Paul had one great ambition: to preach the good news of Jesus at the very heart of the empire. At the end of Acts he reaches Rome at last — and arrives in chains, penniless, imprisoned and condemned. Worse still, the gospel had travelled there ahead of him. Even the great apostle, it turns out, was not indispensable to the purposes of God.

In this sermon on Acts 28, Revd. Mark Fletcher asks what the Bible actually says about success. Was Paul a failure? And how much of what we chase is genuinely ours, rather than what everybody else wants, or what advertisers and influencers have sold us?

We live in a culture that never equips us to handle failure, and we are terrified of the idea. Yet the hardest seasons are often the making of us — and no one is a failure who has friends. Paul, met on the road by believers he had never met, discovered exactly that in one of his darkest hours.

What if the goal of this life is not winning, but simply finishing — fighting the good fight and keeping the faith to the last?

Full transcript and video: https://stpeters.ch/sermons/what-the-bible-says-about-success/