It's Good To Be Ambitious
It’s good to be ambitious. Ambition is gratefully living out your calling to the best of your ability.
But sometimes ambition can sour. Then it becomes an endless grasping for things that you can never reach.
Here’s a litmus test to tell whether you are ambitious or grasping: Do you see others as objects or do you see them as people made in the image of God?
Or maybe to put it another way: Are other people secondary characters in your story or are you a secondary character in their story?
Jesus said,
“When you are invited by anyone to a wedding feast, do not sit down in the best place, lest one more honorable than you be invited by him; and he who invited you and him come and say to you, ‘Give place to this man,’ and then you begin with shame to take the lowest place. But when you are invited, go and sit down in the lowest place, so that when he who invited you comes he may say to you, ‘Friend, go up higher.’ Then you will have glory in the presence of those who sit at the table with you. For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted” (Luke 14:8-11 emphasis mine).1
Instead of seeing yourself as the most important character in the story and grasping for the highest seat, be more ambitious than that and choose the lowest seat.
Instead of viewing others as objects who are getting in your way to glory, be more ambitious than that and see them as people made in God’s image who you can bless.
But what if no ever moves you to a higher seat?
Then know that if Jesus showed up at the feast, He’d be sitting in the lowest seat with you. And that would be glorious.
What do you think?
Joseph
Fun fact: Jesus obviously enjoyed studying the Proverbs, because a very similar passage is found in Proverbs 25:6-7.