Ambition is an excellent thing. As a father, nothing would dismay me more than having my daughters submit to me as husband material a man with no reasonable ambitions. (I say “reasonable” because I would not be happy with some guy whose ambition was to read every science fiction novel that had ever been written, or who wanted to be the Hobo King.)
But many, early in life, err, transgressing our Lord’s teaching by cheating to get ahead, for much of what He is talking about here involves just that. “Taking the lowest place” includes resolving not to limit one’s ambitions, but to maintain the conscience in a healthy, working state, and then taking only so much advancement as a clear conscience before Him will allow. This will most often mean taking a far lower seat than a man with healthy ambitions suspects he deserves. (It will sometimes mean taking a far higher one, which is another subject.) But if he is a Christian, he must believe his vindication will come, usually later, most often after his death, and from the hand of God, within the Ultimate, “Friend, go up higher.”
Deporting one’s self in this way requires faith, without which it is impossible to please God. It is a sin, I believe, either to kill the desire for the highest achievement–to accept the self as some sort of craven, servile, mediocrity, thus risking hell for rejecting the talents one has been given–or to step outside the rules we have for the deportment of life to rise in the estimation of the world, but not of the Lord.
Is this apropos of the little ditty that Kendall did in CO on careerism?