Celebrating Others’ Success as Your Own

Your teammate just won something. And you’re being asked to celebrate it.

For some of you, that’s easy. You’re genuinely glad. The celebration is real.

For others, it’s harder. The recognition they received is recognition you also wanted. And the celebration being asked of you is competing with something less generous inside you.

This devotional is for the second group. And honestly, for both.

Read this passage slowly.

Let that sit for a second before you move.

Rejoice with those who rejoice. That’s an instruction, not a description. Paul isn’t saying it comes naturally. He’s saying: do it. Because the capacity to genuinely celebrate another person’s success — especially when you wanted what they received — is one of the most difficult and most character-revealing things a competitor can do.

The performed celebration is easy. The smile for the photo, the congratulations text, the public acknowledgment. Those cost almost nothing and reveal almost nothing about who you are.

What reveals character is the interior. Whether you actually want good things for your teammate. Whether the recognition they received produces genuine gladness in you or genuine resentment. That interior is mostly invisible — but it shapes how you show up for them in the room, in practice, in the moments after the ceremony when the cameras are gone.

The teammate who can genuinely celebrate another’s success has found a foundation for their own identity that doesn’t depend on relative comparison. They’re not made less by their teammate’s recognition. And that security — the ability to want good things for people who received what you wanted — is the mark of a person with a foundation worth having.

Rejoice with those who rejoice. Mean it. That’s the character work.

Honest interior assessment. Private reflection is appropriate here. The most valuable answer is the accurate one.