Ambition Right If Selfless

You can call it what you like; aspiration, ambition, wanting to get on, wanting to rise. It is there in the constitution of man, and rightly so; God put it there. “Thou makest him to have dominion” (Ps. 8:6). 

That is not just official, positional. That is the fulfillment of some divine power at work in the very constitution of man that makes him feel he must rise, but it has been perverted. 

It is perverted by the great pervert, who himself was perverted by his own pride when he said, “I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High” (Isa. 14:14); and who came down to Eve and said, “Hath God said...? 

Why, God knows that in the day that you eat, you will have the root of the matter in you, you will not be dependent on God for your knowledge, you will not have to obey God, you will have it in yourself!” 

Adam and Eve fell to it, and the race fell with them, and from that day to this that holy thing of aspiration - shall we call it ambition? - that great power in us that makes us know we are born for a destiny, is perverted and tainted by self, by pride.

So that a man has advanced far on the road to holiness who can never be caught along the line of flattery and popularity, to whom the siren charms and voices are as nothing, because he walks so humbly with his God, meek and lowly in heart.

All the prizes and baubles have no attraction for him. I say that is in the HOLY hill of Zion. 

We are touching another thing now, how holiness is inherent in ascendency. But that must wait.

It is not wrong to have ambition, to have aspiration, but it is wrong to have it actuated by personal interest and motive. 

That has to go through the crucible of the cross and be burnt out. 

Here is the paradox, the problem, the difficulty of a true Christian life: to be broken, emptied, humbled, reduced to nothing, and yet at the same time to have a fiery ambition.

How reconcile these two things? I find it in Paul. With the exception of the Lord Jesus Himself, no man was more mastered by the spirit of ascendency and dominion - shall we call it ambition, aspiration? - than he was, and no man was more selfless in it all. 

How he suffered at the hands of those who owed everything to him instrumentally! There is no personal thing here. He is the man who can write, “Love... seeketh not its own, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly - giveth itself no airs”. 

All that is ascendency; not just geographical location, but spiritual ascendency.

Oh, let us ask the Lord to put in us a passionate ambition for His glory, and that we may be kept purified by the cross so that our glory does not force its way in. That will need a lot of the grace of God.

~T. Austin Sparks~