Godly Ambition

My church just finished a short sermon series on godly ambition, which was quite helpful. You can visit the website to download it (the series is "Wired For Glory.")

The title and content of the series reminded me of C.S. Lewis' essay "Weight of Glory," where Lewis discusses that motivation and the desire for approval is from God but that must be centered on pleasing God and striving for heavenly reward. Many of us are familiar with this quote from that essay:

"Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."

I'm not going to recap the sermons, as I'd just recommend any readers download them and listen. However, a few points that came to mind:

1. Ambition is a good thing, but can quickly turn ugly.

Like all people, I tend to be a contradictory chimera. I am ambitious, but prone to laziness. My motivation often tends to follow how much natural ability I have in a given area. Or, I follow the path of least resistance and do what I like and avoid what I don't.

I have been known to beat the proverbial dead horse and not give up on a blocked ambition. A classic example was in my pursuit of flying as a career. It was pretty clear by my freshman year in college that I was not going to be an airline pilot....but I fought with God over that for two years. God resists the proud, and as my pride rose so did his resistance. I became angry, discontent and generally just miserable about where things were going.

In one sense, this idea of faithful dedication to a cause can be beneficial. Sometimes, persistent work can yield success and build character at the same time. I'm grateful for people in my life who haven't just bailed when times got tough or when they got a "no" or "get lost" the first time they asked me a question. Church history is filled with people that were ambitious and who saw the fruit of their labor only in their final years, or after their passing.

Faithfulness and standing steadfast are a good thing - but if we are doing it against counsel, God's revealed will or the conviction of the Holy Spirit; then it becomes an evidence of pride and is a symptom of having a hard heart. One of the most convicting things I ever encountered in preaching was when Mark Driscoll commented in his Ecclesiastes series that people who resist change are sometimes just resisting God. My friend and former pastor Daryn had once told me the same thing and Driscoll's sermon put that tendency of mine in perspective.

2. A lack of ambition is laziness.

However, I'm paradoxical. If something isn't high up on my "desire" list, I can be less than ambitious. This would be laziness. If I see something as unlikely, hard or requiring years of work with little chance of success - a clear lack of faith in God is evident in my life. I don't really trust God to change me or intervene in certain circumstances. I find it kind of odd that the same person who who is seen as goal-driven has many areas where I'd rather just do nothing.

As I've moved to Philadelphia, I've found myself at a large church where on the surface it seems like they got everything covered. Covenant Fellowship has a paid staff and a lot of members to serve. Many of them are more gifted then me. So, I've been finding myself prone to laziness; although I have a strong love for the local church and God's people, I've been putting off seriously looking for areas to serve. Even if it is a big church, there are areas where servants are needed and it's plain lazy for me to just sit back and rest.

3. Cynicism is an ungodly response to unfulfilled ambition.

I am a fairly established cynic, or realist, as I would put it. In the last sermon (August 3), Dave Harvey noted how one response to discontent can be an attempt at taking our ambition off the table with God. It's basically the adult version of throwing a fit, and taking our ball home because we didn't like the rules or outcome of the game.

Yes, in one sense, I tend to look at the darker side of life. I suppose some of that is my propensity to introspection, but it can be unhealthy if I don't see God's answer to the cold realities of life. However, I have been one to play the "take my ball home" game quite often. Why?

Much of this has to do with pride: I don't like to admit that I failed. Sometimes the failure was due to my own incompetence or weakness. Instead of chalking up the failure to learning the hard way and being grateful that God is growing my character, I decided to blame the failure on external circumstances or just shove it in the junk drawer of my life. I find it funny how even some of the neatest people I know have a few closets or drawers where the junk that they don't want to deal with gets tossed. Heck, there are people whose entire basements are monuments to forgotten projects and bad ideas! I guess I assume that if I don't have to see it or live with it, then I don't have to deal with it. Let's not talk about my failures, just my successes (and then you can remind me, as much as you'd like, how wonderful I am) - thank you!

In my pride, I want to set the direction for my life and have those plans come to fruition. Compared to where I was three or four years ago, God has shown me that he has precedent over my calendar and goals. But, when I set out on a given path that I've decided on, deviation can be hard and I can resist. (Again, the Mark Driscoll quote about resisting God comes to mind.) When I want to do something, I'll won't give up - the sinful side of steadfastness is stubbornness. So, when my plans are frustrated, I'll turn into a cynic and tell everyone else how stupid of an idea it is and how I'm just better than that. Pride again, my friends.

The odd thing about cynicism is that it finds company. I would find friends in similar circumstances and we'd just feed on our discontent and heap what essentially amounted to mutual discouragement on each other. Instead of serving one another by stressing what Christ has done for us and his amazing love demonstrated on the cross, cynical friends remind each other that life is just giant discouragement with more loss around the corner. The biblical view is that life is a mix of good and bad circumstances, but as the sermon series notes - contentment is not rooted in our circumstances and transcends them. A cynical philosophy encourages others to incorrectly measure their view of God by their immediate circumstances.

Thankfully, I have faithful friends that would step into my cynicism parties and yank the needle off the spinning record of despair. Those friends were faithful and true, because I usually didn't take to this all that well.

When sin is pointed out in my life, the response often isn't, "Thank you bro, for bringing that sin to light. I am so gracious for the means of grace you are to me." I tended to be harsh, argumentative and would try to sell them on joining the Traveling Despair and Cynicism Road Show. It is a great calling to spend your time extinguishing hope and joy in others, I tell you. I'd say that I was just bringing people to see the futility of chasing their silly dreams and to be "content" where God has called them to be. Really, what I meant was to give up and stew in anger over God's sovereignty and kind intervention in our lives.

I think this series has provided some clarification for ambition. It is a good thing, but involves a big picture view of what God is doing. A large part of this involves exhibiting humility and understanding that God does give us desires and plans, but that they are not to be our idols. Chasing those idols, as C.S. Lewis points out in his quote from "Weight of Glory," is a poor excuse for the real thing.

May we make our ambition to have a holiday at the sea and not to merely find contentment with the mud in our backyard.