The true measure of success

What is success? What is it to be a successful person in life? And what I want to suggest to you is that the true measure of success lies in the quality of our heart, who we are, the quality of our inner life, our character, our spiritual makeup, who we are before God and how God treats us. go. That is the true measure of success. I want to encourage you to think about that main idea. And how understanding this should reconfigure our aspirations and our ambitions to put our energies where we need to put them in order to become truly successful people and then feel happy with our lives.

In First Samuel, chapter 16, he tells us about Samuel, the prophet, and how God directs him to go to the house of a specific man named Jesse. Jesse lives in the village of Bethlehem, and I imagine that for many of you who know the Bible, this immediately triggers an association because Jesus was born in Bethlehem and David is the progenitor, he is the ancestor, he is the ancestor of Jesus. Jesus came from the tribe of Judah where David came from and there is a direct blood lineage, going from David right through to Jesus. That is to say, that he was a direct ancestor in the flesh of Jesus.

What interesting thing? That God has a long memory. Look how Jesus was to be born in Bethlehem a thousand odd, almost two thousand years later and here we have his ancestor David living in Bethlehem where he is going to be chosen for something very special. It is that the Lord always thinks in long terms. He is very intentional in everything he does, he is thinking in terms of thousands and hundreds of years of things that he is going to do. And he does not see as we see.

So, it says here in verse 1, the Lord commanded Samuel to fill his horn with oil and sent him to where Jesse lived, from Bethlehem, it says:

“…because of his sons I have made myself a king – one of the sons of Jesse was the man God had chosen to be the next king of Israel in place of Saul, who had displeased the Lord and did not have a heart like his. what God wanted. Saul's heart was not pleasing to God and again, speaking about the heart, how is your heart, your sensitivity? God sends him there and says in verse 3:

"... and you will anoint me when I tell you," that is, God took that very personally. You are going to anoint me when I tell you. God was very involved in that process. So Samuel did as the Lord told him and after he arrived in Bethlehem the elders are afraid of Samuel because Samuel is a man who embodies the will of God. I imagine they had a slightly guilty conscience.

You ask him if his coming is peaceful or if he has come to make trouble. I wish for the day that the church creates problems. Sometimes we think that the church is only there to say nice things to people and please people. I believe that when the church is filled with the Holy Spirit it is dangerous, I give that to you for free, that is not part of the sermon, but I leave it there for you to think about as well. Those who want to make the church just a trained cat are very wrong.

Then they say to him, is your coming peaceful or...? And he says, "Yes, I come to offer sacrifice to Jehovah." And then he says later that...

“…it came to pass that when they came he saw Eliab, one of the sons of Jesse, and he said – he saw this boy who was handsome, strong, big, stocky, a warrior type, handsome for sure and he said, “This has to be , there is no doubt, this man has to be the one that God has chosen.”

Notice that even Samuel, a man so knowledgeable in things of the spirit, was letting himself be carried away by human, carnal, cultural values. And what did the Lord say to Samuel?

“…said to him, “Do not look at your appearance or at the greatness of your stature, because I undid you.” – It's a strong word. I undid it. – “… because Jehovah does not look at what man looks at, because man looks at what is before his eyes but Jehovah looks at the heart.”

Remember that always. Do not worry so much about the physical, the external, worry about your heart, how is your heart? When God looks, when God enters the room of your heart, how does he smell? How does it feel? Is he there in the space of your inner temple or does he feel uncomfortable and doesn't like what he sees and what he feels? That is why we have to worry about the inner room, because that is where God lives and that is what touches and affects his own heart.

“…Then Jesse called another, Abinadab – it was like a beauty contest, each of Jesse's sons was supposed to appear before the priest. Imagine how those boys must have felt knowing that they were going to come out of there being anointed. – “…and then he came to Abinadab and made him pass before Samuel who said, “Neither has the Lord chosen this one.” – Samuel this time heard from God, he said, “No, that's not it.”

“… And then he made Sama pass by and he said, “Neither has Jehovah chosen this one.” And Jesse had seven of his sons pass before Samuel, but Samuel said to Jesse, "The Lord has not chosen these."

Even the very father of all these boys was not in tune with the value of these boys nor with what truly mattered to God. What's more, Samuel himself, and that is something so important because I believe that today in the church of Jesus Christ, by the way, getting into the subject of my sermon, there is a lot of superficiality about what constitutes a woman of God, a man of God, a successful person, a person worthy of attention. I still believe that in this nation right now in these national elections it is terrible how these people, both Republicans and Democrats, I believe that more Republicans than Democrats because sometimes I identify more with the values of the Republican Party, although I understand its corruption and all its things more than ever, but even today in this nation in national elections we are letting ourselves be carried away precisely because of that, because of external things, who yells more, who talks louder, who is louder, who else seems to He is the strong person, the person who is going to save us from our crisis.

And we are not looking at the issues, the issues of justice, of the love of God, the complexity of the man who is in front of us, the person who is going to have to deal with situations, who is going to need rather sobriety, generosity, justice , intellect, cultural breadth, understanding of all the different moral and spiritual dimensions, so important is that, that they have to be taken into account. A person who fears God, healthy fear of God, we don't have to ask for a spiritual genius, I don't need an evangelical pastor in the presidency of the United States, but we do need a man, a God fearing person, at the very least, a person with a healthy fear of God and whose life reflects, at least, a spiritual basis. That is necessary.

But here we see that not even the father of these boys could understand those values, when the time comes to choose who is going to lead a nation. And then, all the boys pass by and it doesn't occur to him to think about the one that God has chosen. That is the point of his spiritual ignorance. And Samuel says:

“…”Are these all your children? – because God has told him, that is where the men you have chosen are, they pass to all the boys and none of them are and Samuel says, “Have I taken the wrong address? Are these all your children? and see how the father answers:

“… There is still the youngest that feeds the sheep… – oh, yes, I had forgotten, there is one more. – And Samuel said to Jesse, “Send for him, because we will not sit at the table until he comes here.” So he sent for him and brought him in, and he was fair-haired, fair-eyed, and good-looking..."

It is interesting because if God also chooses people, he is very broad, but notice that he was rather a sweet man, he was delicate, he was a person who was not really the warrior needed to fight the Philistines who were oppressing to Israel. David was a poet, a psalmist, he was a romantic, he was a rather spiritual boy, and he was delicate to some extent in his mind and manner. He would have been a good candidate perhaps for director of culture in Israel, but not for being the warrior king that the nation wanted.

But God looked at the delicacy of her heart, looked at the other part. When David wanted to put on Saul's armor, remember the story? To fight Goliath, his body danced inside his armor because he was not a huge man, he was a young boy, maybe a teenager, we are not sure how old he was, but he was rather a delicate person, blond, beautiful eyes and good-looking.

Maybe the church girls would pick him but it really wouldn't have been good for a warrior president, which was what was needed when Isis was up in the air doing her thing.

“…Then Jehovah said, “Rise up and anoint him for that is it.” That is what I want. “…And then Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the midst of his brothers and from that day on the spirit of the Lord came upon David…”

What I was telling you, brothers, is that this idea, what we really have to learn in life to look at how God looks at things. I believe that many people come to the ways of the Lord, they come forward, they know Christ, they receive him, but they never launch into what is the true journey of the spirit, which is the reprogramming of their brain, their values and their their preferences and their aspirations. The most difficult thing in the Christian life is not to stop smoking or womanizing or stealing, it is the interior change, the reprogramming of the human being, changing values, changing appetites, changing the way we see the world, in that we treat others, our inner character. That is where the real battle is, I tell you, of the Christian life.

Many people think with everything that we sometimes emphasize about giving money to the kingdom, about serving, they think that this is like we want to bribe God. They believe that if I give to God and I do this, if I do the other, all external, that God will be happy with me, but they don't care about the interior. His heart is still rotten with pride, bad speech, treating people badly, violence, resentment, all those things that are really what God wants to be treated so that he can do the things he wants to do in we.

Please give up this idea right now that the Christian life is taking off a lot of external things. No, it is to become a new man, a new woman, a new heart, a heart of flesh not of stone. It is different values, the fruit of the spirit, humility, love, meekness, peace, joy, benevolence, goodness, justice, generosity towards others, grace, those are the things that truly indicate that a person pleases the Lord and that he has understood what it is to walk in the ways of God.

And that is what truly defines a successful person. I tie this back to what we've been talking about about how to be happy in life, how to have emotionally healthy lives, and how to be satisfied with life. Because many of us feel like we have failed and that God has failed us, because we have not reached the external aspirations that we had. I wanted to buy a house and I thought that at 40 I was going to have it and I don't have it, God failed me because I have prayed, I have tithed, I have come to church every day and he has not given me the house.

I wanted God to give me a great job or a business, he has not given it to me, God failed me. I wanted to get married when I was 20 years old, I have not married, God failed me. So, we look at everything in terms of external things and we measure people by external things. And that makes us feel like failures and it makes us feel ignored by God or that the Gospel has failed us, when God is interested in a very different set of things and his priorities are not like ours, like the world's.

If we are going to live in Christ we have to look with the eyes of the Kingdom of God and we must work on ourselves. The key to success, brothers, is that your heart pleases the Lord. If your heart pleases God, if your personality pleases God, your temperament, your character, your way of treating others, your internal life, your mental life, if that pleases the Lord, the rest will come in addition.

God is going to give you the desires of your heart in a way that is going to surprise you, but first your heart has to be pleasant, because the heart is the driving force of the man or the woman. If your heart is good, it will bring good things, I assure you. If your heart is damaged, even when you have good feelings, but there is grudge, there are wounds that have not healed, there are things that are not right with God, it does not have to be hate, it does not have to be violence, sometimes just feelings of rejection, hidden agendas with God, sense of victimization, which does not allow us to enjoy what God has done, pride, all these things, then these are impediments. Our heart cannot attract good because in the spirit world good things bring good things, bad things attract bad things.

The devil operates where there is a crooked heart. The devil works on the things that look like him that are in our hearts. When there are things of God, the devil finds it very difficult to operate in that heart because he is attracted to what smells bad in us. And that is why our primary agenda must be to cleanse ourselves of everything that does not smell of Jesus Christ and the Kingdom of God.

I know many people, even in our own congregation and perhaps it applies to me in part as well, who need to understand this truth and I think they judge very superficially about what it truly means to be a pleasant person in the eyes of God, and therefore that they stumble and their ministries and life are limited. They cannot achieve everything that God wants them to achieve, because this is not about how much you give to God externally. No, it's your heart, how your heart pleases.

And what I see here is this, that David was a man, the Bible says that "he was after God's own heart." He was not perfect, David made many serious mistakes as a father, as a king, as a warrior, he made many mistakes, but there was something in David's heart, which is what I always say, look, if in your heart you have a good desire to please to the Lord, if you love God with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength, if you want to do good, if you are simple of heart, if you repent when you offend the Lord, I swear to you, I will to use that word, that God is not going to get tired of working with you.

God will never throw you away. God is never going to hit you with the back of his hand. He will give you a loving slap but he will not throw you away because God loves the humble heart. God loves the heart that loves him and that is tender towards him, that wants to do good, even if it fails.

And that's what David had, he had a heart like that. I believe that this is why David was successful in the future of his life and was a successful man at that very moment when he was anonymous among the sheep behind the house, in the yard or in the field. And no one sees him, when he passed through the village, no one cared much to see him. Now when one of the other wow boys passed by, the women would become engrossed in one of them. And David passed by quietly but he was the most successful of all because his heart was pleasing to the Lord. And God had a purpose for him.

Many of us want God to use us greatly in life but don't spend enough time on the inner quality of our spirit, our qualities as followers of Jesus Christ. And that's why we don't succeed.

On the other hand, there are people in a church, like ours, who perhaps have never preached a sermon and never will preach a sermon, perhaps have never taught a Bible school class or have never even spoken in public in this church, but they are people that pleases God and that God is pleased with them. And every time they come to the house of the Lord, the Lord receives their praise and receives their adoration and they are glad that they are in his temple, because their heart is a heart that loves the Lord.

And one sees that through all the pages of scripture. We have, for example, the case of the widow who gave the offering. There were people who gave much more than she did, there were tycoons who came to the temple and gave thousands of dollars, from their tithes or whatever, but God didn't flinch with them. He received it perhaps but he was not liked so intimately, but that woman who revealed her heart giving everything she had because she loved the Lord, that woman inspired the attention of Jesus Christ and he called his disciples and said, "Look how the rich give great amounts of money, but that is not what my father is interested in.” That woman, that peseta that she threw there that was her last to buy a coffee at Dunkin Donuts, which even today cannot be bought with 25 cents, but that peseta in the eyes of God is much more valuable than a million dollars because she gave all her good.

It is that there are things that reveal the quality of a person. And that was what David had. How do we know what David's heart was like? Remember the story of Goliath, it is in the next chapter, God is already working in David's life, he is preparing him and that moment is coming when this giant is continually insulting God's people and insulting Jehovah, the God of Israel. The two armies are gathered in a big valley, I imagine, and every day they bring out this man who is about 8 feet tall, and every day he stands up and yells at the army of Israel and says, "Take out the one of your own, cowards that you are, where is the God that you say?" every day he insulted Jehovah, he insulted the people of God and there was not a man... because they saw, he was a warrior who had beheaded hundreds of people, he had an immense sword, he was a warrior armed to the teeth. No one dared to touch him.

But David by chance one day goes… his brothers who are warriors, they are strong, they are big, they are powerful, they are in the army but none of them put their hands on him either. And David is sent as an errand boy to bring some cheese and a meal to his brothers who are in the army. And David arrives there with his basket of food and his things and suddenly the giant comes out on the other side and begins to insult God, insult the people. And David puts his cheeses under there and asks, what's going on? Oh, that there is a giant that comes every day and insults the Israelites, insults Jehovah. And David asks, but is there no one here who dares to grope this man? No, no one, it's too big. It would be a terrible problem.

And David's brothers who are next door rebuke David, they say, look at this bully here talking and saying this. Go home, boy. These are things too serious for you. Look again, the values. David is concerned about the reputation of the Lord, he is concerned about the reputation of his people, he becomes inflamed and indignant and says, "I am going to do it." He doesn't have any qualification to be a warrior though. He's never been on the battlefield, but he doesn't think about limitations. It is that his heart loves God so much that he cannot bear the thought that every day they are insulting the name of Jehovah. He says, "I'm going to do it."

And it is interesting, this is a very interesting little detail to complicate the narrative, and it is that... notice that one does not have to be holier than the Pope either, because David was interested - and I say that because there are brothers who when speaking that God blesses you, God prospers you, they fall so much in love... or rather there are others who are so scandalized by the idea that God blesses you if your heart is right and God prospers you, that they forget that there is nothing wrong with desiring good things in life, and that God blesses the heart that pleases him.

Notice how David asks the brothers when he sees what is happening, he says in verse 26 of chapter 17:

“….What will the man do who defeats this Philistine and removes the reproach from Israel?”

In other words, what is the prize. Are they going to give you something? Are they going to give him a Cadillac, are they going to give him a house, are they going to give him a retirement or something? He's interested. He wants to know what the prize is going to give him. David is not a fool.

I believe that there is nothing wrong with you coming to God's house and hoping that God will prosper you and bless you. But the important thing is that your priorities are correct. The first thing is to please the Lord. Because I see these two elements here in David's heart, which is why he is such a complex character, he says:

“….What will the man do who defeats this Philistine and removes the reproach from Israel? For who is this circumcised Philistine to provoke the armies of the living God…”

Both are in it. I believe that we can, God wants to bless us, God wants to prosper us, God wants to use us. There is nothing wrong with you wanting to have a good life, but your priorities have to be right and they have to be in the proper order. So he gets indignant and is willing to confront this giant and in fact he does, he defeats the giant, because he has the anointing of the Holy Spirit that came to him when he was anointed with oil in his father's house by Samuel, because they have passed and months since he received the anointing of the Holy Spirit through the oil that the prophet poured on his head.

Now, at the moment of crisis, the Holy Spirit arises within him and he is filled with that ardor for the glory of Jehovah, he says, "I am going to defeat him." When your heart is pleasing to the Lord and the spirit of the Lord is within you, my brother, my sister, you are invincible. What you undertake will go well for you, says the word, you will be blessed. But that is the order, love Jehovah your God with all your heart, with all your mind and with all your strength. There it begins, that is the good of man.

Let God work in your life, in your heart, in your mind, in your character, in your priorities, let God reprogram your mind because all of us who enter the Kingdom of God need God to reprogram us, all of us. And the problem is that many people do not allow themselves to be reprogrammed when they come to the kingdom. They come to the kingdom and remain untouched on the inside, they do not want to give up their interior to the Lord and because of this they are always skating in life and in the Gospel. And you see that they do not progress, they do not receive nutrients, because their spirit is not capable of processing the values of the kingdom and the blessings that God gives. They are like those people who have problems processing vitamins and they eat and are always thin and weak because their system cannot process certain nutrients.

And so are we and our heart, our mind, our spirit, our values are not in accordance with the heart of God, look, that is what most damages a ministry, a marriage, finances, professions, people's careers, children, is the quality of our heart. Until the heart is in its correct priorities, God's order and that, I'm going to tell you something, if you want your heart to change, you won't be able to do it yourself. That is a surgical operation that only God can accomplish. Your part is to put yourself on the surgery table and let go so that through the years God can create in you a new heart, a contrite and humiliated heart.

Remember the word, put in me a new heart, renew my heart, a contrite and humble heart. That is what David asks of the Lord in Psalm 51. And that is what God most wants to do. When you enter the ways of the Lord, ask the Lord to reconfigure your personality.

That is why Paul says in Romans 12, "I beg you by the mercy of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy, pleasing to God..." Presenting our bodies, our members, our biology, our flesh, our mind to the Lord is it's. I visualize, when I hear that word about presenting our bodies, I visualize a person arriving at a very white, resplendent chamber. In that space there is nothing, absolutely nothing, it is pure, perfect, white, white, and there is an operating table in the center and when that person arrives at the door, before opening it, they completely undress, undress, open the door and he enters and there is a light that makes him totally transparent to that person, you can see everything. And that person solemnly comes and gets on that stretcher and lies there, and then a supernatural force begins to operate and reconfigure the interior of that individual. That is the Christian life.

And that takes a lifetime. In a sense we are on that operating table until the last day of our lives. The Christian life has to be a continuous intervention of God on us, every day. God operating with his scalpel, his scalpel and sometimes his saws because sometimes there are things that have to be removed in large pieces, every day.

And all the things that you experience in your life, the failures, the disappointments, the betrayals, the illnesses, the pains, all that, will be part of that surgical operation, because God is going to use all the elements of your life, everything, to reconfigure your heart so that your heart can be pleasing to him. Everything that happens in the life of the believer has only one purpose and it is to conform our hearts according to the heart of Christ, everything that happens.

That's why we can see all of life's struggles as part of God's work in us. Do not see it as dead ends, as failures. Look, everything that has happened in your life yet, let me tell you, before you entered the ways of the Lord, because it's not like God didn't know who you were when you were born. The Bible says that God formed you in your mother's womb, he had purposes for you, and he allows things even before you know him to be part of your preparation for where he wants to take you.

When you enter the ways of the Lord, it is simply a moment in which God says, okay, now we are going to fight in another way but he is already fighting with you, that is why if you were sexually abused, when you were a girl or a boy, yes you made mistakes in life, if you committed crimes, if whatever happened in your life, if you lost your fortune, whatever, don't live your life regretting what was done to you and what happened to you when you were a child, or when you were a girl , and do not live as a victim regretting all that, because even that God can use for his glory. And yet all of that is part of God's path for your life.

Because it's not like David came in the eyes of God only when Samuel appeared to him. No, David was born in Bethlehem, God had a millennial plan and the fact that he was born in Bethlehem was part of what God wanted to do in his life. His son is going to be born there too, Jesus, and a host of other things. That is to say, that God was not only thinking of David, he was thinking of thousands of years ago, David was part of it.

I imagine David on the mountain where his father called him to appear before Samuel, thinking, look at me here taking care of sheep, my brothers there in the army and successful and so big and strong, and I here taking care of a sheep, I that I wanted to go to university, I that I wanted to go to high school. Perhaps David would have felt like a failure, ignored, that he had missed the bus and had left him. But no, I believe that what was happening was that God was preparing him to reign in the solitude of the countryside.

Because how interesting that David was a shepherd. God loves shepherds of sheep, the Bible says that David was like the sweet shepherd of Israel. I believe that the shepherding of sheep was preparing David to be the shepherd of his people and he was also anticipating the great shepherd, the shepherd of shepherds, who would be his descendant Jesus. It is that God is ironic and God is intentional and God loves to look at the earth and smile at things that we do not see that are happening.

So God was forming a king and kings are often not formed in beauty contests and golf courses, kings are formed in activities that prepare their character for what God wants to do with them. And then God hides them and puts them to work on things, so they can retain the blessing that he has for them afterward. Life is that intentional.

It came to mind now when I was at Harvard University doing my PhD, I took a year off after my sophomore year. It was a spiritual crisis that I had that God was working in my life, calling me in a very strong way and I left the university because I also understood that perhaps it was something else that God was calling me but I was not sure what it was. And so I took a year off and I was thinking about going into business, quitting what… I came here to study literature and yes, I'm going to starve studying literature, and there were things I didn't like about the Literature Department as well. and I said, I'm going to take a year.

And so I started looking into the possibilities of starting to work in the business world and getting a job in some corporation or something. Knowing a little about the world of the university I thought, it will be easy for me to get a job in any business agency or something like that, so I'm going to take some time off and I started looking and I didn't see any resonance, they closed me the doors in that area.

It was a key moment in my life in many ways because God was preparing me to call me into the ministry but I wasn't sure about that. I had an idea more or less but hadn't decided anything yet. It had never occurred to me that it was the pastorate specifically. And so I started looking, I got nothing, I started to do a little academic work there in a place and then interestingly that coincided with the opening of this church that was founded that year. God was already working in the outside world as well and I began to attend the church when Pastor Vergara founded it in '82 and I began to attend that church while I took that year off, or a little before I took the year off it was that I began to attend.

The thing was, he was working there. I was living with my mother and my sister Marina in Lawrence, I went there, it was like God took me and put me in exile. I dropped out of Harvard, after being at Harvard, having been at Princeton, glory years, traveling and a number of things, Lawrence got me to live with my mom at the age of 27, around that time. And he put me there in exile and anonymity.

And one day, while I was there, I got a letter from the Department of Social Services, at that time it was called Children and Families, I got a call from the supervisor of the Lawrence Department of Social Services and I picked up the phone and she told me He asked if I was Roberto Miranda, I said yes and he said, "Look, we have received your resume." "I have never sent a resume to you." In fact, I would never have thought of working in social services, what did I know about social services, about a social worker? He told me, “We have received your resume and although I know you do not have experience in that area, we would be interested in interviewing you for a Senior Social Worker position in the Department of Social Services.

I was starving anyway, I said I'll go and see. So I went, I met with her, we talked about everything except social services, a very pleasant conversation. And I was waiting, when are you going to ask me about what I know about this and that? At the end of about an hour of conversation, he told me, "Look, I know you don't have any qualifications for this job, but I want to give it to you, if you're interested, the job is yours." And I started working at the Department of Social Services as a social worker. I was there a little less than a year.

But here is the interesting thing, that is not what is interesting. Because again, look how sovereign God is, because I assure you that I never sent a resume. I never know, I still don't know how my resume got to the Department of Social Services, I don't understand. But look, God knew that in two years, after that I was going to end up pastoring a church, starting to pastor, he was preparing me, because we started in '84, spring in a basic sense.

And 20 Latino families from Lawrence entrusted me with that job as a social worker, that was my little church. God gave me a church of 20 families, he gave me to pastor them, learn to be a pastor. I was training. It's like he was telling me, I don't want you making money, earning money in business, I have prepared you to shepherd my people. And then he sovereignly got me a job as a pastor and they paid me, how good, in social services. They paid me well. And those 20 families, God allowed me to do so many things that I don't have time to tell you, how God used me with those families during the time that I was working as a social worker.

I learned to love her, I worked with disoriented young people, with alcoholic women, families that were going through terrible tribulations. Meche knows why at that time we also got engaged and she witnessed a great and powerful way in which God used me with one of those families. And I think that if it had been just what I did, in all the time I was there, I would consider myself more than justified in that intervention.

But God knew what I was going to do and so he put me among the sheep to herd sheep because he wanted to train me to be a shepherd. And then after that I became an assistant, I was the right hand – I say this without any kind of boast – of Pastor Vergara. I served Pastor Vergara for a year and a half until God called him to return to Puerto Rico as your lieutenant. And there God taught me to lead worship, to pastor youth, to teach Sunday school, all those things I did at that time. And we learned and there we got married and we were not going to have children for a long time because Meche was a professional woman who wanted to finish... and after 11 months of marriage we already had Sonia because God also needed parents who knew what it was like to be a father.

It is that God is sovereign. You see when God is working in a life and when God has a plan God works in the micro cosmos, in the small things of life. But everything is that God read your heart and that he sees that he can use you, that he understands that you love him and then God will not tire of intervening in the most meticulous way in your life.

Because I tell you that if we only understood how thorough God is in working in the life of a man, a woman, when that man or that woman pleases him, that would change everything. We would put our strength and our emphasis on those things that no one sees because the only thing that God is seeing is your heart, it is your interior, the internal chamber of your life. If that is pleasing to you, I promise you that everything else will come and God will use your life every day, he will be sewing and basting the fabric that will be your life. And God is going to care about you, he is going to take care of you, he is going to take care of your needs, he is going to take care of those you love, but the priority has to be that my heart be pleasing to God.

And if you die one day and never achieved great material glory, let me tell you that if your heart was pleasing to God, you are the most successful person in the world. I was going to read the story of Lazarus but there is no time, because in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, the rich man had everything a successful man could want. He reached the pinnacle of glory, he had a house, he had people who respected him, material possessions but he never did a good thing, he never did a good deed, he did not have a merciful heart. He passed by Lázaro all the time ragged, ragged, full of sores and Lázaro would ask him for 50 cents and he would not even look at him, because his heart was all material, his heart was not pleasing to God.

He was financially successful, and everything else, perhaps he had everything a man could want physically, but he had a rotten heart, or perhaps worse, a dead heart, a heart like dry, hard, packed earth, not pleasing to God. And Lazarus seems that his tenderness and his heart, although he was ragged and miserable in the human sense of the word, pleased the Lord. And the Bible says, when they died, the rich man went to hell and that poor man who never did anything great in life went to Abraham's bosom, that's what the scriptures call him.

And that's the key. I believe that when we get up there, to heaven, there will be great evangelists, there will be pastors of churches of thousands and thousands of people, and they will be in the queue, behind, at the last of the queue, and perhaps some will not even go. to enter. And there will be people out front, waiting for them, coming in, having a free entrance, who never preached a sermon, never spoke in public, never did anything tremendously great for God, but their hearts pleased God.

I know that there are people like that here. I like it when I see many of you, because I see your heart, I see your simplicity, I see your love for God, I see your healthy spirituality and I say thank you Lord, because these people are in this church, because for me that is a incredible responsibility. Seeing these types of people in my congregation, I understand how great a burden it is to shepherd those lives, because they are jewels before God. Not everything that glitters is gold, not everyone who does great things necessarily receives God's offering. It is the heart.

And that's why God called David. He set it up first and David thinking, I failed. No. Your life was about to begin then, David, and God had great things for you. Your dreams were going to come true.

My brother, my sister, this morning get out of here with your priorities right. Ask God to make you a man, a successful woman because your heart pleases the Lord, because your life is a sweet smell before God, because the fruit of the Holy Spirit is manifested in your life and fight for that and be a pleasant offering In front of God. That every time you walk on earth your life gives off a smell that pleases the Lord and blesses men.

That is what it is to be successful in life, everything else is totally secondary. May the Lord bless you. Let's lower our heads. Let us ask the Lord to help us understand these truths this morning. We all have to learn something from that. Lord, help us to be like Christ and cover us with the breastplate of your justice and your love, your grace, your goodness, your humility, your meekness, your generosity towards others.

May this church always reflect the best values of your word and your kingdom, Lord. May that be the hallmark of this community every day that it is on earth. Father, give us the grace to be a people of good works and love, harmony and preference for one another. We ask your forgiveness for the many ways in which we offend you with our inner life, Father. And today we beg you to help us be better than we were yesterday. Bless your people and pour out your sweet ointment on our hearts.

We embrace the fruit of your holy spirit, Lord. Thank you, Father, in the name of Jesus. Amen. God bless you my brothers.