Personal
from Herbert W. Armstrong

I have written of the Seven Laws of SUCCESS. They are really the seven laws of LIFE. Most people do not know, or practice, or apply a single one of them.

The first is to have the RIGHT GOAL. That goal involves realizing the PURPOSE of your life – the reason why God had you to be born – the reason you draw breath and exist – and it involves realizing HOW to live this temporary existence so as to arrive at that goal.

That GOAL – God’s PURPOSE for having put the breath of life in you – is that you be born of GOD, to share with Him the GLORY of creation, to inherit His divine NATURE, to be LIKE HIM – to do what He does, to accomplish what He accomplishes, enjoy what He ENJOYS – peace, happiness, joy, resplendent glory in LIFE EVERLASTING.

No other goal could be as great. It is superlative.

But consider: What are you, now? Just a mass of matter, put together like a machine. Your present existence has to be constantly SUSTAINED. You have to keep drawing a breath of air into your lungs about every four or five seconds. You have to eat food on the average of three times a day. You have to take care of eliminating the impurities from food, and of bathing and cleansing your body. You have to maintain and sustain your physical anatomy to keep on existing – and even then you are ageing and degenerating every day and every year – and the most certain thing in this existence we call “life” is that this machine process is going to run down – YOU ARE GOING TO DIE.

Yet most people keep on, day after day, year after year, pumping that existence into themselves, with NO MORE PURPOSE than to try to be comfortable, free from pain and to be pleasing the five senses – with their minds on the passing physical and material things of the moment – things that are not lasting, and are soon gone.

Unless God’s own CHARACTER is being formed and developed in your mind and your life, replacing the human nature that is there now, you shall have missed your GOAL. God’s PURPOSE is to CREATE within human beings, during this experience we call physical life, a new and perfect CHARACTER, so that you and others may be given eternal life – self-containing, inherent life.

That character is developed through instruction from the Creator Himself. What kind of instruction? Instruction in the true knowledge – knowledge of God’s PURPOSE for you – knowledge of and about GOD – and knowledge of HOW TO LIVE. Jesus Christ said you must actually LIVE BY the words of the Bible. It is your GUIDE TO LIVING – your INSTRUCTION BOOK the Maker sent along to instruct you HOW to OPERATE this mechanism that is YOU.

More, you must study His Word – your BIBLE – to find what is wrong in what you now believe, and what you are now DOING that is wrong – to be CORRECTED and reproved by it. You must study it to let it INSTRUCT you in the ways of God’s RIGHTEOUSNESS – His WAY OF LIFE. And then you must devote yourself to LIVING IT!

This kind of Christian life – the only kind that truly IS Christian – requires, as the Bible emphasizes repeatedly, zealous DILIGENCE. You must CONCENTRATE on it. You must be DEDICATED to it. It requires utter CONSECRATION. It requires total EARNESTNESS.

It requires, in addition, the application of the other six laws of SUCCESS – education, in which the Bible is the main textbook; good physical health; DRIVE, or concentrated DILIGENCE and EFFORT; resourcefulness; sticking to it – enduring; and continual contact with, and the guidance, help, and power of GOD.

Remember what a GLORIOUS GOAL we have before us! Make it your supreme overall life VOCATION, and WORK HARD AT IT!