Runaway Train

3 They said to each other, "Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly." They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves…" - Gen 11:3-4 (NIV)

   
It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on. - Gal 5:19-21 (THE MESSAGE)

 
3 Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. 4 Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others. - Phil 2:3-4 (NIV)


     Ambition has gotten out of control in our generation.  We’ve somehow given it a diplomatic immunity status, garnered as the character trait to have if success is the goal.  When the teens of our culture are labeled as ambitious, the wide birth of blind eyes and forgiveness is immeasurable.  Somehow the rules have changed.  As long as ambition is at the epicenter of just about anything, it’s accepted as OK.
     Funny thing, I can’t seem to find anything in scripture to support this spirit of competition thriving in any pursuit outside that of becoming like Jesus, or running the race “for the prize of the high calling.”  There’s definitely a purpose and a place for it, but we’ve consistently misappropriated it to fit our own game.  I like how Eugene Peterson transcribed Gal. 5, when he wrote:  “…cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival…”  This sort of widens the field of what “good, healthy competition” is not.  If Jesus lived a full 3.5 years of intense ministry without any recorded traces of self-entitlement, what makes it socially accepted for us, His followers?  Just as with the Tower of Babel visionaries who believed in the onward-and-upward philosophy, the end result of our self-achieving pursuits somehow always end up morphing into a desire for unlimited power and control, to become like God.  This is where the half-truth deception seamlessly creeps in.  Becoming like Jesus is not the same as becoming god-like.  As a matter of fact, they are the polar opposites of each other.  One is built on selfless motivations while the other is consumed with selfish ones. 
     Several years ago, I met the bus at 1:00 a.m. for a week-long run during one of the 4Him tours.  Even though it was late, I couldn’t sleep with the burden I was carrying.  After witnessing everything I just described infiltrating the Christian Music community, it really jacked me up.  It was as if I encountered a season of disturbed clarity.  I didn’t like where I saw us, as an industry, heading.  Somewhere along the way we’d picked up the ambition to someday make the world accept us; to give us their stamp of artistic approval in order to somehow legitimize what God was creating through us.  Since when did we see the need for that sort of highly unscriptural credibility?  Where did we feel the urgency to jump on a train that is clearly running out of control?  These were some of the overwhelming questions careening through my skull that night.  So, I stayed up and wrote this song.