Welcome to the Emotionally Healthy Leader Podcast. My name is Pete Cazaro. Great to be with you.

Today is going to be part one of a short little series called Redefining Success Jesus's Way.

Redefining Success Jesus' Way. I'm very excited about this two or three-part series because

defining success as a leader is one of the most challenging, vexing, difficult tasks I know.

It drives people to therapy, cause them to drive their bodies into the ground and exhaustion, lose their joy in Jesus.

In fact, one's whole life becomes driven and consumed when our definition of success

is not Jesus' way, but the world.

Every decision is impacted by it.

But if you get this right, oh, Lord, your whole life is different.

The joy, the contentment, the peace, the certainty, the groundedness.

But there really are two idols that set themselves up in our culture that warp, at least God's definition of success.

And these two idols have set themselves up firmly in the church in our

leadership cultures. They're so subtle. They're so insidious that it can seem almost impossible to

tear down those idols and live freely in Jesus.

And this is coming out of talking to a number of young pastors recently where I've been so

taken aback that the same idol that so crippled and drove folks to anguish in my early days is the same idol and demonic power that is

wrecking young people and young pastors and leaders today. So here it is. There's two idols.

First is numbers. It's an idol of the world. It's an idol of the church. I remember two pastors when I was

younger who made a deep impact on me. I was, I looked up to both of them in different ways.

The first one said to me early on, Pete, listen, you need to build the numbers in your church

as quickly as possible,

because when you walk in a room and you've got a church of size, it's like the Red Sea parts.

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