Ambition and Plowing in Hope

Many Christians are suspicious of ambition, and they do have some texts that support them in their concern. The word in Greek is eritheia.

Whenever a young buck shows up, eager to conquer the world, he wants nothing more than to go out there to make a dent. It may be in the world of finance, or the world of the arts, or the world of athletics, and what they all have in common is that they make the older saints quite nervous about this young man going off the rails.

To be fair, they would also be concerned about a young man whose goal appeared to be to touch every sluggard base in the book of Proverbs. If his apathy is extraordinarily pronounced, the older saints would have concerns there as well.

But unfortunately, this middle class version of the golden mean frequently results in acceptable levels of mediocrity across the board. Young people are trained just enough to be able to take on placeholder jobs, and to be content to remain in them for forty years, give or take. They figure out how to live in a way that does not make the older Christians want to ride the brake, and they summon up just enough energy to get to work and not get fired.

When a young man is motivated to do nothing but sleep in, the force that is holding him down is gravity. But what is the motivation when he wants to go forth conquering? It is ambition, and for many Christians the kind of ambition that wants to break away from the pack is necessarily carnal. This is complicated by the fact that this is frequently the case—it really is carnal. He not only wants to be the first in his class, he wants to be there ahead of a few other key people that he could name. But go back and look at the assumption that many have, thinking that ambition is necessarily carnal.

I want to argue that this is not the case at all.

Now we are fashioned by God as teleological creatures. We want our work day to have a point, we want our work to have a point, and we want our lives to have a point. That point should ultimately be the glory of God, but there are intermediate points along the way. An intermediate point for the farmer would be the harvest. An intermediate point for the architect would be the completed building. An intermediate point for an athlete would be a world record. An intermediate point for the church planter would be a thriving congregation.

Take particular note of how Paul describes this. “He that ploweth should plow in hope.” He is looking for a particular result, and it is a result that he should want to participate in. He has a God-given desire to share in the results.

Someone who is ambitious forms a goal, and then he shapes a process or a plan for reaching that goal, ideally broken down into daily increments. He looks ahead at the ultimate goal, and then puts his head down to look at the task at hand. Now if someone does this because he wants to see his name up in lights, and he wants to enjoy the luxury of being better than everybody else, then sure, there is a problem with the motivation. But if they want to achieve the goal because it would glorify God, and they believe that God made them with that goal in mind, and they cannot rest until they achieve that goal for that reason, the situation is entirely different. In such a situation, the ambition is a godly one.

One of the curses of much modern drudgery is not that the work is difficult. Work is supposed to be difficult. It is supposed to be challenging. The curse is that it is pointless, or apparently pointless.

Let us return to our example of a young and ambitious man who is answering questions from interested older folks during the fellowship hour after church. “What are you planning to pursue after graduation?” Suppose he were to reply that he was wanting to pursue “glory, honor and immortality.” You can almost feel the brows furrowing. But . . .

God grants eternal life to those who patiently pursue glory, honor, and immortality. He grants to them glory, honor and peace.

And what is sin anyway? The Bible teaches that sin is a glory failure.

Human beings cannot live without glory. We seek out glory the way sunflowers turn toward the sun, following its course. We can no more opt out of a desire for glory that we can turn off our desire to breath. This is because we are created by God, in His image. We must seek glory. But because we are a fallen race, this is one of the central things we have twisted. Remember the definition of sin—falling short of the glory of God.

If we will not, through grace, pursue glory, honor and immortality through the gospel, then we only have two alternative choices. We will either pursue vainglory, or we will pursue dark glory. Those are the three options. We will seek out the weight of true glory, or we chase after baubles and tinsel, or we will lust after the deep things of Satan.

Now what is the result when Christians, in the name of holiness, diligently try to squelch those who have been stirred up by the Spirit to accomplish great things? They are relegating them to the pursuit of stupid trinkets, or the pursuit of demon lovers. This being the case, most of them settle down with the trinkets, inscribed with Bible verses, available at a Christian gift center near you.

Can ambition go wrong? It most certainly can. Just like everything else.