Jesus Christ lived a successful life on earth. One of the reasons for this is because he is a person of consistency. Hebrews 13:8 says “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever”. At every opportunity he had, he introduced his disciples into some of the secrets that guarantee success. He told them in Mark 14: 38 (NLT) to “Keep alert and pray”. To keep alert means ‘always watching and ready to notice anything strange or unusual’.
Imagine you have a very tiny pin together with other objects in your left palm and you are to take them from one end of a 20km street to the other. There is a great tendency for you to misplace the pin. Assume you check your palm every 30 seconds to see if the pin is still there, you are assured you could still locate it if peradventure it gets missing, though it is very tiny. This is because you would easily be able to decipher the point it fell, because you must have covered a very short distance in 30 seconds.
II Cor. 13:5 reads “examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith”. Due to lack of regular examination, we discover areas that need adjustments in our lives when they are already strongholds. This is because a week old habit is like cobwebs while that of a year is like a cage. It is very easy to tear down cobwebs, unlike cages. A basketball coach will always look at three objects; his players, his game plan and the scoreboard. The scoreboard will always give him a hint on how to make changes in the team and also adjust his game plan. For us to experience success habitually, we have to regularly score ourselves with respect to God’s plan revealed specifically to us and his standard revealed in his word.
How should you do this? Ask questions and provide sincere answers. The prodigal son made a U-turn in his life when he asked himself the question “How many of my father’s hired men have food to spare, and here I am starving to death!” (Luke 15:17). When you ask yourself questions that begin with what, when, where, who & how, the realities of your life will begin to unfold. For example: What am I living for? How have I added value to people in the last one month? Why did I experience a decline in profit margin this year? What percentage of my time do I spend with my family?’ By the time you do something similar, you may be amazed of how many good things you have allowed to slip away. But if you are consistent with it, you will be amused of how wonderful your life is becoming. Remember, you can easily locate every pin if you have just a short distance to search. You can effortlessly destroy any habit in the similitude of a cobweb. In the journey of success, regular evaluation of our ways is necessary.
– tope_aladenusi