Editor's note: Enjoy today's devotion from Emotionally Healthy Success by Peter Scazzero.
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Jesus didn’t come to tweak the religious systems of His day. He came to overturn them.
From the moment He resisted the devil’s offer of worldly greatness in the wilderness, Jesus unveiled a Kingdom no one expected and many still don’t want.
A mustard seed, not a worldly monument.
A cross, not a worldly empire.
A way of weakness, not a worldly résumé.
In a world obsessed with instant gratification, charisma, and measurable outcomes, Jesus offers an upside-down Kingdom that is radically different from contemporary expectations of success. This means that following Jesus today isn’t about making small adjustments. It doesn’t mean adopting a few new spiritual practices when we run dry or adjusting our leadership strategies on occasion. It’s a shift that feels disorienting, even painful, because it is.
It requires a series of radical reversals: a decisive and disciplined turning away from everything we once considered success.
Jesus does not merely challenge our assumptions; He overturns them. His path does not provide a slight improvement to ours; it replaces it entirely.
Jesus’s reversals show up throughout His teaching:
The first will be last.
Those who lose their life will find it.
The greatest are servants.
Those who humble themselves will be exalted.
Taken together, they form a radically different scorecard for life and leadership.
And yet in the Western church—long dominated by the values of achievement, control, and visibility—the true implications of Jesus’s radical reversals have been largely buried. We know the principles. We even preach them. But the assumptions that shape our lives often run in the opposite direction.
Our situation is like a city in which every inch of life-giving soil has been buried beneath thick layers of asphalt and concrete. It’s been that way for so long that entire generations have forgotten anything ever grew there. Towers have arisen and traffic flows, but no one realizes that beneath the surface, hidden and long forgotten, lies good and rich soil.
Then one day someone kneels with a chisel and cracks the concrete. The opening looks small, and hardly anyone notices, but light enters through the crack. Rain seeps into the soil. And to everyone’s surprise, something living begins to push upward through the opening.
What was buried was not dead. It only needed light.
This is what Jesus’s reversals do. They can’t be accessed on the surface, on top of our inherited definitions of success. They crack through the hardened layers of long-formed scorecards and expose us to the living light of God. And as the light seeps into that newly opened space, something beautiful grows.
Nowhere is this vision for new life more needed than in the way we measure success, power, and fruitfulness.
- Jesus invites us into four great reversals that redefine what true success actually is. If we embrace them, they will not only change what we do but who we are.
These reversals will transform us by reshaping our values, reordering our desires, and reorienting the ways we discern God’s will in the world. They don’t merely improve our old way of leading; they replace it.
Jesus’s four great reversals move us:
- From prayer for results to prayer for communion
- From charisma to weakness and limits
- From our best ideas to discerning God’s voice
- From critical mass to critical yeast
Jesus’s four reversals don’t simply oppose the contemporary values of Western success. They shatter the foundation of lifeless concrete and asphalt, offering us the counterintuitive way of His Kingdom. They challenge the value systems we’ve relied on for too long and call us into another Kingdom altogether, one rooted not in worldly metrics but in Jesus Himself.
If we embrace Jesus’s four great reversals, they will not only change what we do but who we are.
Excerpted with permission from Emotionally Healthy Success by Peter Scazzero, copyright Peter Scazzero.
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Your Turn
What does your scorecard for life and leadership look like right now? Does it match Jesus’? What would change if you refused the culture’s norms and decided to be shaped by Jesus’ four great reversals instead? ~ Devotionals Daily