Dear Friends:

The one thing I ask of the Lord­
the thing I seek most­
is to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life,
delighting in the Lord’s perfections
and meditating in his Temple.
For he will conceal me there when troubles come;
he will hide me in his sanctuary.
He will place me out of reach on a high rock.
Then I will hold my head high
above my enemies who surround me.
At his sanctuary I will offer sacrifices with shouts of joy,
singing and praising the Lord with music.

— Psalm 27:4-6, NLT

Ambition is an ambiguous thing for most of us. If one lacks ambition it is considered a warning that they may be lazy or worse. One perceived to have too much ambition may be considered ruthless and arrogant.

The words “ambition” and “ambiguous” in fact have the same Latin root, ambi, which means “to go around.”  Ambition generally focuses on a direct route and ambiguity involves an indirect and less distinct route, perhaps camouflaging ambition.

Ambitious people may threaten us. The ambition of another may conflict with our own. In the vernacular of the Old West, “This town may not be big enough for both of us.”

The price of ambition is frequently the sacrifice of hopes, dreams and relationships that will not serve the ambition and therefore conflict with it. Think, for instance, of the effects on marriage and family life when a spouse is focused on their career to the exclusion of everything else.

The cost of lacking ambition can be frustration, heartache, and poverty of purse and spirit for those who depend on a slacker.

Ambitions can change with time and experience. I went to law school with the thought of a career in politics. A year’s work as an intern in the Office of Legislative Counsel changed that for me. My job was to draft and review legislation for state legislators and legislative committees.
Often I was requested to work with lobbyists whose special interests were being championed by particular legislators. The greed and cynicism were both eye-opening and disheartening. Good sense and the public interest were inevitably subjugated to the ambition of getting reelected for which the lobbyists’ fundraising was essential.

I was not naive about what I was dealing with. I even believe that political contributions are a legitimate exercise of freedom of speech. But from earliest memory I had been taught that my life belonged to God and was to be lived according to his will revealed in Scripture and experience guided by prayer. I embraced this teaching as my own belief after my life was spared from death in college. I could not square my understanding of life as God’s gift with the hard-bargained realities of politics.

There are men and women who are blessed with a discipline of thought and virtue who can maintain their Christian witness in elected office. I did not hear a calling to be one of them and quickly realized that my disdain of compromise and my passionate nature would make me ineffective in the long term.

Instead, law school opened up to me a vision of business structures and agreements as a method of building stable, productive communities and effective organizations, especially in the field of higher education. The engagement of my mind and the peace of my heart told me my calling was to business law and I have followed that ambition for over thirty satisfying years now.

God, however, never settles for anyone or anything on this earth “as is.” This truth is inherent in his unique role as Creator, Redeemer and Lord. Ten years into my ambitious pursuit of success as a business lawyer, I hit the wall of God’s truth.

Every bit of spiritual, intellectual, emotional and physical ability and energy I possessed was invested in my work and community leadership with some left-overs for my wife and baby son. It wasn’t enough.

That was a shock. I grew up being told at home, church and school, “Put God first, work hard, stay clean, do your best and you can do anything you put your mind to do.” I worked the formula and I came up short. My heart was empty. The light that I had was fading. My grip on the situation (there is always a situation) was weakening.

I shot off a desperate prayer or two like a flare–“God, if you will . . ., then I will . . . ,” in the delusion that I held some equity in a partnership with God.  A prayer like this is no more than building the house on the shifting sands of human ambition with God as the window dressing.

A pain broke in me like a storm-a wild hunger that rejected everything I knew for something that I didn’t. I have not put it this way before but it is an accurate description. It was a moment of defeat for me. It had to be so because control of our life cannot be shared on the very principle that God will allow us no other gods before him” (Ex 20:2).

There is a devastating cognitive dissonance between the Christian cultural ethic that success by someone who nominally claims allegiance to God signifies divine favor and the truth that any activity, no matter how well-intentioned, that is not God-initiated and God-empowered is the evil sin of ungodliness (Isa 32:5-7). The popular mantra, “just do the right thing” echoes out of fallen Eden with the presumption that we know what “the right thing” is.

God speaks out of that dissonance with a single, ambition-thwarting, priority-reordering command: “Be still and know that I am God. I will be exalted in the nations. I will be exalted on the earth!” (Ps 46:10). To heed that command is to live God’s life, in God’s time, and in God’s power with a complete relinquishment of our pride.

There is seductive temptation, however, to get our house in order first. “Do your part, and then God will do his part” has the appeal of responsibility, but it is really rebellion. Whenever we condition God’s acceptance on our performance we are attempting to command God rather than surrendering to God’s command of us. Christ has no hesitation in calling such conduct “lawless” and judging it unworthy of eternity (Mt 7:21-23).

David reached this dissonance at some point in his experience and it changed his ambition. He made his reputation as a “giant-killer” and a man of action. He was anointed by God for leadership and he was gifted with the prowess to achieve it.

David lived in dangerous times. No matter what David accomplished, he could not vanquish his troubles or eliminate his enemies. This eventually settled in on him with a world weariness. A powerful king and warrior poet is no less a debtor to grace than an obscure shepherd boy.

The one constant in his life from mountain pastures to councils of war in Jerusalem was God’s abiding presence. David had been saved many times, seemingly by his own cleverness, but he knew better. Salvation isn’t a better strategy, action, superior force, or gift. With death a constant threat, Salvation is life. David recognized that God was the sole source of that life.

David made this confession in the opening verse of Psalm 27. “The Lord is my light and my salvation. . . .”  He went on to speak of the assurance that this relationship gave to him.

Here is the question, though–the question that confronts every able and ambitious man and woman in mid-stride who considers unconditional surrender to the Lord. What happens after that? Will you be too heavenly minded to be any earthly good? Strangely, I’ve heard that question cynically put many times, but always by some of the most pious people I know seeking to preserve their religious franchise.

Twenty years ago, in the early stages of a conversion experience that continues to this day, I grappled with the practical implications of living out the two great commandments as identified by Jesus- Love the Lord your God with every faculty you possess and love your neighbor as yourself (Matt 22:36-40). If everything I had was invested in loving God, what is left over for my neighbor, beginning with my spouse and child?

After laboring over this in prayer and study, I came to the conclusion that it worked out fine because our love for God is realized in our world of human relationships. That’s why the Apostle John wrote: “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the parent loves the child. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments” (1 Jn 5:1-2).

Our calling then is to turn our complete focus on God and let all that follows flow out of him. Every aspect of our life, personal and public, needs to be entrusted to God in the honest spiritual acknowledgment that his life is our life and we have no claim otherwise (Gal 2:20).

David came to that place in his own experience and wrote out a simple but profound formula for the practical living of the surrendered life in Psalm 27.

First, David said, my unrelenting focus and singular request to the Lord needs to be to live with and through him now and always. That means instead of being distracted by my shortcomings and imperfections and involving myself in a perennial program of self-assessment and repair, I enjoy the fact that the Lord is perfect and perfect for me and I stick with him in that.

The one thing I ask of the Lord­
the thing I seek most­
is to live in the house of the Lord all the days of my life,
delighting in the Lord’s perfections
and meditating in his Temple (Ps 27:4)

Knowing that every human is fickle and prone to wander off in self-indulgence, David said that we need to ask the Lord to empower this devotion because we won’t come to it and hold it on our own. The Lord will answer that prayer. As Jesus later said, our heart will follow and reflect what we value most. If what we value most is the reign of God over our lives all other considerations of living will align in God’s order (Mt 6:21, 33).

Second, David said, when our devotion is to the Lord and living his way by his power, we are the beneficiaries of his sovereign protection against anything that may come against us.

For he will conceal me there when troubles come;
he will hide me in his sanctuary.
He will place me out of reach on a high rock (Ps 27:5).

Every action is his because he is our life. “He will conceal me. . . He will hide me . . . He will place me out of reach. . . .” We are woefully misled and distrustful if we are spending our time working out contingent plans for our spiritual and physical safety in troubles to come. Consider the three Hebrew young men who refused to worship Nebuchadnezzar because their worship was devoted to their Lord God alone. They were not consumed in the fiery furnace because they were already consumed by the life of God and there was nothing left of them to burn (Dan 3).

Here is how the Apostle Paul described this principle that the life of Christ is the complete spiritual package: “So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory” (Col 3:1-4).

So what is left for us to do when we have surrendered and yielded our destiny moment by moment to the Lord? David said, “We need to stand tall over our enemies, give the Lord his due, and sing our hearts out with joyous praise.”

Then I will hold my head high
above my enemies who surround me.
At his sanctuary I will offer sacrifices with shouts of joy,
singing and praising the Lord with music (Ps 27:6).

That is the practical Christian life in a nutshell. We make the King our business and the King takes care of our business. That’s worth shouting about.

So why do so many of us live like Lot’s wife, anxious about what we are leaving behind, and divided in our loyalties (Gen 19:26)?

“Purity of heart is to will one thing,” said Kierkegaard. There are no half measures with God. He takes everything from us and demands more, but he supplies that more.

Whatever you and I think we are capable of doing; however “good” are the intentions that rise in our hearts; what ever the worthiness of our ambitions, we are not going to make it. The one thing to do is to ask the Lord to be everything for us in living reality with nary a thought of a “Plan B.” That is the only ambition worth having.

“O taste and see that the Lord is good. Happy are those who take refuge in him” (Ps 34:8)

Under the mercy of Christ,

Kent

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Please note that the content and viewpoints of Mr. Hansen are his own and are not necessarily those of the C.S. Lewis Foundation. We have not edited his writing in any substantial way and have permission from him to post his content.

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Kent Hansen is a Christian attorney, author and speaker. He practices corporate law and is the managing attorney of the firm of Clayson, Mann, Yaeger & Hansen in Corona, California. Kent also serves as the general counsel of Loma Linda University and Medical Center in Loma Linda, California.

Finding God’s grace revealed in the ordinary experiences of life, spiritual renewal in Christ and prayer are Kent’s passions. He has written two books, Grace at 30,000 Feet and Other Unexpected Places published by Review & Herald in 2002 and Cleansing Fire, Healing Streams: Experiencing God’s Love Through Prayer, published by Pacific Press in spring 2007. Many of his stories and essays about God’s encompassing love have been published in magazines and journals. Kent is often found on the hiking trails of the southern California mountains, following major league baseball, playing the piano or writing his weekly email devotional, “A Word of Grace for Your Monday” that is read by men and women from Alaska to Zimbabwe.

Kent and his beloved Patricia are enjoying their 31st year of marriage. They are the proud parents of Andrew, a college student.