As you look at the broad scope of your life, are you driven more by ambition or by compassion?   You can do a lot of the same things with the same amount of energy and drive and be motivated by either of these forces.  For instance, you can build a business and grow it bigger and bigger throughout your working years, all with the goal of accumulating more and more and more.  This kind of ambitious motivation is routinely praised in our culture, and we have come to view it as normal, if not downright admirable.  After all, he who dies with the most toys wins, right?  On the other hand, you can start that same business, grow it in exactly the same way and for the same number of years, but do it with the goal of getting to a place in which you can truly be generous, advance God’s Kingdom, and do good things in the world.  The motivation of compassion is then your driving force instead of ambition. 

Or take the church scene, for example.  A church, its people, and its pastor can desire to truly change their community for the better and help the maximum number of people find God and grow in him, so they desire that their church expands and grows in order to fulfill this mission – a compassionate motive for church growth and advance.  By contrast, another church, its people and its pastor can have ambition as a prime motivation – which results in an empire-building kind of mindset in which growth is sought for growth’s sake and ministry is done to ultimately fulfill the agenda of the pastor(s) or leadership team (in this scenario usually tied to wealth, prestige and/or power). You can see (and probably have seen) how this sort of thing can get ugly very quickly.

Our individual motivations for entrepeneurial achievement, financial success, and other forms of personal advancement can either be driven by ambition or by compassion.  There is certainly nothing wrong with providing for our needs and those of our families, so I am not suggesting that we should not benefit from the fruits of our work.  There is also nothing wrong with the sense of wellbeing and self-actualization that comes from accomplishing something by our efforts, whether small or great.  I am simply contending that a healthy pursuit of significance in our life’s work must be motivated, at least in part, by a compassionate desire to bless and meet the needs of others.  This must be a major part of the mix even early on in our careers, when we are trying to get established, get out of debt, and establish a positive cash flow fo our families.  If generosity and compassion toward others is not present in these early days, at least as a motivation, it tends to get increasingly difficult, instead of easier, to incorporate it later on when there is perhaps more wealth present.  The cycle of self-centeredness in our motives so easily takes us over that it is imperative at every stage that we not let it have sway.  After all, what we are talking about is a matter of the heart, not of the circumstances of the moment.  Extreme circumstance can certainly affect our motivation for the moment, but we always have to gravitate back toward allowing compassion to be what moves us once a crisis has passed.  No matter what walk of life, may we all be at least as driven by compassion in the things we pursue as we are by ambition!  What’s your motivation?