4
Ambition’s Agenda
EVERY AMBITION HAS AN AGENDA—
WHAT’S YOURS?
It has been called the greatest rescue mission of World War II.
During the second half of that war, American bombers were sent on dangerous missions over southern Europe to cripple the oil production feeding the Nazi war machine. Hundreds of crews in flying tin cans would soar over heavily fortified regions into blinding storms of anti-aircraft shells. Navigating through the brutal gauntlet of ground fire, many were forced to bail from their flak-riddled aircraft. Injured airmen often drifted by parachute into occupied Yugoslavia, fully expecting to be captured or killed.
But on the ground below them a remarkable rescue team was already being mobilized. Serbian peasants tracked the path of the floating flight crews. Their sole mission was to corral the flyboys and steal them to safety—all before the Nazis arrived.
Risking their own lives, the peasants fed and sheltered the downed crewmen and cared for their wounds. These rescued men were in friendly hands—but still on enemy soil. They still needed to be rescued.
The story of what became Operation Halyard builds toward a daring mission, a secret landing strip, and a clandestine evacuation plan involving C-47 cargo planes. Amazingly, more than five hundred airmen were rescued—every single man who had been confiscated by a peasant.
Drama, suspense, daring. This has Hollywood blockbuster written all over it. But there’s a fascinating subplot to the rescue. To travel to the evacuation site, the airmen were entrusted to Serbian freedom fighters, who alone knew the way to the evacuation site. Despite a language barrier that prevented clear communication, the airmen spent weeks following their guides through unfamiliar terrain—waking and walking on command. The direction, the pace, and the destination were in the hands of their rescuers. The men had been saved from their enemy, but the journey wasn’t over. They still had to walk to freedom.
In the last chapter we looked at the ultimate rescue. We used to be glory thieves, swiping honor from God and hoarding it for ourselves. But now, through Christ’s death and his life of perfect obedience, we’re justified—accepted, approved, and permanently secure in God’s love. We no longer need to look for approval; we have all the approval we need. That’s some serious good news!
That raises an interesting question. If God sees Christ’s wonderful works when he looks at me, isn’t that all that matters? Why should I do anything else? Why should I be ambitious for anything if the ultimate thing has already been given to me?
Saved to Walk
The story of Operation Halyard sheds light on an important spiritual reality. To be rescued from something sets us on the path toward something.
For the airmen it was a journey of survival. For us it’s a journey of faith. The One who saved us is now calling us to walk. It’s nonnegotiable. Though snatched from spiritual death, we soon discover that the Christian life isn’t an arrival—it’s an adventure. We experience a rescue, then we’re pointed to a path.
The apostle Paul describes this active view of the Christian life in his letter to the Ephesians, urging them to “walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called” (4:1). This is a brief command, and it’s easy to rush past it. But this isn’t a toss-off request. It’s the center of Paul’s letter, the bridge between truth and life, and it’s crucial for us to understand what Paul is saying.
To this point, Paul has spent three chapters of this epistle exulting in what Christ has accomplished for us. The list is stunning:
• We were chosen in Christ (1:4).
• We were predestined for adoption (1:5).
• We’ve been given an inheritance (1:11).
• We were raised up with Christ (2:6).
• We’re reconciled to God (2:16).
• We’re blessed with unsearchable riches in Christ (3:8).
And that’s just for starters. If you’re digging for spiritual treasure, Ephesians 1–3 is a gospel mother lode.
In the final three chapters of Ephesians, Paul looks at the practical implications of what he has said in chapters 1–3—what effect this redemption has on our actions, our words, and our relationships.
In Ephesians 4:1, Paul is building the bridge between doctrine and duty, principle and practice, creed and command. That stunning salvation we’ve received? We’re to live in a way that’s appropriate to it. “Walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called.”
Bridges aren’t for standing; they’re for getting somewhere. And here, on the bridge between the first and second half of Ephesians, we’re called to stoke up our ambitions and put on our walking shoes.
Paul is saying, “Synchronize your walk with what Christ has accomplished. Since you’re declared righteous, now walk righteous. Since you’re declared holy, purify your ambitions and actions.” B. B. Warfield describes this as Paul’s “ringing appeal . . . to live up to [our] privileges.”1 Become in faith what God has declared you to be in Christ.
Eight Cows and a Worthy Call
Ever heard of Johnny Lingo? He was a character in a short piece of fiction written by Patricia McGerr in 1965. Johnny was Polynesian and one of the sharpest traders in the South Pacific islands. Strong, bright, and rich, he was a leader among the people on the island of Nurabandi.
On the adjacent island of Kiniwata, there lived a woman named Sarita. She was no looker—plain, skinny, and in desperate need of some Mary Kay products. She walked the village with a fretful disposition, shoulders sloping downward as if she carried some unseen burden. But for reasons known only to poets and prophets, Johnny loved Sarita and wanted her as his wife.
It was customary among the people of these islands for a man to buy his wife from her father—sort of a reverse dowry. Two or three cows would secure an average wife. Adding another cow would get you an upgrade; two more would buy a head-turning beauty and some Ginsu knives.
In a transaction shocking the islanders, Johnny shelled out eight cows for Sarita. Why pay quadruple the going rate for Sarita? Simple. Johnny wanted her to know that in his eyes she was worth more than any other woman. It was a statement from him of her value. To Johnny, she was an eight-cow wife.
Word of this unprecedented bride price spread far and wide. But that’s not the end of the story.
One day a visitor came who had heard the story of Johnny’s marriage and wanted to see the bride for herself. When she did, she couldn’t believe her eyes. Sarita “was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen,” the woman reflected. “The lift of her shoulders, the tilt of her chin, the sparkle of her eyes all spelled a pride to which no one could deny her the right.”
Sarita became what Johnny declared her to be: an eight-cow wife. She was walking worthy of her call.
We’re called to become what God
has declared us to be.
Like Sarita, we’re called to become what God has declared us to be. Like the stranded airmen in Yugoslavia, we’re rescued to start walking. God saved us, adopted us, forgave us, declared us righteous in his sight, and altered our desires so they bend toward him. Then he says to us, “Now become what I have declared you to be.”
John Murray puts it well:
To say to a slave who has not been emancipated, “Do not behave as a slave” is to mock his enslavement. But to say the same to the slave who has been set free is the necessary appeal to put into effect the privileges and rights of his liberation.2
Paul begins to explain what walking worthy looks like in the next two verses: “. . . with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph. 4:2–3).
We’re now called by God to walk consistent with the mindboggling privileges we enjoy in Christ. Like seasoning in a delicious meal, the knowledge of our redemption permeates our soul and seasons our life with the character of Christ. This is the one thing most worth perceiving, prizing, and pursuing—an ambition essential to our joy, fruitfulness, and endurance in this life.
If God has given us so much, then called us to walk worthy of it, there must be something glorious out there for us. He must have some agenda at work.
God’s Agenda for Our Ambition
If you’re anything like me, when you think about your calling as a Christian, your thoughts probably go to What am I going to do for God? Jake feels called to serve the poor; Maggie’s called to nursing; Leroy’s called to the mission field; Juanita’s called to raise her children, sometimes even her husband. We often view activity and calling as synonymous.
God’s glorious agenda for our ambition
begins with who we are.
But here’s a truth we don’t always think about: God’s glorious agenda for our ambition, like his glorious gospel, begins not with what we achieve but with who we are.
Walking in a manner worthy of the calling to which we’ve been called means I have a new ambition. Instead of gunning for my own glory or comfort, I’m ambitious for a changed life.
This can be hard to wrap our brains around because we tend to evaluate who we are by what we achieve. That’s the trap the rich young ruler fell into when he asked Jesus, “What must I do to be saved?” and got his heart put on display in response. It’s the thing Peter kept stumbling over in his often comical attempts to prove himself to Jesus. It’s what I do when I find myself totaling my good deeds done for the day as steps closer to God. But Jesus wasn’t impressed with the rich young ruler or with Peter—nor is he all that impressed with me.
The worthy walk commanded in Ephesians 4 is unlike any other trip. This journey works from the inside out. It starts with who we are, then moves to what we do.
That’s why Paul begins with qualities like humility, gentleness, patience, and bearing with one another in love (4:2). This is how Christ lived and loved. As his disciples, we follow after him. We walk as he walked. “Whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked” (1 John 2:6). This is “the calling to which [we’ve] been called” (Eph. 4:1).
Make no mistake: ambition for godly change does lead us to do things. Future dreams are obtained through ambition for present growth. The goal of Paul’s exhortation is to arouse our ambition to apply the gospel to our own lives. Note some other areas Paul brings up in the remainder of Ephesians 4: peace, doctrine, purity, honest labor, holy speech, forgiveness. To experience our best future, we must apply those today. We must take action that accords with the gospel.
In the Pittsburgh neighborhood where I grew up, everyone was a Steelers fan. In fact, if you didn’t like the Steelers, you had no business being in Pittsburgh. There were games where the temperature was below zero and the stadium was still sold out. (I didn’t say we were bright, just devoted.) But as kids we had few, if any, opportunities to get to the stadium to see the games live. So each Sunday, robed in the sacred black and gold, we would mount our sofas, snacks in hand, and position ourselves to “experience” the game on TV.
Through a mysterious process only armchair athletes can truly understand, we began a symbiotic meld with the players and vicariously participated in the gridiron struggle for yardage. Their first downs became our triumphs, their fumbles our failures. A touchdown prompted high fives and other raw forms of masculine exchange, as if we’d personally pounded the ball across the goal line. We gave 110 percent, but all from the cozy confines of the recliner.
You know, the athlete and the fan share some remarkable similarities:
1. They both breathe.
2. They’re both human.
3. They both breathe.
Okay, so fans and players are remarkably different. Fans sit back in the recliner and enjoy the players’ performance. Their vantage point is for the most part through the electronic window of the TV, protected from the elements, the chaos, and certainly the pain of the game. With ready access to multiple angles, instant replay, slow motion, stop-action, and real-time play-by-play analysis by trained commentators, fans don’t just watch the game—they “experience” it (as HDTV salesmen are eager to tell us). But their perspective is only theoretical. No matter how big the flat-screen TV, fans aren’t really playing the game.
Players, by contrast, experience an entirely different day. Being on the field is an immersion in chaos and pain. The players’ roles and responsibilities have direct bearing on what happens in each play. A player can’t simply hit the fridge or channel surf during timeouts. Unlike the fans, the players’ world is one of decision, action, and exertion. Everything they do matters. Their vantage point is a field of activity where they apply what they know.
Football players don’t ask fans to join their huddle. Fans live vicariously; players live experientially. Same game, world of difference.
Christians are not fans.
We’re called to get off the recliner and to go
make a difference in the game.
On the playing field of the real world, we’re called to get off the recliner and to go make a difference in the game. When Paul tells us to walk in a manner worthy of our calling, he’s grabbing spiritual fans out of their cozy den and putting them on the field of play. He’s saying, “Get in the game!”
Thankfully, the gospel gives us all we need to play well; ultimately, not even the outcome is in doubt. But it’s not about watching, it’s about doing. And the doing of the worthy walk isn’t easy. Doing humility is hard—just try responding graciously to a big hit of criticism. Think purity looks good in the playbook? Try running it into the teeth of a blitz of sensual imagery. Committed to the ground game of truthtelling? What if it isn’t getting you anywhere? Eager for unity? What will we do when opposition is stacked up against us at the line of scrimmage?
Ambition begins with knowing who we are in Christ and what we’re given because of that fact. But it trains itself for the game of life according to the agenda God sets for us. He shapes our ambition for the role he wants us to play in his plan.
God’s calling makes me ambitious for a changed heart and a changed life.
How God Shapes our Ambition
God makes our forward momentum his business. That’s why so much of Scripture is dedicated to getting us walking, keeping us moving, and ensuring that we finish our course. But if God truly desires our forward momentum, why does it sometimes feel like I’m banging my glass head against a stone wall? My longings for impact are confusing and fragile; I just don’t know what I should do. Or maybe I’m not the ambitious type. I hunger for nothing more than a good magazine and a peaceful place to read it.
God has an agenda: it’s to change us into the image of his Son. And one way he brings about this change is through our dreams and ambitions. God works in us through that to which we aspire.
Sometimes God brings our dreams to life; sometimes he doesn’t. But how we respond to his work becomes an important intersection for change in our lives. As we cooperate with him, we discover that it’s not ultimately about nailing the promotion, or raising well-behaved kids, or winning the Daytona 500—as good as all those things may be. It’s about something much bigger: how I become like Christ while I pursue those dreams.
Do you understand your relationship with God that way? He doesn’t need us to get things done, but he delights to use us, so he must shape us for his service. That’s exactly what creates godly ambition—the activity of God in us and around us to ultimately work through us.
Let’s look at three important ways he shapes us by dealing with our ambitions.
AMBITION DELAYED
To be alive is to have delayed ambitions. Times when God’s to-do list says, “Postpone Dave’s dream . . . indefinitely!” Maybe it’s graduation, a job, a better job, health, marriage, a promotion, ministry opportunities—a delay in one or more of those areas is an experience common to all.
And it’s nothing new. Take a number and stand behind a long list of biblical characters waiting while walking. Abram and Sarai are promised a child of their own but must wait twenty-five years for Isaac’s arrival. David is anointed the next king, but he must wait more than a decade while he runs for his life and lives in a cave. Paul is called to evangelize the Gentiles, but not before he punches the clock for fourteen years in the wilderness. It’s God’s way of doing things. Delaying the fulfillment of our dreams seems to be part of refining and rescuing ambition.
How we live when ambitions are delayed
significantly shapes who we become.
How we live when ambitions are delayed significantly shapes who we become. God uses the wait to teach us to walk in a manner worthy of our calling.
Wait isn’t a popular word. We like it about as much as a toddler does. But waiting is a tool God often uses. Scripture is full of waiting— we’re taught to wait for God to act (Ps. 25:3; 27:14; 37:7; 130:5; Isa. 49:23; Hos. 12:6), to wait for our adoptions as sons (Rom. 8:23), to wait for the return of the Lord and his righteousness (1 Cor. 1:7; Gal. 5:5; Titus 2:13). We’re to wait in faith, knowing that Isaiah’s words are true: “From of old no one has heard or perceived by the ear, no eye has seen a God besides you, who acts for those who wait for him” (Isa. 64:4).
Waiting is God’s backhoe in the excavation of our ambitions. Waiting unearths and brings to the surface what we really want.
Yet waiting is a strange thing. God’s purposes are not a bus stop where we just sit, waiting for the right option to come by. No, we keep walking while we wait, and we wait while we walk. This may sound ironic, but it serves many purposes.
Waiting purifies our ambitions. We may be tempted to think that if our ambitions are delayed, they will fade. This isn’t true of authentic godly ambition.
Reach your hand into a river and grab a handful of rocks. You can tell the ones that have been recently deposited and those that have been there for a long time, waiting. The new arrivals are rough with edges and sharp points. The other rocks are smooth; time and water have worn away their rough exterior, revealing a polished, beautiful stone.
For us, waiting has the same effect. God purifies our ambitions by delaying their fulfillment. An ambition with a waiting sign is an ambition being smoothed in a riverbed of God’s activity. The rough edges—the selfishness in our ambitions—become smooth. The ambition is purified. The dull exterior starts to shine.
Waiting cultivates patience. If you’re like me, you believe patience is a virtue; you just don’t want to wait for it. All right, I’m impatient. Impatience tries to act spiritual when it says, “Lord, I want your will for my life, and I want it now! Later won’t do.” Impatience deletes God’s schedule and replaces it with our own. It perverts ambition into demands. But God has a rescue plan for us. It’s called waiting.
Two centuries ago the young English pastor Charles Simeon aspired to shepherd God’s people. He was eventually appointed to the pulpit at Trinity Church in Cambridge. He was delighted, but the people were disgusted. Most of the members opposed his evangelical convictions and were intent on frustrating his ministry. For twelve years their opposition was expressed in a most unusual manner. They actually boycotted the Sunday service and locked the pews so no one else could sit in them. Folks coming to church had to sit in the aisles. During all that time, Simeon preached, pastored, and waited.
How does someone endure that kind of irrational opposition for twelve years?
In this state of things I saw no remedy but faith and patience. . . . It was painful indeed to see the church, with the exception of the aisles, almost forsaken; but I thought that if God would only give a double blessing to the congregation that did attend, there would on the whole be as much good done as if the congregation were doubled and the blessing limited to only half the amount. This comforted me many, many times, when without such a reflection, I should have sunk under my burden.3
Faith and patience prevailed. Charles Simeon eventually saw his pews emancipated and his pastorate at that church blessed for forty-four more years. As Simeon recounted the precious passages that sustained him during those earlier twelve years, he often quoted Lamentations 3:25, “The LORD is good to those who wait for him.”
Perhaps in reading this you’re becoming aware of impatience toward God and his timing in your life. But is God’s timing not perfect? Are his ways not perfect? Is his will not perfect? Is his character not perfect? And hasn’t all this perfection been displayed for us in the cross? Who are we to question God in impatience when he has so perfectly displayed his love for us in the shedding of his Son’s blood on the cross?
Waiting redefines our definition of productivity. We live in a world where time is money, so speed is essential. We define our success by how “productive” we are, and productivity is wrapped up in activity. We develop daily lists that would take months to accomplish and strive to achieve what no man or woman ever could. We lay our heads on our pillows at night, discouraged about our failure and driven to try harder tomorrow.
Waiting is often God’s reorientation program
aimed at our definition of success.
God defines productivity differently. For God, productivity is wrapped up in transformation, in who we’re becoming, not in what we’re accomplishing.
Waiting is often God’s reorientation program aimed at our definition of success. He lovingly empties our misguided preoccupation with accomplishment and fills it with ambitions to know him and be like him. God isn’t beyond slowing our walk to remind us that only he is omnipotent, and we’re not; only he is omnicompetent, and we’re not; only he exists without need for rest, and we don’t.
Airports are modern conveniences that God uses to help me learn patience. Here’s the drill. When entering an airport, we enter a world where flight schedules are contingent upon hundreds, even thousands, of variables outside the airlines’ control. An engine malfunction shuts down one flight or one gate, which subsequently stalls the schedules of thousands of people. And there’s nothing you or I can do about it. We can whine, rant, or throw a tantrum about needing to be there right now! But the only way to influence when a plane lands is with a heart attack or a bomb threat—neither of which will solve your particular “now” problem. Add to this your early airport arrival to make the flight and the wait for connecting flights, and you quickly realize that learning patience is your only link to sanity.
Waiting takes our definition of productivity to school. It tutors us to connect our agenda not to personal achievement but to God’s glory. Then we can bear God’s fruit, satisfied that his list is accomplished during our day, even when ours is not. “By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples” (John 15:8).
Let me encourage you: if people describe you as a workaholic, if people seem like an interruption to goals, if you’ve been temporarily sidelined by illness or downsizing, or if you have difficulty resting, then cultivate the ambition to study “waiting” and “rest” in Scripture. It will help you “bear much fruit.”
AMBITION DEVELOPED
God loves good ambition. It brings him glory as he works through our desires to fulfill his purpose. God doesn’t need us, but amazingly he uses us. But to position us for fruitfulness, he’s continually working in our lives, turning our desires toward his ends and developing our ambitions in accordance with his will. In the process we become what God has declared us to be in Christ.
Much of the rest of this book will deal with how we cooperate with God’s ambition development project in our lives. But let me give you a picture of what it can look like through the experience of my friend David Sacks.
A good ambition becomes a selfish ambition
when it’s our only ambition. It’s called idolatry.
David is a member of our church. He’s an artist who enjoys dabbling in many genres but finds his niche in photography. David didn’t know that a good ambition becomes a selfish ambition when it’s our only ambition. In the Bible that’s called idolatry.
Sometimes God must first save us from our ambitions in order to redeem them. To develop our ambition, God first converts it. That was true for David, who describes it this way:
Before conversion, photography functionally controlled me. I moved to New York City to pursue photography and really devoted myself to that; I spent almost every waking moment investing in my photography career. But my life seemed so aimless. My ambitions and goals were wrapped up in achieving success in photography at any cost. I was working many hours every week to make that happen. But as I look back, I remember that season as incredibly hopeless. My identity and sense of worth was all wrapped up in being a successful photographer . . . it was like photography was a god to me. I was obsessed with myself. My only ambition was to make a lot of money and work with a lot of creative, powerful people.
God rescued David and began the work of revolutionizing his value system. Through prayer, the study and preaching of God’s Word, and involvement in a local church, David began to change the way he looked at his aspirations. He saw his ambition for art as the idolatrous pursuit that it had become. His drive to succeed didn’t disappear. Instead, how he defined success changed. God rewired him for a different kind of glory. David never dreamed there could be so much satisfaction from actually having your greatest ambition undermined.
“I once heard someone say,” David recalls, “that when you become a Christian you probably won’t be as good at something as you could be, because you’re going to spend less time doing it. From one perspective, there’s truth to that—and it’s for our good. I have a wife and three kids—I want to live according to God’s will for my life. And I learned that wrapping my ambitions around God’s goals was the only way to achieve success as a husband, father, artist, and Christian.”
David discovered the joy of using his gifts not simply as a vocation but also to serve God’s people. In addition to his private studio, David now uses his craft to raise money for orphans in Africa while occasionally providing shoots for different ministry causes he supports. Cultivating that ambition has only deepened his delight in the use of his gifts.
“Part of recognizing that the gift is from God is finding ways to use it for God,” David says.
There’s joy in that. That’s why I love to offer my gift freely at times. Part of the human condition is a continual desire for meaning in life and work. Some of the work I do commercially is lucrative, but doesn’t have a lot of inherent meaning in it; it’s not enriching people’s lives. Doing cover work for Christian publications, or going to Africa or Afghanistan or Ukraine to do photo shoots for ministries, is very much about honoring God’s teaching about being a good servant and being a good manager of the talents. That’s when we find real meaning.
Do you see what happened to David’s ambition? God didn’t judge him in his idolatry; he rescued him from it. What amazing love! And God didn’t take David’s career ambition away; he converted it and developed it. Along the way God used his aspirations to change him. David’s dreams developed along lines that gave him joy without causing him to sacrifice those things that really mattered in his life.
God’s ambition development projects always produce results for our good and his glory.
AMBITION DENIED
The Harvard Business Review called it “middlescence.” It’s the growing phenomenon among middle-aged workers to be “burned out, bottlenecked and bored.”4 But it’s more than that. It’s men and women realizing they’ll never achieve certain dreams. The manager beginning to realize he’ll never be an executive, the technician who feels her sacrifices for work were fruitless, the artist confronting the limitations of gifting, the worker bored stiff while confronting the probability that “this is all there is.” “Like adolescence,” the Harvard Business Review sums it up, “middlescence can be a time of frustration, confusion and alienation.”5
For David Sacks, walking worthy of his calling as a Christian coincided with success in his other ambitions as well. But sometimes God’s agenda for change involves losing our dreams.
For many it goes beyond vocation. The fifty-something single woman concludes she’ll probably never marry. The man approaching retirement realizes he doesn’t have enough money to retire. Our spouse doesn’t change; the marriage is stalled and aimless. We’re drifting like a car with no brakes or steering wheel. The kids seem stuck and require too much work. The house or neighborhood or church or social network or—you fill in the blank—no longer satisfies. “We don’t realize how influential our dreams are until mid-life,” Paul Tripp says. “All of a sudden, we feel cheated, conned, and stuck. What satisfied us before doesn’t do it anymore.”6
But it’s more than just dissatisfaction. It’s the death of certain ambitions. It’s the burial of our dream.
God uses our lost dreams to achieve his
ambition for us.
It’s a fact of life that ambitions get denied. In many cases, some of our long-term dreams are just that—dreams. No one gets all he ever wanted or accomplishes all she set out to do. Our ambitions are strained through the limits of opportunity, of time, of resources, of our own physical capabilities.
It’s also a fact of the gospel that denied ambitions are part of God’s sovereign plan to direct our lives toward his appointed ends. God uses lost dreams to achieve his ambition for us—that we walk in a manner worthy of our calling.
That’s the power that emanates from that great memory verse, Romans 8:28: “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” The denial of ambitions isn’t ultimately a penalty or punishment. It’s the gracious work of a loving God defining the path for our walk. He installs fences along the way to keep us moving in his direction. And this expression of God’s love isn’t limited to midlife.
When ambitions are denied, God’s sovereignty is the first thing to go on our internal witness stand. It’s not that we change our theology. It’s that our theology isn’t connected to our unfulfilled desire. We lose sight of God’s omniscience and omnipotence. We fail to connect our circumstances with God’s goodness. Making that connection can be the difference between delight and disillusionment.
As a college graduate with a criminology degree and police certification, my dream was to get on the local police force. But jobs were scarce and openings rare. We could’ve moved, but we were in a great church. After several years of shift work as a security guard at the local hospital, I got my shot. Dozens applied, but it came down to me and three other candidates. I knew God was with me, and the door was finally opening. This moment seemed custom-made and hand-delivered for the satisfaction of that dream.
I didn’t get the job.
In fact, I never did get a police job. But within a year I relocated to Philadelphia, and a year later, I was in ministry. That was twenty-four years ago. Police work was my dream, and I thought it was God’s plan for me. I was ambitious for a good thing, but he had something better planned. God stepped in and fenced in my dream, and I found my call.
God loves us so much he’ll intentionally fence us in to keep us on his road. That can be hard, I know. It’s never easy to stare at a fence suddenly blocking the path we want to take. But God fences our road to keep us moving in his direction.
Maybe you’re wondering how you got here—unemployed, disabled, unhappily married, an unexpected child, a frustrating job. You never thought your road would go in this direction. You’ve made every attempt, prayed every prayer, read every book—but nothing ever changes.
We find no peace in life until we’re convinced our path is his way and our place is his choice. That’s so important it’s worth repeating: your place is his choice. Fences and all.
When God is fencing our ambition, it can sure seem to constrain our freedom. But fences don’t simply contain, they protect. A good fence keeps us on the right path and prevents us from hurtling over cliffs, even if it seems we’re chasing something good.
Remember, God’s agenda for our ambition is about shaping us to use us. God isn’t beyond denying certain ambitions to achieve a greater good in us and through us.
It All Leads to Delight
God created ambition because it has the potential to glorify him and delight us.
Ambition is so important that God undertakes a lifelong project in us, forming the ambitions that exalt him and enthuse us. As God moves to the center of our dreams, our desires conform to his glory. God then grants desires because he knows they will magnify his name, not ours. Psalm 37:4 says, “Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart.”
As we cooperate with God’s work, what delights us is no longer indulged ambition, or even ambitions for God, but God himself.
So let me ask you: What lies at the end of your ambition? Are your goals built around that job you’ve got to have, the weight you’ve got to lose, that position in the church with your name on it?
Or are your dreams increasingly built around God and his lifeshaping activity in you?
David Sacks wonderfully describes the cumulative impact on life when ambitions are trained by God:
Every day I’m able to take a picture, it’s only because God has enabled me to do that. God has created my senses to see beauty and appreciate it. He’s created everything I’ve ever photographed. I’m now more open to explore the things that God puts in front of my camera and in my imagination.
I think God wants me to have ambition to be a good photographer. But that’s not his primary purpose for me. God wants me to have ambition to be a person who lives for Him in everything.