Day 14

The Death of Ambition

Today's Scripture: Jeremiah 45:5 (NLT)

In the prophet Jeremiah's day, there was a man named Baruch — Jeremiah's scribe, the faithful man who wrote down the prophet's words on the scroll that King Jehoiakim later cut to pieces with a penknife and threw into the fire. Baruch was a behind-the-scenes man, a man of letters, a man whose name might never have been remembered if it had not been preserved in the very book he helped to write. And in the middle of a national catastrophe, Baruch began to grieve — not just for his nation, but for himself. He had hoped for more. He had dreamed of more. He had imagined, perhaps, that his life would amount to greater things than what he was now seeing. And God spoke to him through Jeremiah a sentence that is one of the most quietly devastating sentences in all of Scripture: "Seekest thou great things for thyself? seek them not" (Jeremiah 45:5).

Notice the careful precision of the word for thyself. God did not say, "Seek not great things." God Himself does great things and calls His servants into great works. He told Joshua to conquer the land. He told David to build a kingdom. He told Paul to evangelize the empire. The problem was not greatness. The problem was the small phrase for thyself — the slight but ruinous reorientation of greatness from being something done for God's glory to being something accumulated for one's own.

And this is the heart of the ambition self that must die. Ambition itself is not the enemy. The Father has placed within many of His children real gifts, real callings, real fires, and the disciple who refuses to develop those gifts in the name of false humility is just as wrong as the one who pursues them for self-glory. The question is not whether your ambition is large or small; the question is for whom. Who is the ultimate beneficiary of the greatness you are seeking? Whose name is meant to be exalted at the end of your striving? When the dust settles, who walks away with the credit, the reward, the praise, the throne?

If the answer is yourself, then the ambition self is alive and ruling. And it must die.

This is one of the most painful deaths for capable, gifted, hard-working people, because the ambition self does not look like sin. It looks like excellence. It looks like leadership. It looks like vision. It looks like exactly the kind of thing the church often celebrates and rewards. And the believer who is trying to put this self to death may find that the very world around them — sometimes even the religious world — is rewarding them precisely for the thing God is asking them to crucify. This is one of the deep ironies of the Christian life in our age: we have built reward structures around the very ambitions Jesus told His disciples to lay down.

Listen to what Jesus said about this: "But Jesus called them unto him, and saith unto them, Ye know that they which are accounted to rule over the Gentiles exercise lordship over them; and their great ones exercise authority upon them. But so shall it not be among you: but whosoever will be great among you, shall be your minister: and whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be servant of all" (Mark 10:42–44). He did not abolish the desire for greatness. He redirected it. He took the upward staircase of worldly ambition and turned it upside down. The way up in the kingdom is the way down. The way to be first is to serve. The way to rise is to bow.

What does it mean to put the ambition self to death? It does not mean throwing away your gifts. It does not mean refusing every opportunity to lead, to grow, to influence. It means asking, before every step up the ladder, "Whose ladder is this? Who is being served at the top? If I cannot find a way to take this step that magnifies Christ instead of me, I will not take it." It means being willing to accept obscurity, even chosen obscurity, if obscurity is what faithfulness requires. It means being able to celebrate the rising of another person without secretly grieving that it was not you. It means doing the great work and then handing the credit back to the One who gave you the strength to do it in the first place.

There is freedom on the other side of this death that the ambitious self cannot picture. The ambitious self thinks that if it stops climbing, it will fall. But the soul that has died to ambition discovers that it has been carried all along by hands much steadier than its own. The Lord lifts up whom He will, and the soul that has stopped lifting itself finds that it can be lifted, or laid low, with the same peace either way.

Today, lay down the ladder. Ask the Father what He is calling you to, not what you have been calling yourself to. Be willing to be small if smallness is the assignment. Be willing to be hidden if hiddenness is what the kingdom requires. Be willing to die to the dream of yourself in order to live in the dream of God.

Prayer

Father, I confess that some of my dreams have been more about me than about You. Forgive me for seeking great things for myself when You were calling me to seek great things for Your name. Crucify in me the ambition that lives for my own glory. Awaken in me a holy ambition for Yours. Make me willing to be small, hidden, or great — whichever is most useful to You. Amen.

Today's Challenge

Examine one ambition you have been carrying. Ask honestly: whose glory is at the center of this? Whose name will be exalted if it comes to pass? Today, surrender that ambition to God, asking Him to either purify it or replace it with one of His own.

"Holy ambition seeks great things for God; sick ambition seeks great things for itself, and the difference is invisible to everyone except the One who reads the heart."