If you were to ask the average person, is ambition a good thing or a bad thing? Almost all of them would say it's bad. But you know, I think the reason people believe this is because... because the way they've seen ambition displayed always seems to be pretty arrogant. You've seen posters on ambition, right?
Ambition, aspire to climb as high as you can dream. Here's another one. Ambition, it is not strength, but ambition that drives us. Here's another one.
Ambition, the world makes way for those who know where they are going. Right off the end of the pier, apparently. Here's the one I think is most fun of all because a fellow decided that all of these posters were making him ill, so he started a new kind of poster company.
You can find it on the internet under despair.com. Ambition, the journey of a thousand miles sometimes ends very, very badly. Ambition, really, if you were to look at the definition of it, does sound to be a little bit shady. The term actually comes from the Latin to go about or to seek by making interest of amb, about, and eo, to go. This word has its origin in the practice of Roman candidates for office who went about the city to solicit votes.
And here's another part of the definition, a desire of preferment or of honor. A desire of excellence or superiority. It is used in a good sense as emulation may spring from a laudable ambition.
It denotes also an inordinate desire of power or eminence often accompanied with illegal means to obtain the object. Well, just by looking at the definition, we can see that while many people believe that ambition is always a bad thing, the reality is a little bit more textured. Ambition can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you approach it.
J. Oswald Sanders wrote one of the first books on leadership from a spiritual perspective. It's kind of become a classic in the field.
And he addresses the issue of ambition straight on. He says, first of all, it is an honorable ambition to aspire to leadership. Paul told Timothy, Right.
If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task. It's actually a noble thing to do. Second, though, Sanders points out that it is not honorable to seek leadership for your own sake.
Jeremiah 45, 5 says, And do you seek greater things for yourself? Seek them not. Third, leaders must be ambitious to serve. What you're ambitious to do really matters. Mark 10, 42-44, Jesus said, You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them, but it shall not be so among you.
But for whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. So, whether we should be ambitious or not depends on what we are ambitious for. We should be ambitious to lead if our desire is to serve. This is an honorable ambition, but we must always check our motives so that we are not seeking leadership for its own sake. So, what should we be ambitious for?
Let's take a look at the teachings of Jesus. In Matthew 5, 6, Jesus said, Blessed are they who do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. What should you hunger and thirst for? Should hunger and thirst after righteousness?
I've always enjoyed this passage, really thinking of it as a dad. Because, you know, my goal with my children in spiritual development is not to cram them full of spiritual information, but to try to cultivate in them a hunger and thirst for what is right. If someone is filled up, they don't want more. They don't desire what you have. One time, Some friends came over to visit our home.
It was a man and three sons and they were all big men. So Danielle, knowing that they were big men and would be eating a lot, fixed a lot of food. Well, apparently this man and his three sons were used to going over to people's homes who didn't realize how much they would eat and fixed too little. So on the way to our home, they stopped off at Taco Bell and filled themselves up on 99-cent burritos. When they got to the house and they saw the wonderful spread that Danielle had prepared, they were distressed because they realized, we just filled ourselves up on these 99-cent burritos and we're missing out.
on this feast because we're just not hungry. You see, to fill yourselves up with what's not worthwhile takes away that edge that we need. That edge.
We should be ambitious to be hungry and thirsty for what God has to offer us through Jesus Christ. So what is that actually? Well, Jesus in another teaching says this. One of the scribes came up.
and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, Which commandment is the most important of all? Jesus answered, The most important is, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is this, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
There is no other commandment greater than these. Notice, what He tells them to do. You are to love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all of your soul, with all of your mind, and with all of your strength. It occurred to a lot of the Bible translators that if Jesus took pains to quote the Old Testament and to specify four different ways that we're to fulfill the commandment to love God, that each one of those things may have a little bit of a different meaning. That to love God with our heart and love Him with our soul might actually be two different things.
So a lot of people have speculated, what does it mean to love God with all of your heart? What does it mean to love God with all of your soul or your mind and your strength? I'm not claiming to be the ultimate Bible interpreter here, but for the purposes of a leadership class, I think we can suggest something that's consistent with Scripture as follows, that we can love God with all of our heart by living out our vocation.
We have that heart calling to do what God's designed us to do. To respond to that call is a way of loving God with all of our heart. I know how hard that is. I've worked with students for years and a lot of them will come to me with what I think is a really profound question.
They will say, you know, Dr. Myers, you're encouraging us to engage with the culture, which means we're not necessarily going into church work. We're going into what people might call secular work. Now, Now, I'm not sure they should call it secular work.
Really everything is sacred, but I understand what they mean. They're going into an area where the rules are not quite as clear about how to spiritually engage. One of these students told me, I'm going into the field of advertising. And so I asked him, how do you live out a biblical worldview in the field of advertising?
His first response was, well, I guess as an advertising agency, I would just discourage our agency from trying to make advertisements that are manipulative or unethical, or that use, you know, say, women's bodies to try to sell products, you know, sort of based on the ideas of lust and greed and self-interest. He said, we try to have more uplifting kinds of advertisements. I said, that's great. I laud that. That's a wonderful illustration.
But is there something more? Why don't you think about it a little bit and come back to me? So he came back to me and had a breakthrough, which I've always enjoyed thinking about and telling about when it comes to people who are interested in going into advertising.
He came back and he said, you know, I think really the key issue is this. In advertising, is what we are encouraging people to do going to cause them to be better people? And how do we make that connection between our product and the consumer in a way that makes that line especially clear. He said, so what I would think first is this.
If we want to do an advertisement for a company, we first go to the company and ask them, how are you operating as a company? Are you operating ethically? Are you operating in a way that actually builds people up rather than tries to take something away from them?
Are you operating? by selling products that are good products? And are you treating people with respect and those kinds of things?
He said, once we're sure that that company is doing all of those things in the proper way, then we can with confidence help them create advertising and know that our advertising is a lot less likely to be manipulative because it's focused on drawing the connection between good and good. Right? So I thought that was a great application here. This student was learning to love God with all of his heart.
He may not get to control or be a gatekeeper on what kind of advertisements they do or don't do, but he certainly can go in and help these companies be more successful in bearing God's image in the way they operate their companies. Second, love God with all of your soul. As I understand this, it would be to embrace God's nature and commands in our heart.
I'd like to tell you a story I found really compelling. I found this in World Magazine a few years ago. Karen Covell, director of the Hollywood Prayer Network, which consists of some 3,500 Christians in the industry who pray for each other and for their non-Christian colleagues, finally got her big break in Hollywood, a job as an associate producer on Headliners and Legends with Matt Lauer. She was thrilled, but then came her first assignment. A one-hour profile of playboy mogul Hugh Hefner.
As a Christian who opposed everything Mr. Hefner stood for, Ms. Covell was appalled. When I complained to Jim, her husband, about the assignment, he reminded me that working with Hugh Hefner is exactly why we are here. He suggested that we start praying and that I talk to my producer Rick to see if we could approach the subject from a different perspective.
To her surprise, she discovered that Rick too was a Christian who did not want to do the story and had talked to his pastor about it. His pastor told him he couldn't turn down this assignment, Ms. Covell said. Someone was going to do the story, the pastor had said, and if Rick turned it down, it would likely be done as a standard puff piece. This was an opportunity to really dig deeper into why Hugh Hefner became the man he is. The story delved into Mr. Hefner's early life and spiritual background.
It culminated with an interview in which the icon of sexual promiscuity told about being raised by harsh, distant parents who never told him they loved him. His mother never hugged or kissed him, he said, because of her fear of germs. In the opulent Playboy Mansion, surrounded by Playboy bunnies, The interviewers brought Mr. Hefner, clad in his black pajamas, to confess that he is, quote, still just a little boy trying to find love, end quote.
They exposed his futile attempts to substitute sex for love and the pain behind the playboy facade, the God-shaped vacuum in Mr. Hefner's heart. And now there's an example of someone Taking their God-given vocation and understanding the situation from God's perspective so that they can bring out the truth in a way that changes how people see things so they see it more based on a biblical perspective. Third is to love God with all of our mind, to seek wise counsel. We must find other people who are in that field.
Notice that they talked to spouses and pastors and one another and sought wise counsel so that they could actually love God with their mind. And then finally, you know, the scripture says there you should love God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and you should love your neighbor as yourself. I think that's where we get to the idea of committing to action. If we're actually to be ambitious, it should be ambitious to see the world be a different place than it would be otherwise. There are a lot of examples of this.
I've seen some incredible examples of it. In fact, one of my favorite examples is looking at companies in other parts of the world that do microloans. As it turns out, if the United States government gives billions of dollars to a country, a lot of that money ends up just going straight into the pockets of those dictatorial leaders who use the money to reinforce their power and further oppress their people. On the other hand, if you can give someone...
$100 or $500, they can start a business that will allow them to provide for their family. Now there are actually companies on the internet that allow you to go in and give $25 to a person, not as a gift, but as a loan. That person can take the $25 along with the $25 contributions of a lot of other people and develop a fund from which to buy some supplies, turn around and resell them to others, and then repay the loan.
Would you believe, even though these countries... are under severe economic distress, a lot of these companies giving microloans have found that they have a 97 to 99% repayment rate of the loans. All of it started with realizing the principles about God are true.
And God's nature is that He designed people to be productive, to take initiative. He designed them to be stewards of a domain. If we enable people to do that, and we combine them with others who can help give them wise counsel about putting together their businesses, then we can actually discover in a whole new way what it means to love our neighbor as ourselves.
Here's some questions you can begin to ask. As you discern this issue of ambition for yourself, first of all, what lies did I believe in the past about myself and others? What are my motivations? How might they be shaped by seeking God's glory?
And then the third one is, where have I held back? Where have I been unwilling to risk? Many years ago, a politician ran for office, and in his first political announcement of his career, he said this. Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition.
Whether it be true or not, I can say for one that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men by rendering myself worthy of their esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition is yet to be developed. That man's name was Abraham Lincoln, and he developed it quite a bit because He was willing to have an ambition to do well by his fellow man. He was elevated to being the President of the United States during one of the most critical periods in American history. So, is ambition good or bad?
The question is, how are we ambitious? For what purposes? If we are ambitious for God's glory, then ambition is something that we ought to pursue with all of our heart.