It's not bad to want to be great
Is it bad to want to be great?
I would say, no. What’s bad is making peace with mediocrity and calling it humility.
I feel the rub with you. As Christians, we don’t want to intentionally or accidentally waste our lives building our own little kingdoms. We’re concerned about our proclivity to spend our lives grasping after vain self-glory.
But I’m convinced that living for the glory of God involves a lifelong pursuit of greatness.
The importance of appreciating significance
I recently started rereading a commentary on Isaiah called Isaiah, God Saves Sinners by Ray Ortlund. The second chapter emphasizes our need for greater, clearer self-awareness because doing so deconstructs our self-glorification and leads to more God-glorification. He’s saying that if we are concerned about living lives of self-glory, it would help for us to get a clearer understanding of ourselves.
A part of me expects that, if I want to glorify God, I need a greater appreciation of how small and insignificant I am.
I’m surprised when Ortlund says the problem is that I’m not appreciating my significance. Instead of seeing that my life and my choices are weighty, I trivialize my life. If I can’t appreciate the magnitude of my life before God, then I can’t appreciate the magnitude of my sin. I can’t appreciate the magnitude of my ongoing rebellion and dismissive attitude towards God.
Owning our significance is needed for us to feel conviction over sin, and it motivates us to avoid sinful choices. Owning our significance will also help us appreciate the weight of our impact on others and our participation in the Kingdom of God coming to earth.
Made for greatness
We were made for greatness. We were made to rule, reign, cultivate, and protect.
We justify holding back
But sometimes this call to greatness scares us, and we justify staying in mediocrity with phrases like, “I don’t want it to be about me.”
But we have to be careful not to equate humility and glorifying God with shrinking back.
Maybe we get this idea from John 3:30, where John the Baptist said, “He must increase, but I must decrease.” But how did he do this? He was proactive, loud, disruptive, noticeably different, and he leveraged all of it for God’s glory, the coming Kingdom, and the good of those around him.
Cultivating potential
This past week, I heard an older, well-known preacher share about how he was physically incapable of speaking in front of people when he was a teenager due to anxiety. In school, he chose to fail projects that required public speaking. But one year in college, he was asked to pray in front of a large assembly. For some reason, he said yes.
Fast forward 50-60 years, and it’s impossible to calculate the impact of this man’s teaching on my life and the lives of so many around the world.
Fruitfulness happens when we face our fears, multiply our talents, and seek to be great in all that God has given us to do. Most of us won’t end up being famous for anything, but that’s not the point. The point is that our lives are full of potential, impact, and influence. Part of honoring God with our lives is cultivating the potential he has placed in us.
Called to greatness
Ortlund notes that Isaiah 1:2-9 is God lamenting because “It is a solemn thing to see God’s children, called to greatness, dissolving into the opposite.”
What is the opposite? The opposite is a bad kind of contentment. It’s an okayness with our lives, our days, or moments, and our choices not being that big of a deal. Instead of running after the greatness God calls us to, it’s making peace with mediocrity.
No, it’s not wrong to want to be great. In fact, we should pursue it. That’s easier said than done because living into greatness often requires us to be proactive, step forward, take a risk, and unabashedly light up dark spaces.
We glorify God when we appreciate the significance he has placed on our lives and lean into it.
What does it look like to chase after self-glory? This is what Eve did when she reached for and bit into the idea that she could become her own god. I’m looking forward to diving into that more with you in the next essay.
