For most birthdays, I usually have some clearly defined goals for the following year and high expectations for what I would set out to accomplish. You see, I have always been a fairly ambitious person.

I have been ambitious personally and professionally, setting high goals for personal achievement and for professional success. Growing up, I carried my keys around on a chain with the word that pretty much summed up my philosophy…excellence.

Yes, I have always been committed to doing things excellently, and that has usually translated into achievement and success. For this reason, I have usually met my goals and have always reached for my dreams.

However, something has changed for me. It’s not that I don’t have goals or dreams. It’s just that they’ve become fewer and smaller. Up until this past year, I’ve had many things I’ve wanted to pursue personally and have had big visions of reward and recognition professionally.

But, most of that has really subsided. I used to enthusiastically say that I wanted to “blow a hole in history” but now am actually quite content just to scratch it. And, by scratch, I mean that I just want to be faithful to what God has asked me to do.

I’m quite sure that God wants me to be a devoted husband and father, and that He wants me to teach the Bible. I think he may want me to write about it too. But, that’s about it.

I’m not sure God wants me to be the president or a senator, a mega church pastor or national speaker, a Pulitzer prize writer or best selling author. I’m not even sure God wants me to alter history in any way.

I’m just sure that God wants me to have integrity, love my family and serve the church. That being said, I think my goals are now simply to accomplish those things.

When Stephanie asked me what my hopes and dreams are for this year, I told her that I wanted my boys to be healthy, for her to find healing, and for the church to grow deeply. Yes, I’d be happy with those goals.

I’d be quite satisfied if the cyst in my son’s neck would finally heal, if my wife would find peace after her third miscarriage, and if the church would grow deeper in their love for God and each other.

Some would say those are meager goals. But, I think they are rather ideal. Sooner or later, we all learn to let go of our ambition. Not the holy ambition to serve God and make a difference in the world but the self-centered ambition to be something.

Everybody today seems to want to be somebody. They want to be a rock star, an actor, an athlete or an entertainer. They want to be some kind of celebrity and it’s usually not because they just like the craft. No, they like the fame, the money, and the fun that comes with it.

The truth is that we’re foolish if we think that we’re something. And, we’re all so very shortsighted if we believe that striking success in this world makes any difference in eternity.

Solomon told us that fame and success are short-lived and that the world will forget us as soon as we’re gone. So, why should we care what the world thinks of us anyway?

I once heard a missionary say that we’re all a bunch of nobodies just trying to make much of somebody. And, that Somebody, of course, is God. After all, He is the only Somebody.

When people tried to make much of John the Baptist, he deflected their adoration saying that Jesus must increase and that he must decrease. By decrease, he meant that he must become a nobody.

This past year, I have been thinking about that. I’ve been wondering why we say that we have an audience of One but in reality play to everyone else. If we really believed that we have just One to please, then shouldn’t this bear out in our lives?

Pleasing God, and God alone, is something we can do very quietly and discreetly. It’s something that can be accomplished while living completely off the radar screen of this world.

It’s something that can be done without any notable achievement, any renowned victory or any special merit. It can be fulfilled without any title, trophy or talent.

That means we can bring pleasure to God and accomplish everything that He desires of us in this life as nobodies. We don’t need anyone to notice us, to admire us, or to reward us to be enormously successful in God’s economy.

For most of us, this presents a radical recalibration of our view of success. It is an enormous shift away from the self-centered priorities of this world, which tell us that we have to be something or do something to have value.

Instead, it is a significant shift towards the priorities of God, which tell us that we don’t have to do or be anything in this world to bring pleasure to the only Somebody who matters.

Well, in the process of disconnecting from this world and connecting more and more to God’s Son, I have come to look at things a little differently today than I have in the past. What I have been experiencing is an untangling of sorts from the trappings of the world that have captured my attention and energy for many years. And, one of those things that I feel I am being freed from is the snare of ambition.

For some reason I have always been interested in and motivated by success in whatever field I have been engaged. Whether it was in marketing, recruitment, demography, real estate or vocational ministry, I have always been motivated and inspired to drive for more, never settling for the status quo or mediocrity. The downside of that kind of drive is that you never feel settled and are often discontent, and that is something I have always been at odds with in my own life.

All of this is to say that after plumbing the depths of Solomon’s wisdom and meditating on it each day, I have come to a stunning and convicting realization about life here on earth. For me, it is a mystery solved that now just needs to be applied. The epiphany that rocked my world and hopefully will also rock yours too is that I think I have been praying the wrong prayer all along. All of these years, I have been praying for God to give me more…more income, more comfort, more enjoyment, more experience, more influence and more responsibility. More, more, more, and I have a feeling I am not the only one who has been praying this way.

And, here’s the thing. I have been trained to pray this way because that is apparently what ambitious people do. Those we admire seem to pray for more, those who write the books we read usually tell us we should pray for more, and those who teach us often encourage us to ask for more. The central example of this kind of praying perhaps is the best selling The Prayer of Jabez that unabashedly taught us all to ask God to “enlarge our territory” and ask God for more, which oddly enough isn’t really at all what Jesus taught us to do.

In the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew it says that Jesus taught his disciples how to pray saying, “Pray like this: Our Father on heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread…” And, there it is. So simple and yet so profound. Notice that in his instruction Jesus does not tell us to ask for more bread but for enough bread. There is a difference.

Literally, Jesus tells us to ask God each day for enough food to eat, and by implication that includes clothing and shelter for the day. He does not instruct us to ask for more than that. In fact, just a few verses later Jesus tells us not be anxious about our lives, about food, clothing and shelter because God knows what we need and will add them to our lives. Conversely, Jesus adds that needing or asking for more is actually consistent with the lives of nonbelievers and not disciples.

When we read Jesus’ instruction to pray “Give us this day our daily bread” it is logical and helpful to connect this to the bread that God gave to Israel as they wandered in the wilderness. In Exodus 16 we read that God gave manna, or bread from heaven, to the people of Israel as their sole sustenance during their journey to the Promised Land. It says that with the dew of the morning, there came a fine, flaky bread that was more than enough to feed everyone each day. However, there was only enough for that day.

We read that the bread from heaven quickly rotted and melted away if it was not consumed, so God did not give them more than was needed for each day during their exodus. It says that they gathered new manna “morning by morning” or day by day as it was given, and that they did this for the entire 40 years that they wandered! What they learned from this providential experience was an important lesson for them and should also be an important lesson for us. The lesson is that God sovereignly provides for his children, and his superintended provisions are enough.

So, if God always provides enough, then why do we keep asking for more? There is a most interesting biblical passage in Proverbs 30. In verses 7 through 9, it says: “Two things I ask of you; deny them not to me before I die: Remove far from me falsehood and lying; give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full and deny you and say ‘Who is the Lord?’ or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God.”

This is a most convicting truth. The author of this Scripture asks God for two things in life. First, he asks God to make him honest. And, second, he asks for God to make him satisfied. Interestingly, he asks God NOT to make him rich or poor, but rather to give him enough. He goes on to say that if God gives him riches, then he will become distracted and will forget God, and if God makes him poor, then he will become a thief and dishonor God. Therefore, he doesn’t want to be either rich or poor…he just wants to be content.

So then, how does all of this relate to us? Well, these Scriptures both explicitly and implicitly show us that we have perhaps been praying the wrong prayers. Rather than asking God to give us more, we should be asking God to give us enough. This means not asking God for more money, more food, more clothes, more space, more luxury or more amusement. Instead this means asking God for just enough of these things to be enjoy the life He has given us and be pleasing to Him while we are here.

In light of all this, I am convinced that asking God for more is not the right prayer. Rather, what we should be asking God for is “enough”. In other words, we should be asking for enough money to live affordably, enough shelter to live comfortably, enough clothes to dress appropriately and enough food to eat moderately. Anything more than that is more than enough and should be considered excess. And, if there is excess, then we really ought to think about giving it away and not keeping it for ourselves.

In 2 Corinthians 9, for example, we are told that God supplies seed and bread to us and each for different purposes. The seed is for investment and the bread is for consumption, and that means bread is to be kept for ourselves and seed is to be given away to others. Interestingly, God does not promise to give us more bread, only more seed. Paul writes: “He who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your seed for sowing and increase the harvest of your righteousness” (2 Cor. 9:10). Conspicuously absent from the passage is any promise that God will give us more “bread” to consume for ourselves. Instead, it says that God wants the excess “seed” to be invested in the kingdom to help others. Paul adds: “The ministry of this service is not only supplying the needs of the saints, but it also overflowing in many thanksgivings to God” (2 Cor. 9:12).

So, what I have concluded in all this is that many of us, myself included, have probably confused bread and seed. I am quite convinced that we have been eating the seed and not planting it, and the end result is not only a materialistic culture but also a malnourished church. When we start presuming that more wealth means more to spend on ourselves, then we have tragically missed the biblical directive of generosity. Biblical generosity means only keeping for ourselves what we need and giving the rest away joyfully to others.

In my estimation, hoarding in the church is an embarrassingly obvious problem that is not only crippling the credibility of the gospel message but also compromising the mission of the church to care for others. The truth is that there is so much excess wealth sitting around in real estate assets, brokerage accounts and savings plans belonging to Christians that it is extraordinarily shocking that we can’t even take care of our own, let alone take care of others. At a time when the church’s credibility and mission in America is hanging in the balance, it is a shame that so many Christians are sitting on so much.

My point in saying all this is simply to share how I have been disturbed by my own selfishness and embarrassed by the collective selfishness that I see in the church today. As a pastor, I am honestly frustrated with the stunning inconsistency between what the Scriptures say about generosity and contentment and what I see in the everyday lives of so many Christians today. And, what really burdens me is the fact that so many Christians don’t even seem to notice it. They just keep on asking for more and spending it on themselves without ever asking if that kind of personal consumption is consistent with what the Lord desires.

In light of this revelation, my hope is that we would be courageous enough to confront ourselves with this issue and honest enough to talk about what needs to change in ourselves and in the church. Toward that end, I pray that a revolution would occur in the lives of believers everywhere and that we would finally be liberated from the things of this world that capture us like ambition, wealth and success. And, it is my belief that we will finally experience this kind of freedom in life once we learn to no longer ask for more but for enough.

Generally speaking, ministry success seems to be gauged by how many people attend your church, by how large your ministry budget is, by how “state-of-the-art” your facilities are, or by how many books you’ve written and sold. And, it’s all very easy to draw comparisons and conclude a measure of worth or success from how we, as pastors, stack up against each other in those categories. And to be fair, it’s very human to assess our personal success based on the comparative successes and failures of others. And yet, something about this evaluation process has become progressively more uncomfortable for me.

I’m staring down my 35th year on this earth and have been a pastor for ten years now. After a decade of serving the church, I am at a place where I feel a strange disconnect with the typical church growth model of success. Though I think I can honestly say that I have been groomed for ministry “influence” all of my life and have intentionally pursued it for the last ten years, I am at a place where I now feel rather disillusioned with the status quo. Admittedly it would be easy to say so if I had never tasted any real ministry success, but I think that I have experienced and enjoyed some influence during these past several years and yet even still feel restless. So, it’s not that I’m being openly critical of something that I secretly envy, it’s what I have already actually experienced that has left me wanting.

I suppose some of this restlessness is intrapersonal conflict within myself over my own natural ambition. I feel like I am waged in an internal conflict of sorts over my lifelong desire to make a “maximum impact” on the church and the world, which really is just pastoral code for “recognized success”. Though we tend to shade our language with spiritualized terminology, the truth is that pastors struggle with self-actualization issues just like the rest. Well, I confess that I have struggled for many years contemplating what would finally qualify me for perceived success among my peers. And, what I have found is that the answer to this question is strangely evasive.

What I have observed is that there is no real path to ministry success or model for ministry growth that one can walk down knowing where it leads. The reality is that there is no rhyme or reason to explain who rises up and who goes down the ladder of ministry notoriety. Though it seems that there are certain people who come with the right message at the right time, there is no guarantee when or where that person or his message will get noticed or heard. From what I can see, there really is no explanation except to conclude only that God sees fit to promote certain people at particular times for His own undisclosed purposes.

Honestly, I don’t really understand why some leaders have such loud voices in the church and culture while others don’t. It may simply be that they just speak up more or just that they happen to speak up when people are actually listening. I’m not sure of that and probably never will be. I am quite sure, though, that there are people who have much to say who aren’t being heard and that there are others who have very little to say but are. Just browse the latest shelf of hardbacks in your Christian bookstore and ask yourself whether any of those author’s words will outlive their own generation and then spend a few hours with someone you respect who has much wisdom to share but no invitation to pass it on and you’ll understand what I mean.

Knowing this, the whole experience of life often feels like a chasing after the wind. Once you’ve chased it and not been able to grasp it, you begin to tire and wonder why you are running in the first place. That is where I now am. I’ve been wondering why I’ve been running so hard, and after what anyway? Solomon observed that much of the success we go after in this life is really just vapor, disappearing before we touch it and certainly voided even if we do. Having pursued and tried to touch the vapor, I can honestly say now that it wasn’t worth the chase.  The feeling is a lot like going in circles and ending up in the same place you started, only many times over.

The critical question for me now is what part of the pursuit, if any, is worthwhile? In other words, I’m considering whether the exercise of the run itself has ontological value for me. That is, I’m asking myself about what things I do on the journey that have inherent worth in and of themselves regardless of whether they ever get recognized or rewarded in this life. And, I’ve discovered that there are a few things for me that give me true joy and satisfaction in midst of the chase. And, because there is value and enjoyment simply in doing these things, my satisfaction is not tied to any success or influence that comes with them. For me, the things that I find to be intrinsically satisfying and worthwhile are studying and teaching God’s Word, sharing life with and serving others, and preserving and contributing to God’s goodness in the world.

I have finally figured out that I would spend my time engaging with the Bible, serving the lost and the least, and working to restore beauty in the world whether I was compensated to do it or not. Meaning, there need be no reward or recognition attached to any of these things for me to be fulfilled by them. And, therefore, I have decided that I intend no longer to invest myself into things that must be framed by success in order to be enjoyed. For me, that means easing back on the throttle of personal ambition and professional success and getting used to the quiet and often obscure road of personal contentment.

Now, this doesn’t mean that I intend to purposely avoid opportunity and invitation to success, it just means that I will no longer seek it. I am more convinced than ever that influence or success is not something that I have any control over and that seeking it is really a meaningless waste of my energy anyway. All things considered, I believe that Mother Teresa was right about the whole thing…success is vanity, but faithfulness isn’t.