We hope you enjoy this re-post November 13, 2013. Be blessed! The Today’s Quote From God Team

And spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly; – 2 Peter 2:5, KJV

God does not categorize us as a success or as a failure based on how many souls we win, how many church members we recruit, or how many bowls of soup we serve at the soup kitchen. He considers us a success or a failure based on how obedient we are to His commands.

If God was results-focused, then Noah would have earned the Worst Ever Preacher Award. No other preacher has ever preached as long as Noah preached without a single convert. Many have estimated that it took Noah somewhere between one hundred and one hundred twenty years to build the ark, and it can be confidently inferred from the scriptures that Noah preached a message of righteousness and judgment during the construction period. It is entirely possible that Noah preached a message of righteousness and judgment even BEFORE he built the ark, which means Noah could have preached hundreds of years without a convert (Noah was six hundred years old when he entered the ark.). Either way, Noah preached a long time with nothing to show for it, yet God honored Noah’s obedience – both prior to and after the flood – by preserving the lives of Noah and his family.

Jeremiah was first runner up to Noah for the Worst Ever Preacher Award. After years and years of warning his countrymen to repent, Jeremiah failed to sway his people to righteousness, leaving God no alternative but to discipline His people through the Babylonian captivity. Yet, God honored Jeremiah by preserving his life and by preserving his name, even though he was a total failure in the eyes of man.

We get discouraged when we see no results from our efforts for God because when we work and see nothing come of that work, we tend to think we are worthless. But God didn’t think Noah was worthless. God didn’t think Jeremiah was worthless. Even today He touts these men as examples of greatness through His Word, and their greatness was rooted in their faithful obedience to God, not the results they produced for God.

If we are working for God (and we should always be working for God) and seeing no fruit from our labor, it’s okay to take a step back and examine why we are seeing no fruit. If there is sin in our lives, or if we are trying to accomplish God’s goals through human will power rather than through Holy Spirit power, then we will see no results. But if our self-examination proves that we are pursuing God’s work God’s way without being impeded by sin, then we should not let the lack of results get us down. Instead, we should continue faithfully to walk the path we’ve been shown by God, and we should leave the results to Him.

If we deviate from God’s plan in order to produce the results we want, then we may be deemed a success by our fellow human beings. In God’s eyes, however, we will be failures because we abandoned God’s perfect plan in favor of human wisdom. The only result God demands from us is complete obedience, and if we fail to give Him that, we can never be a success in His eyes.