The famous or infamous “secrets to success” sales pitch can be heard within the kingdom. The screaming, spotlighted specials, the testimonial pitch from too perfect, too focused spokesmen is a marketing system useful to sell ideas and methods to believers as well as heathens. The “we’ve found the secret” promise has an appeal to this generation. The reality is that when a person or ministry achieves a certain goal people will flock to find out how they did it thinking that all they need is the “secret to success” that person or ministry discover.
“God is no respecter of people,” they say, “so when I do what they do, I’ll be as successful as they are.” While God is no respecter of people, for sure, the aspect of His universal respect doesn’t extend to “secrets to success” in the same sense as this shallow assumption. God doesn’t have the same definition of “success” for every person or ministry in the sense of end goals or assignment. The truth that God is no respecter of persons does not extend to the point that everyone is an apostle or that every believer will lead a ministry.
While it is true any believer can be used of God at any time, the idea that any believer can pray for any person at any time and that person will be healed, raised from the dead, born anew, or set free is simply inconsistent with revelation and reality. It certainly didn’t work that way for Jesus.
My concern is the concept that actually causes people to not function at all, sidelined while they await the discovery or arrival of their “secret to success.” Or, worse the pandemic of “conferencitis” that causes people to run “to and fro” to every conference with the mistaken idea that someday at some special moment – finally – they will receive the magic wand revelation that will turn the toad into a prince, Cinderella into Barbie, or Bob the Believer into a Simon Peter Do-It-All action figure.
There is no secret to success that turns a believer into someone else. All God’s secrets were revealed to transform a believer into the person God created them to be in the first place.
