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The political climate of 2025 is such that people often ask me what is going on with our world.

My answer can be found within the next three newsletters, but begins with a story about a conversation James Roosevelt had with his father, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), after his father was elected president for the first of four terms:

“You know, Jimmy,” Franklin said, “all my life I have been afraid of only one thing—fire. Tonight I think I’m afraid of something else.” “Afraid of what, Pa?” “I’m just afraid that I may not have the strength to do this job.” He paused reflectively. “After you leave me tonight, Jimmy, I am going to pray. I am going to pray that God will help me, that he will give me the strength and the guidance to do this job and to do it right. I hope you will pray for me, too, Jimmy.”

H.W. Brands, Traitor to His Class

What I know about our country, our culture, and the world is that despite all the difficulties and tragedies, it does not seem that anyone today prays like one of our greatest presidents did then.

FDR had his flaws, as do we all. But he prayed. The difference between him and many other leaders is the nature of his ambition. Selfish ambition—a desire to get something for one’s own pleasure or profit—is often considered essential in secular leaders. But any self-promoting, self-reliant, or self-consuming motivations in FDR had been tempered by contracting deadly polio on a family trip. He went to bed sick and woke up paralyzed. His battle to overcome changed him so he could change the world.

What is wrong with our world today? Too few leaders like this exist in the world, and I am not sure they are desired. Nevertheless, I will make the case that we need them, and the best path for developing them is found in the Scriptures.

Let me explain.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

The paradox of progress: How our selfish ambitions cause us to lose more than we gain

Again, I saw futility under the sun. [8] There is a man all alone, without even a son or brother. And though there is no end to his labor, his eyes are still not content with his wealth: “For whom do I toil and bereave my soul of enjoyment?” This too is futile—a miserable task.

Ecclesiastes 4:7-8 BSB

The last 25 years of the 21st century have brought breathtaking advances in science and psychology. We diagnose and cure diseases that once destroyed generations. We live longer, think faster, and understand more about the human brain. We seem poised for generational breakthroughs as AI and quantum computing promise unimaginable futures.

Yet something has shifted in these same decades. The rise of social media, hustle culture, and personal branding has transformed ambition from something we once pursued on behalf of greater humanity into something we now chase in isolation. The remote economy and the four-hour work week promised freedom, but reality is setting in as these post-pandemic visions are being upended by the creative destruction of AI. Once again, we are experiencing the very futility the writer of Ecclesiastes observed—endless labor that leaves us asking, “For whom do I toil?” 

We’ve gained unprecedented tools for connection, yet loneliness epidemics plague our societies. We’ve democratized ambition, making it accessible to everyone with a smartphone and a side hustle, yet this same accessibility has made selfish ambition more universal—and more destructive—than perhaps any generation before us has experienced.

We live in polarized times. Hate explodes in mass shootings. Anxiety is the common cold of our emotional lives. Birth rates are plummeting. Fewer young people believe in marriage. And for many, the most profound experience of the day is earning more “likes” than their peers.

The irony is unbearable: at the very moment that we know more than we ever have, we also feel more lost than ever before. We are left to wonder how all our human achievements could have led us to the exact place Jesus warned us about. As he put it:

Even if you gained all the wealth and power of this world, and all the things it could offer you, yet lost your soul in the process, what good is that?

Luke 9:25 TPT

One of the reasons? We’ve placed all our faith in science and psychology—and used them to push ourselves to the center while God is relegated to the margins.

This is not a knock on science or psychology. They are extraordinary disciplines, capable of improving and saving lives. But they were never meant to replace spirituality.

Science is a way to measure physical truth. Psychology is a way to measure brain chemistry and its effects. They can’t tell us why we are here or how we should live, only how things work. But there is a third domain—one they cannot measure: the spiritual.

This is where we turn to God. To Scripture. To faith. And contrary to assumptions about scientists, this path is not as irrational as some would have us believe. Even Einstein recognized the necessity of both domains:

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions

Simply put, science and faith ask different questions and use different methods, but we need both to live fully human lives. Science without faith leaves us knowing how everything works but not why any of it matters. Faith without science leaves us with meaning but no way to engage the physical world God created.

Today, understanding and recognizing both science and religion as credible sources of wisdom, we’ll use the framework of the scientific method—not to prove God, but to pursue him. In doing so, we’ll rediscover what it means to live spiritually in a world dominated by data. 

Here are the key elements of the scientific method that will help us discover the answer to the questions we began with: What’s going on in our world, and what can we do about it?

• Observation: Noticing things about ourselves that cause us to question the patterns we see in the world.
• Hypothesis: Proposing an explanation of what’s going on in the world using the Scriptures.
• Experiment: Testing our hypothesis by looking at the Bible and asking ourselves deep questions.
• Analysis: Making sense of our answers by looking at data and at the life of Jesus.
• Conclusion: Going forward with new clarity about what’s going on in the world and what we can do about it. 

Over the next three weeks, we’ll run a spiritual experiment. We’ll collect evidence—not from labs, but from lives. We will operate under one bold premise:

The Bible offers a more precise diagnosis of our cultural crisis than any secular framework.

For ever since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through His workmanship [all His creation, the wonderful things that He has made], so that they [who fail to believe and trust in Him] are without excuse and without defense.

Romans 1:20 AMP

This is not just content. It’s a confrontation with the force that’s destroying our world.

The Chemistry Lab is open. Let’s begin our investigation.

In this first step of the scientific method, here is my observation: our world is currently being broken by selfish ambition.

Let’s break this down.

Jesus taught us that we must diagnose our own vision problems before we attempt to help someone else with theirs.

Why do you look at the [insignificant] speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice and acknowledge the [egregious] log that is in your own eye? [4] Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me get the speck out of your eye,’ when there is a log in your own eye? [5] You hypocrite (play-actor, pretender), first get the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.

Matthew 7:3-5 AMP

Centuries after Jesus taught this, psychiatrist Carl Jung discovered what he had been teaching all along. Jung wrote about those who can’t see other people clearly or objectively because they are projecting their own unresolved issues on them:

No matter how obvious it may be to the neutral observer that it is a matter of projections, there is little hope that the subject will perceive this himself. He must be convinced that he throws a very long shadow before he is willing to withdraw his emotionally-toned projections from their object.

Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

The similarity of Jung’s writing and Jesus’s teaching is spiritual chemistry at work—God using psychology to help us rediscover biblical truth. Jung was describing exactly what Jesus warned against: projecting our own unresolved issues onto others, criticizing their speck while ignoring our log. The hypocrite and the person with a “long shadow” are the same person.

I know this because I was that person. As a teenager, my way of projecting was to remain silent about my insecurities while being condescending—verbally and silently—to people around me. Years later, while reconnecting with friends, one of my former classmates said that she considered me and one of my friends to be the two most conceited people in our entire high school of 2,000 students. That was shocking to hear, especially since I was already a Christian by then. But it explained the length of my shadow and showed me that becoming a Christian was just the beginning—I needed to grow as a Christian by dealing with not only my sinful nature, but my human nature.

Achievement had been the measuring stick of my life from my earliest days. I measured myself by where I ranked in class, sports, and popularity. I defined myself by the positions I held, possessions I owned, and prestige I possessed. As a result, I developed an insatiable drive that I later learned was selfish ambition.

The problem was deeper than I realized. I thought I grasped the point of life, but I couldn’t—because I was living a life of selfish ambition, blinded to what God was doing in the world and in my life:

He has made everything beautiful and appropriate in its time. He has also planted eternity [a sense of divine purpose] in the human heart [a mysterious longing which nothing under the sun can satisfy, except God]—yet man cannot find out (comprehend, grasp) what God has done (His overall plan) from the beginning to the end.

Ecclesiastes 3:11 AMP

My obsession with achievement was my human nature’s dysfunctional response to life—a way to suppress and avoid uncomfortable emotions. But the result was an inability to access love and deep emotional connections. My sinful nature took advantage of these dysfunctional obsessions to draw me deeper into the empty pursuits of selfish ambition.

This dysfunction came from many places—being an adult child of an alcoholic, being raised during a time when men weren’t learning or teaching much about emotional intelligence, experiencing the insecurity of adolescence, and being an African American in a predominantly white community that I loved but required me to negotiate two very different worlds. All of this gave my sinful nature fertile ground to draw me into an empty life.

This was my “long shadow.” If I had not become a Christian, I would have avoided it all and just projected my angst onto other people through bitterness, criticism, and competition. But because I became a Christian, the light of Christ set me free from my shadow, just as John 8:31-32 promises. 

The years have taught me to stop living to impress and start living to love people, with this passage of Scripture as my guiding light:

Don’t be selfish; don’t try to impress others. Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourselves. [4] Don’t look out only for your own interests, but take an interest in others, too.

Philippians 2:3-4 NLT

Selfish ambition has been responsible for most of the foolish decisions, careless mistakes, heartless sins, and broken relationships in my life. It has been at the scene of all my ”unpretty” moments.

I am an expert on the manifestations and consequences of selfish ambition. While it’s humbling and it’s left me with my fingers searching for the rewind button on my life, I am nothing without my sins. They have taught me to understand the importance of focusing on God and relying on him to become the person I was meant to be rather than regretting the man I used to be.

Which puts me in a credible position to tell you: our world is currently being broken by selfish ambition.

My observation leads me to this working hypothesis: Selfish ambition produces spiritual disorder and social decay, but spiritual ambition rooted in God’s love creates peace, humility, and healing.

What if the very force breaking our world is the same force that could heal it? Ambition was meant to build, not break. The difference lies in a single word: selfish. This hypothesis changes everything about how we approach our cultural crisis.

To explore this hypothesis, we need to start with Jeremiah 6, where the prophet addresses a people who are looking for solutions in all the wrong places:

This is what the LORD says: “Stop at the crossroads and look around. Ask for the old, godly way, and walk in it. Travel its path, and you will find rest for your souls. But you reply, ‘No, that’s not the road we want!’

Jeremiah 6:16 NLT

[13] “From the least to the greatest, their lives are ruled by greed. From prophets to priests, they are all frauds. [14] They offer superficial treatments for my people’s mortal wound. They give assurances of peace when there is no peace.

Jeremiah 6:13-14 NLT

The prophet Jeremiah noticed something about the mindset of his time. People were only out for themselves, driven by an innate ambition that had been corrupted with self-consumption. 

The cultural data today confirms what Jeremiah observed. Let’s take a look at some data from a book by political and cultural commentator David Brooks: 

Between 1948 and 1954, psychologists asked more than 10,000 adolescents whether they considered themselves to be a very important person. At that point, 12 percent said yes. The same question was revisited in 1989, and this time it wasn’t 12 percent who considered themselves very important, it was 80 percent of boys and 77 percent of girls.

David Brooks, The Road to Character

The percentage of people who consider themselves very important has increased, but here’s what I’ve learned working with every generation from Gen Z to Baby Boomers: saying you’re important and feeling personally secure are two different things. Many people I encounter are flooded with negative thoughts about themselves. The boasting is often a cover-up for deep insecurity. 

We’ve confused being important with being loved, included, and valued in relationships. This is how the world distorts the essential with the superficial—offering “superficial treatments” just as the earlier passage from the prophet Jeremiah warned.

David Brooks also reports on the alarming rise in narcissism:

Psychologists have a thing called the narcissism test. They read people statements and ask if the statements apply to them. Statements such as ‘I like to be the center of attention…I show off if I get the chance because I am extraordinary…Somebody should write a biography about me.’ The median narcissism score has risen 30 percent in the last two decades. Ninety-three percent of young people score higher than the middle score just twenty years ago.

David Brooks, The Road to Character

These statistics give us helpful information, but fail to explain how our culture became fertile ground for narcissism. I believe there’s a dangerous progression at work:

Our condition	Description
Stage 1: Selfishly ambitious	We are driven to prove our worth.
Stage 2: Self-seeking	Everything and everyone becomes valued by how well they promote our goals. Others become mere characters in the movie of “me.”
Stage 3: Self-promoting	We spend all our energy telling the world about ourselves, rejecting anyone who won’t promote us and disregarding them as toxic.
Stage 4: Self-indulgent	When the world won’t value us according to our experiences, we turn to overspending, overeating, and emotionally overreacting to ease the pain of living in a world made cold by selfish ambition.
Stage 5: Self-consumed	We can’t stop thinking about ourselves. We absorb every fearful, negative, anxious, and angry thought until we begin to self-destruct. We turn inward at unhealthy levels and become too lonely and self-absorbed for genuine connection.

Bruce Springsteen described this never-ending cycle perfectly in his song “Badlands”: 

“Poor man wanna be rich, Rich man wanna be king, And a king ain’t satisfied till he rules everything.”

This is the dangerous cycle that the Bible describes in James 3:16—a disordered life born from selfish ambition. It’s a personal cycle we must break and a culture we must eradicate.

James explains exactly why this cultural breakdown is happening:

If you are wise and understand God’s ways, prove it by living an honorable life, doing good works with the humility that comes from wisdom. [14] But if you are bitterly jealous and there is selfish ambition in your heart, don’t cover up the truth with boasting and lying. [15] For jealousy and selfishness are not God’s kind of wisdom. Such things are earthly, unspiritual, and demonic. [16] For wherever there is jealousy and selfish ambition, there you will find disorder and evil of every kind. 

James 3:13-16 NLT

This “disorder of every kind” is shown across multiple areas in data presented by David Brooks in The Road to Character:  

1. The rise of fame-seeking – Fame ranked 15th out of 16 life goals in 1976, but by 2007, 51% of young people listed being famous as a top personal goal. Middle school girls now prefer being a celebrity’s assistant over being president of Harvard.
2. The decline of intimacy – People once reported having four or five close friends; now it’s two to three, and the number with no confidants has doubled. Thirty-five percent of older adults report chronic loneliness, up from 20% a decade ago.
3. The erosion of trust – In the early 1960s, majorities believed most people could be trusted. By the 1990s, distrusters had a 20-point margin over trusters, and that gap continues to widen.
4. The collapse of empathy – Today’s college students score 40% lower than 1970s students in their ability to understand what another person is feeling, with the biggest drop occurring after 2000.
5. The death of character language – Words like “bravery” (down 66%), “gratitude” (down 49%), “humbleness” (down 52%), and “kindness” (down 56%) have drastically declined in usage, while individualistic phrases like “I come first” have surged.

These societal signs show we are in need of an answer when it comes to the question of selfish ambition and self-consumption. David Brooks captures the essence of the solution:

Humility is freedom from the need to prove you are superior all the time, but egotism is a ravenous hunger in a small space—self-concerned, competitive, and distinction-hungry. 

David Brooks, The Road to Character

Brooks says humility is freedom. I agree that humility is freedom because it’s the absence of insecurity. It’s the freedom God gives us from always trying to impress. It’s the fruit of living God’s way, as James 3 continues to explain:

But the wisdom from above is first of all pure. It is also peace loving, gentle at all times, and willing to yield to others. It is full of mercy and the fruit of good deeds. It shows no favoritism and is always sincere. [18] And those who are peacemakers will plant seeds of peace and reap a harvest of righteousness. 

James 3:17-18 NLT

Humility breaks us out of the self-consumption cycle by making us willing to admit our deeper spiritual and emotional needs to God. What we need is not to be impressive or important, but to be loved, understood, and believed in. When we are humble, we will find security by being rooted in God’s love: 

For this reason I kneel before the Father… [17] so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, [18] may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, [19] and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. 

Ephesians 3:14, 17-19 NIV

Despite the weakness of our human nature and the sinfulness of our sinful nature, Jesus died on the cross to free us forever from the consequences of our past so we could live for the future. This is what saved me from selfish ambition and what I believe will save us all. Knowing how great God’s love is strengthens us on the inside, making us capable of handling whatever comes on the outside. 

With this resilience, we can walk in this world no longer afraid of people or God because we know the cross has purchased us perfect love:

Such love has no fear, because perfect love expels all fear. If we are afraid, it is for fear of punishment, and this shows that we have not fully experienced his perfect love. [19] We love each other because he loved us first. 

1 John 4:18-19 NLT

The love of God quiets the noise and complexity of life, leaving us satisfied:

My heart is not proud, LORD, my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. [2] But I have calmed and quieted myself, I am like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child I am content. [3] Israel, put your hope in the LORD both now and forevermore. 

Psalm 131:1-3 NIV

This is how we move from a disordered life to a beautiful one.

This brings us back to our hypothesis: Selfish ambition produces spiritual disorder and social decay, but spiritual ambition rooted in God’s love creates peace, humility, and healing.

To be continued…

This is where we will leave our scientific method today. Next week, we will run an experiment to learn how to transform selfish ambition into spiritual ambition. 

As we await the next installment of this three-part newsletter, reflect on these questions:

• How have you seen selfish ambition in your life? How do you see it in the world?
• Why do you think it’s helpful and even hopeful to identify selfish ambition in our own lives and in the world around us?
• What would taking the first steps of humility look like for you?
• How can God’s love keep you secure in the coming weeks?

As always, I would love to hear from you. 

Reply or reach out

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