Title: God-Honoring Ambition
Text: Chapter 2:11-20
God-honoring ambition leads to a life of purpose.
Nehemiah 2:11-20 11 So I came to Jerusalem and was there three days. 12 And I arose in the night, I and a few men with me. I did not tell anyone what my God was putting into my mind to do for Jerusalem and there was no animal with me except the animal on which I was riding. 13 So I went out at night by the Valley Gate in the direction of the Dragon’s Well and on to the Refuse Gate, inspecting the walls of Jerusalem which were broken down and its gates which were consumed by fire. 14 Then I passed on to the Fountain Gate and the King’s Pool, but there was no place for my mount to pass. 15 So I went up at night by the ravine and inspected the wall. Then I entered the Valley Gate again and returned. 16 The officials did not know where I had gone or what I had done; nor had I as yet told the Jews, the priests, the nobles, the officials or the rest who did the work. 17 Then I said to them, "You see the bad situation we are in, that Jerusalem is desolate and its gates burned by fire. Come, let us rebuild the wall of Jerusalem so that we will no longer be a reproach." 18 I told them how the hand of my God had been favorable to me and also about the king’s words which he had spoken to me. Then they said, "Let us arise and build." So they put their hands to the good work. 19 But when Sanballat the Horonite and Tobiah the Ammonite official, and Geshem the Arab heard it, they mocked us and despised us and said, "What is this thing you are doing? Are you rebelling against the king?" 20 So I answered them and said to them, "The God of heaven will give us success; therefore we His servants will arise and build, but you have no portion, right or memorial in Jerusalem."
God-Honoring Ambition Requires You To…
I. Listen to the call of God
II. Assess your situation
III. Be patient
IV. Cast your vision
V. Proceed with confidence
Nehemiah is my hero. He’s always been one of my favorite biblical characters for a lot of reasons. We’ve already talked about a few of those reasons. First of all I love Nehemiah because he is so totally and completely connected to God. He lived his life with God close to him every step of the way.
Second, Nehemiah is a stud because he was a man of great faith. Like we saw last week; Nehemiah’s faith wasn’t a weak, idle, namby-pamby faith. No, it was faith in action.
Probably my favorite character trait of Nehemiah is the he is very clearly a man of great ambition. He was a guy who possessed great ambition to do great things for God and for others.
That’s the kind of man I want to be. I’ve always had an extra measure of ambition. I like tackling new things and trying new adventures. I like to set my goals high and then go out there and work to achieve them. I know a lot of you out there are like that too.
On the flip side of that, I’ve known people who seem to have a total lack of ambition. Life just happens to them. They don’t know what they want to be when they grow up, they float from one thing to the next. They always seem to be unsure, insecure, and often even unhappy.
Ambition can be defined in a couple of ways. In one sense it is a hope or a dream. It is an aspiration to something higher. It is also a goal or a purpose. Ambition gives us direction and drive to accomplish things.
Ambition mixed with a firm reliance on God can be a great thing. However, ambition without that connection to God can turn into a selfish, greedy, ugly thing. There is no doubt that blind ambition has driven people to do some lousy things in pursuit of their selfish dreams. Just like anything in life, we humans have an amazing ability to take something that is good and turn it into something bad.
But I believe that as followers of Jesus Christ there is a measure of God-honoring ambition that we all need to posses.
Today I want to talk about what God-honoring ambition looks like. Nehemiah is very clearly a man who exemplifies God-honoring ambition. And as we continue to read through this book we will see how that ambition drove him to accomplish some great things for God.
Just by way of a quick review for those of you who weren’t here last week… In chapter 1 of Nehemiah he hears this report about how the Jews, who have returned to Jerusalem after years in captivity, have returned to a city that is in ruins. The walls are still broken down, the gates have been burned. They are vulnerable to attack and totally humiliated.
Nehemiah takes that news and immediately goes to God in prayer. He asks God to intervene and help those people. Then Nehemiah approaches the king and asks for permission to go back to the city of his ancestors and help them rebuild the wall.
God’s hand is on Nehemiah and the king agrees. So Nehemiah, armed with letters from the king and a clear mission, heads out for Jerusalem. Here in the second part of chapter 2 we see exactly what he does when he gets there. Follow along as I read 2:11-20…
If you watch much religious TV you’ve probably seen this trend out there with some TV evangelists who focus a great deal of their time on talking about self-help, self-actualization, feel-good stuff. You have Joel Osteen teaching about how to have your best life now! And Guys like Schuler at the Crystal Cathedral who preach that self-esteem is the most important virtue.
These guys are almost like motivational speakers, encouraging you to go out there and grab for all the gusto you can. That raise, that new car, that relationship, that shinny brass ring are all yours for the taken in the name of Jesus. In reality it is just a slightly mutated form of the same old health and wealth gospel that’s been around for years.
The message is that you deserve whatever it is you want. All you have to have is faith. But not a faith in God, a faith in yourself. You’re good enough and you’re smart enough and dog gonit people like you.
It’s not hard to see why these guys are popular. They never talk about sin, never convict, they always tell you what you want to hear. Who doesn’t like to have their ears tickled?
The problem with these false messengers is that they breed selfish ambition. They breed people who are only concerned with satisfying their own desires. They make people falsely believe that God is this cosmic genie who exists to grant all our wishes.
I watched a 15 minute interview on 60 minutes with Joel Osteen and never once did he even mention Jesus. But he talked a lot about how much God wants to give you stuff.
Let me be clear here, God doesn’t exist to serve us, we exist to serve God. Our meaning and purpose are found in what we do for God, not in meaningless, temporary stuff that we acquire.
True happiness and fulfillment in this life doesn’t come from demanding that God listen and obey us- in the name of Jesus- it comes when we listen and obey God. The first step to acquiring God-honoring ambition involves listening to the call of God.
We’ve already seen examples of how Nehemiah listened to the call of God. Here in this passage he says, “I did not tell anyone what my God was putting into my mind to do for Jerusalem…”
Nehemiah was a man who clearly had a good measure of ambition. He had achieved one of the highest offices in the land. He had power, and wealth, and comfort. If God’s job is just to make us healthy, wealthy, and worry-free, then Nehemiah had arrived. He was there.
But Nehemiah clearly understood that he existed to serve God. His high position was something to be used to glorify God. He was even willing to jeopardize it all for God.
When God called Nehemiah to go and rebuild that wall, Nehemiah heard the call and responded. He was able to hear God’s call because of that close connection he had to God. Nehemiah’s ambition sprang from a clear understanding of what God wanted him to do. And he knew that with God on his side he couldn’t fail.
Have you heard the voice of God? Have you been called by God? Ephesians 2:10 says that “we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” If that is true, than God is speaking to all of us. He is calling each and every one of us who is a believer in Jesus Christ.
The problem is all too often we can’t hear Him because we aren’t listening. Selfish ambition gets in the way. Life gets in the way. We never stop and take time to really listen. That’s why those mountaintop retreats are so effective. Because they give us a chance to stop and listen. The background noise of our daily life can be turned down and we can really start to think about what God wants from us and how we can live for Him.
I guarantee you that God is putting something into your heart and mind, just like He did with Nehemiah. Are you listening?
God-honoring ambition comes from God.
Second, God-honoring ambition involves assessing your situation. Nehemiah sneaks out at night and inspects the walls for himself. Before he shares his plans with the people he gets of firm handle of the scope of the project. He learns from himself what it will take.
We’ve already seen from the first part of chapter 2 that Nehemiah is not someone who just leaps blindly into something. He is a planner. He doesn’t want anyone accusing him of being naive or uninformed. He needs to have a realistic assessment of the situation.
What does that mean for you and me? How does assessing you situation help you to have God-honoring ambition? What steps do you need to take to get a handle on where to go next?
First of all, start by evaluating your relationship with God. Do you need to rebuild your prayer life or you devotional time, or your commitment to Him?
Second, it’s good to evaluate your gifting. We just had a class on spiritual gifts. It’s helpful from time to time to evaluate what Gifts God has given you. If you can narrow in on that a little, it will make it so much easier to determine where God is calling you to serve.
It’s also helpful to evaluate your resources. What has God given you? What’s your financial situation? What kind of talents do you have? What kind of time commitments are you willing to make? Most importantly, how do you view those things?
Do you see them as gifts from God to be used for His glory? Or your stuff that no one can touch?
Most important, take inventory of what is truly important to you. What are you passionate about? What moves you? What causes you to stretch and grow? What kinds of things are you naturally interested in and ambitious about? Write them down. Make a list. Map things out.
God-honoring ambition will also often require you to be patient. This is a tough one for me. I often want to run ahead of God and sometimes have to be reminded that my timeline isn’t always His timeline.
There is a time to move and a time to wait. God-honoring ambition will understand when it’s time to wait and when it’s time to act.
We saw this truth last week in the first part of chapter 2. Nehemiah waited 4 months before he approached the king with his request. He prayed and planned and waited patiently for the right time to act.
Here he doesn’t just show up in Jerusalem and say, “OK, get to work!” He assessed the situation, gathered some information, and then when the time was right he moved forward.
When it comes to ambition we tend to either be overly eager and want to rush things, or overly apathetic and tend to never get moving. There has to be a healthy balance if we are going to be God-honoring. We need to wait for His timing. We need to be ready when it is time to go for it.
When the time was right Nehemiah casts his vision. Look at verses 17-18…
I love this part. It’s just so simple. It’s just so practical. Nehemiah states the problem, shares how God had directed him, and simply says, let’s fix it! He is able to transmit his excitement and enthusiasm and ambition on to the people. As a leader, that’s an ability that I want to develop. But if the plan is from God, then people will see that, and be willing to join in the fun.
I couldn’t help but relate this to our church’s desire to build a new building. Are we following these same steps? Is this a case where my ambition is a little overzealous? Is this something that is truly God-honoring?
Have we been listening to the voice of God as we’ve been developing our plans? Clearly we have had times when we started down a particular path and God has closed doors and stopped us short. I think the fact that we haven’t tried to bully down those doors or crawl around them is a good indication that we are being sensitive to God’s leading. We all are on the same page- we want God to lead us.
Clearly we have spent a great deal of time assessing our situation. For the past two years we’ve been doing nothing but gathering information and figuring out who we are now, how we plan to grow, where the biggest needs are, and what our resources are.
I think we have been incredibly patient. We haven’t rushed into anything, even in the information gathering process. The guys on the board have been thoughtful, prayerful, and patient.
We’ve come to the point were we have cast a vision for what we need in a new building. It isn’t fancy or all that grandiose, but it is ministry centered. It might not enable us to minister to thousands of people, but it will enable us to do more ministry. We are still proceeding with caution, and allowing God to guide us, but up to this point we have seen open doors and great confirmation that God is with us.
Look at the response that Nehemiah gets, "Let us arise and build." So they put their hands to the good work”.
Now the people there could have said a lot of things at this point. They could have said, “We’ve already tried to rebuild the wall and we got shut down”. Has anyone ever heard that excuse before? You can’t succeed because the last guy to try it didn’t succeed.
Now it’s always important to learn from the past, but just because it didn’t work last time, doesn’t mean it can’t be done. It just means it wasn’t the right time or the right way.
If you have been listening to the calling of God, and have assessed the situation, and waited patiently for the hand of God to move you, don’t let others stomp out your ambition.
The people could have said, “The job is just too big, we’ll never be able to accomplish this!” That’s another common complaint.
For a Baptist church the complaint would have been, “We like it that way? There’s no need to change it. Let’s just keep things the way they are.”
In your own personal life it is just as important to cast a vision. What that means is you need to be willing to set some goals. Write out a list of goals that you want to accomplish over the next year. Map out where you want to go and how you are going to get there. Share your passion and ambitions with your friends and your family and those around you.
I know it can be kind of scary to reveal your true ambitions to people sometimes. Not everyone will understand. But don’t be afraid to move in the direction that you feel God is leading you.
Mark Twain once said…
“Keep away from those who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you believe that you too can become great.”
Let me be the first to reassure you, you too can become great. God has some great things in store for your life.
Finally, once we have cast that vision it’s time to proceed with confidence. Look at verses 19-20…
When the enemies of Israel head that work had begun to rebuild the wall they mocked them. They ask, are you rebelling against the king? The reason they asked that question is because over in the book of Ezra these guys has sent a letter to the king saying that if the people are allowed to rebuild a wall then they will stop paying taxes and cause all kinds of trouble for you. So the king put a stop to the work.
Now, many years later, the king was the one who commissioned Nehemiah to return and rebuild. Those guys couldn’t intimidate Nehemiah because he had the full support of the king. More importantly, Nehemiah knew that he had the full support of God.
They went forward with great confidence and great determination. This won’t be the last time these guys cause trouble.
One of the greatest feelings is when you know that you are walking in God’s will. When you know that you have God leading out in front. What a hugely freeing feeling that is.
I’m sure that we all have felt the opposite. When we are not walking in God’s will and we know we aren’t doing what we should be doing. It’s like we’re just waiting for the crash, because instinctively we know that it is coming.
We weren’t meant to live in fear, or to live aimlessly, or to live without meaning. We were meant to live lives full of confidence, purpose, and joy.
To sum it all up, God-honoring ambition happens when we get excited about doing the things that God has called us to do. It leads to a life of fulfillment and contentment.
Selfish ambition only leads to a life of discontentment and disappointment.
A freshman of Amherst College put over the door of his dormitory room the letter V. Because of it he endured all sorts of ridicule and withstood questioning. But he paid no attention to either, nor would he disclose the secret of the letter. When his four years were over, and graduation day came, that student was appointed to deliver the valedictory. Then the mystery of that letter V was revealed. It stood for valedictorian. That letter on the door held before him during his four years the ideal that he had set for himself.
Psalm 37:4-5 4 Delight yourself in the LORD; And He will give you the desires of your heart. 5 Commit your way to the LORD, Trust also in Him, and He will do it.
