"The success and the failure are not my concern, but His"
About this Quote
A Victorian theologian’s mic-drop, delivered with the calm audacity of someone who thinks the scoreboard is rigged by eternity. Lightfoot’s line refuses the modern tyranny of outcomes. In an age when the British Empire was busy measuring everything it touched - souls, territories, “progress” - he narrows the moral field to one unnerving question: obedience. Success and failure, the categories that keep reputations afloat and institutions funded, are demoted to distractions.
The intent is pastoral and polemical at once. Pastoral, because it offers a bracing consolation to anyone doing thankless work: you are not the author of results. Polemical, because it critiques a church culture tempted to confuse providence with metrics, evangelism with expansion, holiness with visible “impact.” Lightfoot was a formidable New Testament scholar and a churchman; he knew how easily religious labor can slide into careerism, how quickly the language of “fruit” becomes a sanctified quarterly report.
The subtext is also a discipline of ego. “Not my concern” is not apathy; it’s abdication of control. “His” re-centers agency in God, but it also shifts accountability: you can’t hide behind failure as an excuse or success as proof of virtue. You’re responsible for faithfulness, not applause.
It works rhetorically because of the blunt symmetry: success/failure, my/His. Two human extremes, one divine ownership. The sentence is short enough to be memorized, sharp enough to sting, and dangerous enough to liberate.
The intent is pastoral and polemical at once. Pastoral, because it offers a bracing consolation to anyone doing thankless work: you are not the author of results. Polemical, because it critiques a church culture tempted to confuse providence with metrics, evangelism with expansion, holiness with visible “impact.” Lightfoot was a formidable New Testament scholar and a churchman; he knew how easily religious labor can slide into careerism, how quickly the language of “fruit” becomes a sanctified quarterly report.
The subtext is also a discipline of ego. “Not my concern” is not apathy; it’s abdication of control. “His” re-centers agency in God, but it also shifts accountability: you can’t hide behind failure as an excuse or success as proof of virtue. You’re responsible for faithfulness, not applause.
It works rhetorically because of the blunt symmetry: success/failure, my/His. Two human extremes, one divine ownership. The sentence is short enough to be memorized, sharp enough to sting, and dangerous enough to liberate.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
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