You see, I believe that ambition—godly ambition, that is—is a noble force for the glory of God. But let’s face it: ambition has mostly hovered outside respectability. For church leaders from Augustine to Jonathan Edwards, ambition was synonymous with the love of earthly honor, vainglory, fame-hunting—pretty slimy stuff.
Today’s cultural climate doesn’t help. The prevailing worldview in the West involves a distrust in big ideas and man’s ability to achieve them and the firm belief that objective truth doesn’t exist. But when we deny truth, we suffocate ambition. Without truth as a foundation and ideas worth exploring, meandering replaces meaning, confusion trumps conviction, ambivalence swallows aspiration—nothing really matters all that much.
Ambition must also be rescued from a wrong understanding of humility. That may sound crazy, but I’m serious. I think this issue quenches a lot of evangelical fire. Humility, rightly understood, shouldn’t be a fabric softener on our aspirations. When we become too humble to act, we’ve ceased being biblically humble. True humility doesn’t kill our dreams; it provides a guardrail for them, ensuring that they remain on God’s road and move in the direction of his glory.
Ultimately, it’s we ourselves who hold ambition hostage. We’re sinners, we love ourselves, we aspire to bring glory to ourselves, and we’ll drop godly dreams if something more attractive shows up—and in the process, the right kind of dreams die.
- Dave Harvey,
Rescuing Ambition
, p. 14
1 comment:
Hi All, just read your post on ambition. Just wanted to thank you for this insight as to deal with our own ambitions. My wife and I have been developing our blog which in itself has been a real experience for techno dummies for us.
As Reformed Christians and both self employed we're nearing an age where the body isn't wearing so well with our employment types. So we have been in the process of building an online business and found there are not to many places we have been able to turn to get the technical christian support for doing so other than from some of the internet marketing industries guru leaders should we say.
Anyway, the struggle seems to be the time it takes to move forward within the marketing learning curve with our ideas which we pray are from our Lord and not from our own ambition.
So this post has helped keep in perspective why we are learning all this web techno stuff and pray it is to be able to continue to glorify our God online without falling back into worldly self motivations.
We are developing a blog that basically incorporates our personal life and experiences in Christ and Christian world views verses the "if is to be it's up to me" psychology of the world incorporating bible study.
We also plan on sharing resources and online business education services that we have been able to learn to use and and put to use as well.
And that is the part that has been bringing a confusion to our hearts as we feel like it is counter intuitive at times to the proclamation of the gospel, yet feel is a much need education for many, yes, even Christians to be able to utilize the tools of the internet without have to turn to worldly wisdom to do so.
So you can see our struggle has been with incorporating the two from a reformed Christian business perspective as we have not found many topical treatises for the self-employed in Christ out side of the scriptures of course.
Any suggestions for study?
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