When Success Is No Longer Enough

by Dave Miller

When I was young, I chased things with intensity. Not necessarily bad things, though some were. No, I did chase good things, meaningful things. I wanted to build something, to matter, to make my mark in the world. I wanted to engage life fully and be someone who belonged in it. That desire was not rooted in rebellion or immorality. It was rooted in ambition, responsibility, and the longing to see potential turned into reality, with the guidance of the Word and a passion for Christ.

And in many ways, it worked.

Over time, I found myself in rooms where presence itself signaled success. I set long-range goals that required more than a decade of effort and discipline, more than once, and I completed them. I built relationships, stewarded opportunities, and accomplished the very things I once dreamed about while imagining the future. Yet something quietly revealed itself along the way.

Each achievement brought a sense of gratitude and genuine good. Success does carry impact. It opens doors. It allows you to bless others. But it never quite produces the joy you expect when you are young and reaching for it. The anticipation always feels larger than the arrival.

At the beginning, you are motivated by what could be. Then, what could be becomes reality. And then that reality ends. The moment passes. The win fades. The goal is checked off. And you realize that what once fueled you so powerfully, while good, does not and can not support things of ultimate eternal weight.

The world is designed that way.

Not because success is evil, but because it is insufficient. Temporal things are incapable of bearing eternal hope. They were never meant to. Creation itself gently but relentlessly exposes this truth. Over time, the heart begins to polarize. It is drawn either deeper into grasping or upward toward eternity.

Age has a way of making this unavoidable.

As men reach midlife (as I have), a fork appears in the road. We are forced to interpret our past. And how we interpret it determines how we live next.

One option is regret. We look back and grow bitter over what did not happen, what did not last, or what never delivered what it promised. Another option is nostalgia masked as glory. We relive former victories, cling to old identities, and refuse to grow beyond the season that once affirmed us. In both cases, immaturity sets in. Either we are angry that the world did not give us what we wanted, or we keep behaving like twenty-year-olds still trying to prove something that no longer needs proving.

But there is a third way, a Kingdom way.

We can grow up.

Spiritual maturity does not mean rejecting the world or despising good work. It means understanding where meaning actually resides. In Christ, we begin to see that the truest mark we make is not found in what we produced, but in the people we shaped. Not in the titles we held, but in the lives we trained for eternity. Not in the momentary impact of success, but in the long obedience of faithfulness.

This is where wisdom begins to replace ambition as the driving force of life.

Wisdom does not condemn desire. It orders it. Our longing and desire is not sinful, but it must be submitted. As we mature, our desires are no longer meant to rule us. They are meant to serve under the reign of God. His timing. His potency. His pace. What once felt urgent now becomes discerning. What once demanded immediacy now submits to formation.

And slowly, something shifts.

Joy becomes less dependent on outcomes and more anchored in obedience. Contentment grows not because life has fewer challenges, but because the weight of expectation has moved off the temporal and onto the eternal. We become more comfortable with the truth that lasting fruit often grows unseen, slowly, and in others rather than in ourselves.

Scripture does not teach this as theory. It teaches it as reality. Life eventually reveals that storing treasure in this world always ends in loss, not because the treasure was evil, but because it was temporary. The eternal, however, is where the design of our life in Christ is held. That is where meaning compounds rather than evaporates.

Age does not simply teach us concepts. It teaches us truth through lived experience.

And for those willing to receive it, that truth becomes freeing.

Success can still be pursued. Work can still be done with excellence. But the heart no longer asks these things to carry what only eternity can bear. The older we grow, the more clearly we see that our greatest investment is not what we leave behind, but who we send forward, trained, grounded, and oriented toward the Kingdom that does not fade.

That is not the loss of ambition, it is the refinement of it.

And this is where the invitation stands. Not to abandon the world, but to finally place it in its proper order. Not to despise success, but to stop asking it to do what it was never designed to do. The gospel does not call us away from responsibility or effort. It calls us toward maturity. Toward a life where ambition is baptized by wisdom and where achievement becomes a servant rather than a master.

At some point, a man stops living to prove that he belongs and starts living from the security of knowing where he belongs. In Christ, the question is no longer whether we will leave a mark, but whether that mark will endure beyond us. That shift does not diminish our work. It dignifies it. It places it inside a story that outlasts our name, our season, and our strength.

This is what it means to age well in the kingdom.

We keep building, but we build differently. We keep striving, but we strive with open hands. We invest less in applause and more in people. Less in what can be counted and more in what can be carried forward. Our lives begin to echo the wisdom we once only understood in theory.

The world will still offer success. It always will. But for those whose hearts have been trained by time and truth, success becomes something we steward rather than something we chase.

And that is how the restless pursuit of youth gives way to the settled joy of eternity.