourself, the moment will arrive when what seemed so near is still very far.

And the LORD said, “If they have begun to do this as one people speaking the same language, then nothing they devise will be beyond them.

Then Rachel said, “In my great struggles, I have wrestled with my sister and won.” So she named him Naphtali.

We were binding sheaves of grain in the field, and suddenly my sheaf rose and stood upright, while your sheaves gathered around and bowed down to mine.”