Success Quote by Jerry B. Jenkins

A novelist declaring that success isnt the goal sounds like a rebuke to the entire attention economy: the sales charts, the algorithmic sugar high, the fetish for visibility. Then he swerves. The alternative isnt artistry or curiosity or even craft. Its obedience. That word lands like a hard consonant, deliberately abrasive, because it reframes writing as a form of submission rather than self-expression. Whatever romance we attach to the author as lone genius gets replaced with a stricter identity: servant, soldier, witness.

Jerry B. Jenkins is best known in evangelical circles, and the line reads as a theological tell as much as a work ethic. In that context, success is a morally unreliable metric because it can reward vanity, trend-chasing, or the flattering illusion that God is a brand partner. Obedience offers a different scoreboard: did you do what you believed you were called to do, regardless of applause or outcome? The subtext is defensive and liberating at once. Defensive because it insulates the writer from failure (if the book flops, the mission can still be intact). Liberating because it claims permission to work without bargaining for cultural validation.

The phrasing is also quietly authoritarian, which is why it sticks. Obedience has a history: it can mean integrity, or it can mean conformity. Jenkins seems to bet on the former, but he doesnt avoid the edge of the latter. Thats the provocation: the quote asks whether we want our art governed by the market, or by a mandate that cant be audited by anyone but the conscience.