Last Saturday Rico Tice of All Soul’s, Langham Place, spoke at two events at Christ Church on “What is Success?”. His short answer is this: ‘failure’ is being successful in things that ultimately don’t matter.
You can listen to Rico’s talk here. Check out some photos here or on Flickr
“Well, gents thank you very much for coming out this morning, I wonder if you can see this piece of paper that’s in front of you on the tables. I’m just going to throw out a bit of the Bible and I just don’t know what you make of it. Here’s a bit of the Bible, it’s Jesus telling a parable so you can fold it up and put it in your wallet. I find it really compelling. Let me read it to you, say a few words about it, and then I really hope it will be food for thought. Let me read it to you, so here’s Jesus, it’s Luke 12, one of the biographies of Jesus, and this is the story we hear him tell:
Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.” Jesus replied, “Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?” Then he said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.”
And he told them this parable: “The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’ Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I’ll say to myself, ‘”You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”‘ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’ This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God.”