APPLICATION
1. Do you know God’s purpose for your life? If yes, how do you think
you can fulfill it? If no, what do you think are the ways you can discover
it?
2. What can you do to nurture and safeguard your passion and
commitment to fulfill God’s purpose, calling and destiny for your life?
3. Find someone who will be accountable with you as you fulfill your
God-given purpose, calling and destiny.
PRAYER
1. Pray that we will have a God-given perspective of what success is.
2. Pray that we will have a revelation of God’s purpose and direction
for our lives.
3. Pray for one another for grace, strength, and wisdom to fulfill God-
given purpose, calling and destiny for our lives.
Week 3: How To Succeed
NOTES
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WARM UP
1. What is success for you?
2. How can you consider a person to be successful?
3. What are your ambitions or goals in life? How do you think those can
happen?

Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle
to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor
favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all.
For man does not know his time. Like fish that are taken in an evil net,
and like birds that are caught in a snare, so the children of man are
snared at an evil time, when it suddenly falls upon them.
Ecclesiastes 9: 11-12 ESV
Everyone wants to be successful. The reason why we are in school,
want to have a good education or have good grades is because we want to
succeed. No one gets up in the morning having a goal in mind to fail. The
pursuit of success is common to all of us because none of us want to fail in life.
But what is success? How do we know we are succeeding in life? This week
we will look closer at how the author of Ecclesiastes defines and views success
and how we can apply it in our lives.
1. It is not what you achieved.
For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?
(Mark 8:36, ESV)
We always categorize success as the titles that a person carries. This is why
we think Doctors, Engineers and people with big titles are successful. This is
not to say that having titles is not good and aiming to gain is bad. It only means
that we do not put our trust and confidence in them. Achievements and
recognition only give us momentary fulfillment of what success is.
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2. It is not how much you earned.
For when he dies he will carry nothing away; his glory will not go down after
him. (Psalm 49:17, ESV)
We somehow associate success with the size of the paycheck or things we
have. We think that the richer a person is the greater the success he has
attained. Solomon, who gained pretty much everything, says that even great
riches are temporary. The things we have will also fade away. We are not
defined by it or the lack of it.
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3. It is about fulfilling the God-given purpose and destiny in our lives.
His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been
faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.’
(Matthew 25:23, ESV)
Success is not about the temporal things but about the things that has eternal
impact. Success is about fulfilling the God-given purpose and destiny for our
lives. Being successful is not about how much we have earned or things we
have gained but about God’s commendation, “Well done, good and faithful
servant.”
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