“Success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying the basic fundamentals.” – Jim Rohn

I’m not an expert on motivation, or success, or self-help. Although I’ve read books about success and motivation, I’ve never completely mastered any of them, and in some areas, I’m still not very good. But I’ve studied it enough to know that the principles of success aren’t mysterious, but, in fact, are reasonably obvious. My problem isn’t knowledge, it’s application. Or more accurately, lack of application.

Now, think of this in terms of your spiritual life. I’ll reword this quotation by substituting the word “spirituality” in place of the word “success.” It would then say, “Spirituality is neither magical nor mysterious. Spirituality is the natural consequence of consistently applying the basic fundamentals.” I find it helpful to think of spiritual growth in that way: applying a set of fundamental principles to the problems we face in our spiritual lives.

By way of application, which of these two components do you struggle with the most? Is it with learning fundamental spiritual principles? Or is it with putting the principles into practice?

This is where the discipline of self-examination becomes so critically important. Every day of every week, each of us needs to take a hard and honest look at ourselves to see where we should improve. The only way we can improve is to identify the problem, find the biblical principle that addresses the problem, and then put the principle into practice to eliminate the problem. That’s spiritual success.

As we said at the beginning, there’s nothing magical or mysterious about spiritual success. It’s a matter of applying the principles to the problem.

Jesus said it best of all: “If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them” (John 13.17).