Men in the church don’t often get accused of being ambitious, but maybe they should be. After all, the drive that comes from ambition is part of how God created men—to seek, to act, and to shape the world around them. This ambition is part of man’s God-given nature that fuels action, perseverance, and purpose. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ambition as follows: “a strong desire to do or to achieve something, typically requiring determination and hard work.” When men align their ambition with God’s purpose, it motivates them to support their families, engage with their communities, and seek goals that honor Him. In the absence of ambition, life can feel stagnant, and untapped potential can leave men feeling lost and unfulfilled, drifting without direction or purpose, or worse, deriving purpose from lesser goods.
Unfortunately, many in the church view ambition as a vice instead of a virtue. Men are frequently encouraged to “be content,” “just be faithful,” or “don’t rush ahead of God.” While true in their proper context, these statements often hinder action and stifle the drive to subdue. At the same time, our culture normalizes the portrayal of passive and lazy fathers on screen, and the church sometimes reflects these poor patterns in more subtle ways. For example, the popular phrase“faithful presence” often becomes an excuse for not actually sharing the Gospel with our neighbors or engaging in cultural battles. This leads men to receive mixed messages about ambition; either it’s seen as prideful, or it remains unacknowledged, leaving many uncertain about how to follow God’s calling in their lives.
The Bible illustrates that ambition, when grounded in things like obedience, dominion, and service, is a powerful tool for productive men. Figures like Joseph, Daniel, and Nehemiah exemplify how God-driven initiative can bring glory to God while benefiting those around them. Recognizing and embracing God-ordained ambition enables men to live purposefully, lead with courage, and make meaningful contributions to their communities.
Common Reasons Why Christian Men Lack Ambition
There are a few reasons why we see fewer ambitious Christian men:
1. The Rise of Therapeutic Christianity
Over time, the church has shifted from forming men into strong disciples to soothing them with therapeutic language. Much of modern preaching sounds less like a call to take up the cross and more like a group counseling session. Sermons often emphasize “how you feel” over “what you must do.” Instead of proclaiming Christ as King who commissions His people for work and mission, churches reduce Him to a life coach who simply helps us process our emotions.
Worship music has taken a similar path. The Psalms capture the full spectrum of human emotions—expressing lament, hope, triumph, and battle cries of faith. In contrast, contemporary worship songs frequently revolve around recurring themes of struggle and brokenness, offering emotional ballads to swaying hips. While recognizing our dependence on God is certainly necessary, an overemphasis on emotional appeal fosters a culture of perpetual spiritual adolescence rather than encouraging maturity and a sense of mission.
The overemphasis on feelings subtly trains men to believe that the Christian life is primarily about inward reflection instead of outward action. Faith becomes something to “feel deeply” rather than live boldly or build generationally. The result is men who equate holiness with passivity, mistaking the absence of ambition for the presence of humility.
2. Fear of Worldly Power
Men in the church today have largely been taught that power is inherently bad and is something that shouldn’t be desired. Power is no longer seen as something that should be pursued responsibly, but something that should be avoided altogether. No doubt the rise in social Marxism in the last few years has influenced this mindset, in which power is always seen as a tool of oppression.
And yet, this fear of power has likewise stifled ambition in men. No longer do men train, work, or even seek out positions of power. This fear of power has not only resulted in less ambitious men, but it has had considerable costs in the church, culture, and society at large. If good men aren’t seeking positions of power, then evil men will fill this void. Men’s ambitions collapse into private, trivial pursuits while public life is ceded to the very elites who taught them to fear power in the first place. In a society that desperately needs virtuous leaders, Christian men are often trained to be spectators.
3. A Shrunken Vision of the Kingdom
If you were a Christian in the late 2000s to early 2010s, you probably remember the wave of popular books that criticized the pursuit of the “American Dream.” Books like Crazy Love by Francis Chan or Radical by David Platt often gave the impression that the apex of the Christian life was selling everything, moving to a third-world country, and dying as a martyr. Instead of developing skills, building businesses, or preparing financially to pass something on to their children, many young men sacrificed these things to “reach the nations.” And while foreign mission work is certainly a needed and ambitious calling, the wake of these influencers left a trail of young men who were suspicious of normal vocations, resentful of those who chose different paths, and hesitant to take calculated risks lest they appear too comfortable, too worldly, or not “radical” enough.
4. Passive Theology Produces Passive Men
The Gospel Centered movement, in particular, has created a theological allergy to action and obedience that has also contributed to the lack of ambition among Christians. To be sure, Christ is the fulfillment of the law and the prophets—every shadow points to Him, every promise finds its “Yes” in Him. But a misapplication of the Christocentric hermeneutical approach reduces biblical narratives exclusively to Christ-types, leaving men without concrete models of godly action.
Matt Chandler’s famous sermon on David and Goliath in 1 Samuel 17 is a good illustration of this. Chandler strongly emphasized that “we are not David,” meaning that Christians should not emulate King David or derive practical wisdom from his story beyond seeing him as someone who points to Christ. But didn’t the Israelites join David’s victory by rising with a shout and pursuing the Philistines (1 Sam. 17:52)? And if David is a type of Christ, aren’t his followers called to follow him? Preaching this account merely as a foreshadow of Christ with no ethical imperative strips away David’s courage, leadership, and other virtuous traits as practical examples for men to imitate.
The movement also labels strong desires for legitimate goods as potential idolatry, with frequent warnings about “the idol of the family,” suggesting that Christians who strongly desire marriage or a generational legacy must regularly evaluate themselves lest they be in spiritual danger. This hyper-vigilance creates men who are afraid to pursue God-given longings with intensity. When every good desire must be examined for idolatry and every Old Testament example is reduced to Christology, men lose both the permission and the pattern for godly ambition. They become spiritually sophisticated but practically impotent—able to articulate gospel truths but unable to translate them into bold gospel action.
5. Pietism
The recent emphasis in Pietism is another modern trajectory that has pacified Christian men by creating a false separation between spiritual and material realities. Michael Clary rightly defines Pietism as a “gnostic tendency to overemphasize spiritual realities at the expense of material realities,” relying on “a fortune cookie, bumper-sticker, and ultimately fear-based approach to Scripture.” This distorted Christianity treats cultural engagement, business building, and institutional development as “distractions” from true spirituality, producing men who are introspective but ineffective. Biblical piety, in contrast, encompasses practical duties, family responsibilities, and actively living with one another alongside personal spiritual development.
6. The Church Often Equates Passivity with Godliness
A significant factor contributing to the declining ambition among men lies in the church’s tendency to conflate passivity with godliness. Many well-meaning pastors and teachers highlight messages such as “waiting on the Lord” and “being content in all circumstances.” However, these exhortations often overlook the broader biblical narrative that encourages men to embrace courage, risk, and decisive action. Verses like Isaiah 40:31 and Philippians 4:12 have been misinterpreted, leading many to view waiting or contentedness as synonymous with inactivity, while Scripture actually conveys a message of active trust, expressed through initiative and endurance.
This mindset has fostered a culture where taking risks is often viewed as recklessness and where bold ambition is met with skepticism. Those who dare to build, lead, or pursue grand endeavors for the Kingdom frequently face cautionary remarks about pride or worldliness. In contrast, men who retreat into passivity are lauded for their “humility” and “faithfulness.” Over time, this creates a narrative in which men equate inactivity with holiness, suppressing their God-given drive under the pretense of spiritual maturity.
The consequence is that this teaching distorts masculinity. Scripture consistently depicts godly men as proactive individuals who advance in faith, like Abraham, who left his homeland; Joshua, who led Israel into conquest; David, who faced Goliath; and Paul, who tirelessly planted churches. True godliness is characterized not by retreat but by stepping forward in obedience, even amidst significant risks. When the church fails to communicate this truth, it results in generations of men who mistakenly link timidity with virtue, leaving the Kingdom short of builders, leaders, and warriors.
Ambition in Creation
With the reasons why many modern men lack ambition laid out, it’s necessary to ask what the Scriptures say about it.
The creation account shows us that ambition is woven into the very fabric of man’s nature. God formed man an active agent commissioned for transformative work, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Gen. 1:28). God’s mandate to Adam was inherently ambitious: he was given raw materials of a good-but-unfinished world that needed cultivation and subjugation. The word for “subdue” implies bringing something under control through effort and skill, while “dominion” speaks to responsible leadership and governance. [1] The Garden of Eden itself required tending (Gen. 2:15), and beyond its borders lay an entire world waiting to be developed under human stewardship.
1. For “subdue,” see the thirteen instances in the Hebrew Bible (Gen. 1:28; Num. 32:22, 29; Josh. 18:1; 2 Sam. 8:11; 1 Chr. 22:18; 2 Chr. 28:10; Neh. 5:5; Esth. 7:8; Jer. 34:11, 16; Mic. 7:19), along with the standard lexical denotation in Ludwig Koehler, Walter Baumgartner, and Johann Jakob Stamm, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, trans. and ed. M. E. J. Richardson (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 2:460. For “dominion,” see the denotation of subduing in twenty-three of its twenty-seven occurrences in the Old Testament (Gen. 1:26, 28; Lev. 25:43, 46, 53; 26:17; Num. 24:19; 1 Kings 4:24; 5:16; 9:23; 2 Chr. 8:10; Neh. 9:28; Psa. 49:14; 68:27; 72:8; 110:2; Is. 14:2, 6; 41:2; Jer. 5:31; Lam. 1:13; Ezek. 29:15; 34:4); see also HALOT, 3:1190.
Even in providing Adam with Eve as a “helper suitable for him” (Gen. 2:18), God placed a sense of generational ambition into human existence. The directive to “be fruitful and multiply” extends beyond simply having children; it encompasses the establishment of families, the creation of communities, and the transfer of wisdom and purpose through the ages. This kind of vision necessitates long-term thinking and planning, inspiring individuals to create something enduring for their descendants
Compare this mandate given to Adam with the risk-averse and mere present-thinking society we live in now. God did not design men to lazily veg in front of a screen for hours at a time, or even to mindlessly doomscroll in a cubicle while on the clock. Men were created to be laborers, producing work that glorifies God and promotes human flourishing. The Fall, of course, made this labor more difficult. But it’s no wonder so many men find themselves depressed and left with a purposeless disposition that compels them to say, “There must be more to life than this.” Thankfully, there is!
Ambition in the Church: Properly Ordered
In 2 Corinthians 10:13-18, Paul addresses his own ambitious ministry, stating clearly, “our hope is that as your faith increases, our area of influence among you may be greatly enlarged, so that we may preach the gospel in lands beyond you” (2 Cor. 10:15–16, emphasis added). Paul was not timid; he sought to maximize his influence for his ministry.
Paul’s example demonstrates the distinction between holy ambition and worldly ego-building. Holy ambition seeks to build God’s kingdom rather than personal kingdoms, is interested in Christ rather than self-promotion, and measures success by faithfulness rather than by comparison with others. When Paul writes a few verses later “let him who boasts boast in the Lord” (2 Cor. 10:17), he is not lamenting the absence of achievement, but he is rather redirecting the focus and essence of ambition towards a higher purpose. What sets Godly ambition apart is the object of ambition—whether it is for God’s glory and others’ good, or for mere personal indulgence. Again, this is what the intention was in the garden: Adam, as God’s image bearer, will rule the earth and use raw materials to take dominion.
Consider the example of Christ, the second Adam. He came to fulfill a profound purpose: the redemption of His people. He did not wander aimlessly or spend years searching for his identity; instead, He faced His mission with determination (Luke 9:51). Jesus endured the cross because he was ambitious to accomplish the mission that God had given him, and he was resolute to lose not one of the souls entrusted to him. Jesus’s ambition for the glory of the Triune God carried him through the hungry wilderness, through lonely Gethsemane, through forsaken Calvary, through the empty tomb, and all the way to the right hand of God. For the joy set before him, Jesus endured the deepest agonies because he had a godly ambition for a finished task (Heb. 12:2). From the Father’s side he now gazes at us with eyes that burn with fire as he commands: “follow me.”
This well-ordered ambition is what the church needs today in its men. These types of men will plant churches, start businesses, or work in their vocations that serve their communities, lead families that have generational influence, run for political office with integrity, and build institutions that outlast them. The church doesn’t need to suppress this drive, but to inflame it and guide it toward God-honoring purposes.
Ambition & Contentment Properly Ordered
A recent trend within the church has been the use of contentment as a means to justify inaction. However, it is important to recognize that ambition and contentment are not mutually exclusive. Unfortunately, contentment is frequently misinterpreted as passivity, resignation, or even laziness, allowing individuals to disguise their avoidance of the hard work needed for personal and spiritual growth.
Genuine contentment is not characterized by a lack of ambition; rather, it is the steady reliance on Christ that enables believers to glorify God in every circumstance, whether in abundance or in need (Phil. 4:11–13; Prov. 30:8–9). The wise puritan Jeremiah Burroughs defined contentment as “that sweet, inward, quiet, gracious frame of spirit, which freely submits to and delights in God’s wise and fatherly disposal in every condition.”[2] This does not mean passive resignation or a fatalistic acceptance of circumstances. Paul, after all, knew how to be content even in hunger (Phil. 4:12), but his contentment did not keep him from seeking food! Contentment, rightly understood, is the posture of trusting Christ’s sufficiency so that we avoid sin in hardship and pride in prosperity, while faithfully laboring in the vocations God has given. Far from stifling ambition, such contentment provides the foundation for pursuing God’s purposes with courage and diligence.
2. Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1964), 19.
Genuine contentment involves trusting in God’s timing while engaging proactively in the present. In contrast, false contentment misuses the concept of divine sovereignty as a rationale for personal inaction. The biblical perspective illustrates a balance: while ambition devoid of contentment can lead to a destructive fixation, contentment without ambition may result in stagnation. Men need both the confidence that comes from trusting God’s oversight in all things and the holy drive that compels them to pursue their vocations wholeheartedly. When contentment and ambition coexist in proper alignment, they foster leaders who embody both peace and productivity.
Conclusion
Ambition serves as a driving force for men, motivating them each morning to make a difference in the world, support their communities, and honor their material and spiritual responsibilities through their work. But what happens to men without ambition? They rot. They get hooked on video games, porn, and cheap dopamine rushes. They waste away, bitter at the world and raging at God (Prov. 19:3). They find themselves trapped in mindless distractions, losing sight of their potential, while others actively pursue and build meaningful legacies. A man without ambition is only existing rather than truly living (to paraphrase William Wallace).
Our communities do not need more passive observers. They need ambitious men who are willing to create, lead, and stand firm with conviction. These kinds of men say with eighty-five year old Caleb, “my strength now is as my strength was then, for war and for going and coming” (Josh 14:11). They say with an outnumbered Jonathan “let us go over to the garrison of these uncircumcised . . . for nothing can hinder the LORD from saving by many or by few” (1 Sam 14:6). And they say with a stalwart Christ, “not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42). Every man must choose whether to surrender to passivity and watch himself wither, or embrace the ambition God placed within him and build something worthy of his calling.
Charles Spurgeon challenged his hearers with this: “Aspire to be something more than the mass of church members. Lift up your cry to God and beseech him to fire you with a nobler ambition than that which possesses the common Christian—that you may be found faithful unto God at the last, and may win many crowns for your Lord and Master, Christ.”[3]
3. Charles H. Spurgeon, The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit Sermons, vol. 15 (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1869), 232.
May the Lord raise up men who aspire to more.
