Happy New Year
As we continue to fine tune our New Years resolutions for 2015, lets take a moment to examine this matter on ambition as it relates to us as Christians.
Does ambition have any place in the life of a Christian?
Are these two things mutually exclusive?
Is the very idea of an ambitious christian an oxymoron?
Webster’s defines ambition as
“An eager, and sometimes an inordinate, desire for preferment, honor, superiority, power, or the attainment of something”. [1913 Webster]
“The act of going about to solicit or obtain an office, or any other object of desire; canvassing. [Obs.]
One underlying factor in these two definitions is…the desire to dominate.
In Gen 9:1 GOD gives man what would seem to be an ambitious charge…..“be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth”….a handful of people replenishing the earth is no minor task!
In creating man in his own image, God imprinted (by breathing life into his nostrils) some ‘traits & characteristics’ in order that in his ‘god-likeness’, man would be able to exercise dominion over all God’s creation. This includes but is not limited to God’s creativity, his capacity to Love, etc. It wouldn’t be far fetched to deduce that ambition was a trait needed for man to drive his capacity for growth|development|exploration. Perhaps this is still what fuels mankind’s quest to discover what is ‘out there’..thus we build telescopes, rockets, and carry out space exploration. See science has its roots in God 🙂
All of man’s innate desires where fundamentally good, but the resultant effect of his fall into sin was that carnality intrinsically mixed into his naturally created desires for sex, hunger, thirst and ambition! Traits which original served functionally positive purposes rapidly became twisted into selfish and self-serving objectives.
Ambition in of itself was good and served a functional purpose, but when it became mixed with carnal flesh it metamorphosed into ‘Selfish Ambition’!!. Ever since then any ambition arising from the flesh is ultimately selfish and runs contrary to the divine nature. Thus everything God says about flesh in the bible is negative.
The world system has 3 devices to entrap Christians into self-destruction:
1) The Lust of the Flesh, ii) The Lust of the Eyes and iii) the Pride of Life.
When we become Born Again Christians, we become partakers of the divine nature, quite distinct from the inherited nature of Adam. Yet these 2 natures are in us but are in active opposition to each other!!! From Romans 7:14-25
Lets examine some scriptural examples:
The Woman EVE
In the garden of Eden, the serpent used the weapon of ‘The Lust of the Eyes’ to entrap the woman into committing SIN. After the devil lied to her in verse 5, verse 6 records it that “So when the woman SAW that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree DESIRABLE to make one wise, she ate of it”.
That lust of the eyes was targeted at the ‘ambitious’ aspect of her Adamic nature, which eventually ended up in her demonstrating a selfish ambition “to be like GOD” ultimately entrapping her into her very own destruction.
When man’s ambition is fueled by the Lust of the Eyes, the inevitable end of such is an entrapment into downfall! The Psalmist understood this:- Psalm 119:37 “Turn away my eyes from looking at worthless things”
Nimrod and the Tower of Babel
Gen 11:4 “And they said, Come let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top Is in the heavens; Let us make a name for ourselves”
Once again ambition this time mixed with the Pride of Life!
GOD was never threatened by the tower of babel, after all even if they built it into space they still wouldn’t find him there for he is spirit, and this was being done in the physical realm. He stepped in to scatter them because they were inadvertently becoming a danger to themselves.
From the tower of Babel story we learn that there are some kind of ambitions that set us on a collision course with GOD. Imagine if they had completed the tower? their pride and arrogance would have known no bounds up to the point of making of themselves graven images to worship!
The tower of babel isn’t so much about GOD limiting man’s capability! (Which of course he hints at in Gen 11:6 “now nothing they propose to do will be withheld from them”) it is about GOD preventing man from harming himself! Every time we see GOD step into ‘limit’ man, it has more to do with man’s excesses and preventing him from thinking more highly of himself than he ought! This is made evident in the encounter with Jacob in Genesis 33:25 where he handicapped Jacob (who might have ultimately become too smart for his own good) or with Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 7: “And lest I should be exalted above measure by the abundance of revelations, a thorn in the flesh was given me,…to buffet me, LEST I BE exalted above measure”
From my own personal experience, I have come to understand that even in service to GOD we need to guard against personal ambition. The Lord once pointed out to me why he crippled the work of my hands sometime in the past, because I was set on a “collision course with him” (his very words), it was an eye opener! More on this later,
LOT and the Mixed Multitude!
Gen 13:10 “Then Lot lifted up his eyes and saw all the plain of Jordan, that it was well watered everywhere”.11 “Then Lot Chose for Himself”
The earlier point about when man’s ambition is fueled by the Lust of the Eyes, the inevitable end of such is an entrapment into downfall is perfectly demonstrated in LOT’s ambition.
Lots ambition arose out of a fleshly desire! A desire which had not bearing in divine purpose. witnessed in his method of choosing his own will not the Lord’s and eventually though he attained his ‘ambition’ of ‘exaltation’ by ‘sitting at the gate of Sodom as an elder man”, (Power and Pride of place), the end thereof was catastrophic loss! (which i discuss extensively in an old post ‘avoiding Lot’s Legacy‘)
Prov 14:12 “There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof is destruction!!!”
In many ways, many of us Christians still have ambitions obviously or subtly fueled by carnal desires, such as the need to keep up with the joneses, or wanting to be rich and famous etc. Such lustful desires as these all emanate from the flesh! And as a result such ambitions aren’t actually godly. They are selfish in that they in no way serve to bring glory to GOD, but to ourselves.
Much to the injury of the body as a whole, it is to these inordinate and lustful desires that much of the ‘prosperity movement’ has preyed upon in the past decade by selling the ‘come to God & he will enable you attain all your desires!‘ concept…..
Phil 2:3 says ‘Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves’,
So scripturaly speaking, how exactly is a Christian supposed to fit in, in this world of relentless drive & pursuit towards carnal goals?
We will take the discussion further by examining the scriptural pattern for Christian ambition in the next post.
Grace to you.
The Revealed Word. 