“Who is wise and understanding among you? By his good conduct let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom. But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth. This is not the wisdom that comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic. For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practise. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere.” – James 3:13-17.

THESE WORDS SEARCH our hearts and we will do well to let this beam penetrate our every motive instead of just skimming this section at surface value. As with every part of Scripture, these verses full of weight, mandates careful and slow reading. There is no need to be afraid of God’s Word exposing our innermost being that leads to repentance and healing; it is the avoidance and denial of truth that places us in the most dangerous predicament.

We become betrayers of God’s truth when we propagate it with ill motives, no matter how godly we may feel in accomplishing the spread of sound doctrine. This applies to Christian writing and blogging as well as public preaching, whether in its originality or republishing great classical Christian literature. We may say and write things with the mouth of an angel while with the heart of the devil. Our loyalty to the truth of God’s Word is not so much in our declaration as in our demonstration of its power evident in our lives. “The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life, and whoever captures souls is wise” (Proverbs 11:30). As the 18^th verse of James 3 states, “…a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace”, so fruit is determined and brought forth by the nature of its tree.

What we are really ambitious for inevitably flows through our motives no matter how genuinely righteous our actions may appear at times to human eyes. To whom are we loyal – to self or Christ? We have heard it said a thousand times: there is no middle ground; it is one or the other.

Christ has appointed us to labour for the fruit that lasts (John 15:16), not for the immediate success that often times proves to be useless in God’s economy. The lust for recognition still needs to be stamped out of the many of us; when there is no acknowledgement of us there is the tendency to sulk and whine. This generation of Christians perversely survives and thrives on the praise and constant reassurance of others, but it takes a heart intact with God to steadily carry on in obscurity. Seldom do we hear words today like that of Oswald Chambers: “Our audience is God, not God’s people, but God Himself. The saint who realises that can never be discouraged, no matter where he [or she] goes. The audience of the ready saint is God, He is the arena of all his [and her] actions…The curse in Christian work is that we want to preserve ourselves in God’s museum; what God wants is to see where Jesus Christ’s men and women are. The saints are always amongst the unofficial crowd, the crowd that is not noticed, and their one dominant note is Jesus Christ…We do not need the grace of God to stand crises, human nature and pride are sufficient, we can face the strain magnificently; but it does require the supernatural grace of God to live twenty-four hours in every day as a saint, to go through drudgery as a disciple, to live an ordinary, unobserved, ignored existence as a disciple of Jesus…The reason we do not make disciples is that we are not disciples ourselves, we are out for our own ends”

The greatest stunt to our spiritual growth is selfish ambition – no matter how much the many attempt to ‘Christianise’ it and get away with it – at least for now. We are heading nearer to that Day when you and I will give an account for the deeds done since we have professed Christ – not so much for what we do as to why we do them.