9 Bible Verses about Holy Ambition

and to make it your ambition to live quietly and peacefully, and to mind your own affairs and work with your hands, just as we directed you,

“Strive to enter through the narrow door [force aside unbelief and the attractions of sin]; for many, I tell you, will try to enter [by their own works] and will not be able.

Do you not know that in a race all the runners run [their very best to win], but only one receives the prize? Run [your race] in such a way that you may seize the prize and make it yours!

But earnestly desire and strive for the greater gifts [if acquiring them is going to be your goal].And yet I will show you a still more excellent way [one of the choicest graces and the highest of them all: unselfish love].

Pursue [this] love [with eagerness, make it your goal], yet earnestly desire and cultivate the spiritual gifts [to be used by believers for the benefit of the church], but especially that you may prophesy [to foretell the future, to speak a new message from God to the people].

So it is with you, since you are so very eager to have spiritual gifts and manifestations of the Spirit, strive to excel in ways that will build up the church [spiritually].

Brothers and sisters, I do not consider that I have made it my own yet; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead,

I press on toward the goal to win the [heavenly] prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

Study and do your best to present yourself to God approved, a workman [tested by trial] who has no reason to be ashamed, accurately handling and skillfully teaching the word of truth.