Personal Ambition Hinders Christian Life and Ministry # 2 (and others)

Personal Ambition Hinders Christian Life and Ministry # 2 (and others)

Is the desire for ecclesiastical advancement, ambition? If not, what is it? We may say it is a laudable ambition! Can a qualifying word change the evil nature of this dark and fallen angel? Does an angelic garb make satan into a holy angel? We may say we want a more honorable place - to do more honorable and larger service for Christ. Is not this satan clothing himself as an angle of light? The honor of service for God, depends only on the spirit in which it is done, and that spirit is one in which self, pride and ambition are crucified! SELF  in us, looks to the future to personal greatness and honor. Christ in us, looks to the present to fidelity and zeal for the work at hand, and has no eye for self and future.

Can the preacher preach without faith? If he preaches with personal ambition, he is preaching without love, for ambition and love have neither union nor concord.

Can a preacher preach without humility? If he preaches with personal ambition, he is preaching without humility, for ambition is the very essence of pride!

Can a preacher preach without consecration? If he preaches with personal ambition he must, for ambition is a thing to be crucified and not consecrated. Ambition must be daily crucified - because it never can be consecrated.

Personal ambition changes the whole nature of ministry, and floods it with worldliness. Instead of the ministry being an institution where the highest Christian graces are to be produced and the loftiest virtues exhibited - personal ambition transforms it into a ministry where SELF is the mainspring, and every grace is blighted!

With personal ambition in the preacher - the church is no longer an institution to save men; but it is changed into an institution to confer honor on the preacher. And all its holy places are then polluted by the grasping, self hand of ambition, or they are trodden by its unhallowed feet!

~E. M. Bounds~

(The End)
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The Sword of His Pure, Infinite and Incensed Wrath!

"Yet it was the Lord's will to crush Him and cause Him to suffer" (Isaiah 53:10).

To see God thrust the sword of His pure, infinite and incensed wrath through the very heart of His dearest Son, notwithstanding all His supplications, prayers, tears, and strong cries - is the highest manifestation of the Lord's hatred and indignation of sin - which ever was, or ever will be!

It is true, God revealed His great hatred against sin by casting the angels down to hell, by turning Adam out of paradise, by drowning the old world, and by raining hell out of heaven upon Sodom and Gomorrah, and by the various and dreadful judgments which He has been pouring forth upon the world in all ages. But all this hatred which God manifested against sin, is causing the whole curse to meet upon our crucified Lord! 

It is true that God reveals His hatred of sin by those endless, easeless, and remediless torments, which He inflicts upon devils and damned men. But this is no hatred compared to that hatred against sin, which God revealed when He opened all the floodgates of His envenomed wrath upon His Son - His own Son, His only Son, His Son who always pleased Him!

Suppose there was a father who had but one son - and he was such a son in whom he always delighted, and by whom he had never been provoked. Now suppose you should see this father inflicting the most intensified pains and punishments, tortures and torment, calamities and miseries upon this, his dearest son. Would you not wonder at the cause of the father's exercising such amazing, such matchless severity, fury and cruelty upon his only beloved son?

Now cast your eye upon the actings of God the Father towards Jesus Christ - and you will find that he has inflicted more and greater torments upon the Son of His dearest love - than all mortals ever have or could inflict upon others. God made all the penalties and sufferings that were due to us - to fall upon Jesus Christ. God Himself inflicted upon dear Jesus, whatever was requisite to the satisfying of His justice, to the obtaining of pardon, and to the saving of all His elect!

"He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon Him, and by His wounds we are healed" (Isaiah 53:5).

~Thomas Brooks~