======================================================================== (CLIP) IS YOUR LIFE CONTROLLED BY A HOLY AMBITION？ by John Piper ======================================================================== Summary: This sermon emphasizes the importance of having a strong, clear gospel ambition in life. It encourages individuals to take time away, seek God's guidance, and discover their mission or ambition for the future. The speaker shares personal experiences of seeking God's direction during challenging times and highlights the need to have a specific purpose to avoid drifting aimlessly through life. Duration: 3:34 Topics: "Gospel Ambition", "Seeking God's Guidance" Scripture References: Proverbs 16:3, Philippians 3:13, Ephesians 5:15, Habakkuk 2:2, Colossians 3:23 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ DESCRIPTION ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This sermon emphasizes the importance of having a strong, clear gospel ambition in life. It encourages individuals to take time away, seek God's guidance, and discover their mission or ambition for the future. The speaker shares personal experiences of seeking God's direction during challenging times and highlights the need to have a specific purpose to avoid drifting aimlessly through life. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CONTENT ------------------------------------------------------------------------ I hope you have an ambition. I hope you have a strong, clear gospel ambition. Some of you are wired not to have ambitions. You don't think in those terms at all. And I want to encourage you to have one. Get one. Take a retreat. If you're married, ask your spouse to give you two days on the weekend. Just go away with your Bible and a piece of paper, a notepad. Probably not your computer, not your iPad. Leave your phone at home, maybe. Just your Bible and iPad. And ask God, get a group to pray for you. Go away. And your goal would be, give me an ambition for the next 10 years. And it might be, I'm going to be the most faithful mom I can possibly be. Or it might be, I'm turning this neighborhood up for Jesus. Oh, I don't know. But God would like to meet you there. He would like to do that. I remember in my years of ministry, those periodic times when I just went away, or sometimes Noel and I went away together, and just laid it out. Lord, say anything you want about the next five or ten years. Just say anything to us. We just want to get the noise out of our heads and be available. Give us a mission. And I remember in 1993, when our church came crashing down, we lost 230 people. Didn't grow for four years. And then we pulled a group together and said, let's try to re-identify ourselves. Think who we are. See if we can survive. And in the middle of that, they sent me away to a retreat center. Get my bearings here. I don't know where East West is. But I went to St. Paul. Somebody point towards St. Paul. You don't know where you are either, do you? Okay. Doesn't matter. I went to St. Paul. And I rented a room for two days, day and a half, in a Catholic monastery over there in St. Paul. And they said, you come back with a mission for this church. It's on the walls of our church right now. And I said, God, I need an ambition. And after about 36 hours, my ambition was, is, I exist to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things, for the joy of all peoples, through Jesus Christ. Find yours. Write it on a piece of paper and put it in your wallet or your purse. And then remind yourself why you exist. Because if you don't have an ambition, something like that could be more specific, less specific. If you don't have an ambition, you know what? You coast. You drift. You just drift in life. You get up in the morning. Do you do the next thing? And you drift. When Paul wrote, look carefully then how you walk, not as wise but as unwise, redeeming the time because the days are evil. He didn't mean drift. Redeeming. You see a day. You see an hour. You see a week. You see a decade. And you bite for your ambition, your God-given ambition that He gave you when you took your retreat in February 2017. ======================================================================== Video: https://sermonindex2.b-cdn.net/CCND08x2x_0.mp4 Source: https://sermonindex.net/speakers/john-piper/clip-is-your-life-controlled-by-a-holy-ambition/ ========================================================================