Grace Downtown member Tom Niblock shares his reflections on our recent Faith & Work event.
On February 23, Grace Downtown hosted a Faith & Work ministry event. It focused on the question of when ambition becomes a sin, an ever timely topic in a city teeming with ambition at the center of our nation’s political power.
Casey led off the discussion by providing a bit of historical and theological context on ambition. He said that “the pursuit of glory is fundamental to our being.” I think this is a good starting point for this discussion. From the earliest pages of the Bible we see ambition as a central trait for many characters, in ways that are both bad and good. The creators of the Tower of Babel aimed to “build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens” with the goal of challenging God, and God intervened in a decisive way to thwart their efforts. At the same time, Joseph and Daniel were two individuals who rose from humble roots (some unpaid interns in D.C. could empathize) to head powerful governments in their respective regions and time periods. Without downplaying the role of God’s sovereignty in each situation, you could argue that both Joseph and Daniel demonstrated some measure of ambition in their rises.
However, even if we acknowledge that ambition is a normal, unavoidable, and potentially even good thing in life, it still raises another important question: for what are we ambitious? In my discussion group, we talked a bit more about how to distinguish good ambition from bad ambition. One person said that a key factor is knowing the ultimate purpose of that ambition. To pursue status, money, sex, or power as an ultimate goal is self-destructive because none of those things were intended to be pursued in that way.
Ambition as purely a desire to increase my status and fame, get me more money, or help girls find me attractive (an impossible task anyway) shades into sin because those things fill the place that God meant for Himself to fill. Jesus said the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength; to love something else above Him is to disorder our loves and distort our desires. The result is that you lose even when you think you win. This is the idea behind Jesus’ statement: “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?”
This is hard for many of us in DC, where it can sometimes feel like the whole world is up for grabs. As part of my job, I’ve had to find new positions every few years. Every time I have to find a new position, it forces me to ask: what I am looking for in my next position? Is what will help me learn new skills, expand my network, and help me get promoted? Or is it what will help me glorify God? Sorting through those conflicting motivations has been a challenge.
One final thought – perhaps at least part of our problem with ambition is not that we, even those of us living in a city defined by striving for and pursuing great things, are overly ambitious. Perhaps part of the problem is that we are not ambitious enough. C.S. Lewis writes:
It would seem that 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.
As we think and pray more about the proper role of ambition in life, let’s also ask that we become people who are hard to please.