LIFE'S AMBITION

LIFE’S AMBITION

I Thess. 4:11 This should be your ambition: to live a quiet life, minding your own business and working with your hands, just as we commanded you before.  NLT

       What is your main ambition in life?  I would dare say that living a quiet life, minding your own business and working with your hands would not be on your agenda.  Most of us want to be noticed.  We want to be recognized for what we do or have become in life.  We want the affirmation and attention of others.  Many will go to great lengths to make it happen.  They will strive to be the best in whatever they do.  Their ambition is to rise above the rest.

      Living a quiet life means that we don’t get caught up in the quest to be the best at whatever we do.  We should do our best and let our best be good enough.  It is not healthy to be driven to be on the top in everything.  Personal ambition can easily distract us and keep us from being driven to live a life that is submissive to the Lord and pleasing to Him.

       Striving to excel is a good thing as long as we don’t become obsessed by it.  Without balance, one’s life is valued based on how we succeed or fail instead of our standing with God.

      Minding our own business seems to be something that is lacking in many of us.  There is that part of us that thinks we have to know the details of other people’s lives.  We want to hear the latest and often it is with the intent of finding something that makes us look better.  And some feel compelled to talk about what is none of their business in the first place. Way too much time is spent sticking our noses into other people’s business!

      We tend to work more with our mouths than we do with our hands.  We tend to want to find ways to avoid work.  Shame on us.  Work was given to man to do in the Garden of Eden.  God knows that we need to work in order to stay busy and not let Satan get the upper hand in our lives.  Idleness is fertile ground for Satan to work.  It is good for us to do the work the Lord has equipped us and given us to do.  And, it is good for us to do our work with a cheerful and thankful heart.

       We should work with thanksgiving.  We should be grateful for the health we have that enables us to work and the opportunities we have to work.  It’s a privilege that most of the world does not have.  It is a gift from God to help us become a holy people, a people after His own heart.  Idleness is breeding ground for sin.