There is a particular kind of creative ambition that is not obviously wrong. It does not look like ego. It looks like caring about quality, wanting your work to reach more people, wanting to grow a platform that can do more good. All of those things can be true and can coexist with a quieter, more insidious pull: the pull to make the work ultimately about yourself. To let your name become the point. To measure the value of what you create by how much it reflects back on you. That is a direction that starts subtly and rarely announces itself honestly.
John 3:30 is John the Baptist at his clearest: “He must become greater; I must become less.” John had influence. Real influence: crowds, disciples, a ministry that prepared the way for Jesus Himself. And at the height of it, he said: this is not about me. The whole point of my influence is to point to someone else. That level of clarity about calling is rare, and it does not happen by accident. It comes from someone who has genuinely settled the question of whose story this is.
As a creative, your work can carry the same orientation. A filmmaker who uses their platform not to build a following but to direct attention to the stories of people who have no voice. A designer whose visual language consistently points toward truth and beauty rather than toward their own cleverness. A writer whose deepest goal is not to be admired for the prose but for the reader to walk away changed by what they encountered in it. This kind of influence is rooted in humility and clarity of calling, and it tends to last longer and reach deeper than its alternative.
The irony is that influence aimed at lifting God higher often ends up carrying more genuine weight than influence aimed at personal elevation. Because people can sense the difference between someone who is using their work to become something and someone who is using their work to serve something. The second kind draws people not toward the creator but toward what the creator is pointing at. And what you point toward is ultimately what defines the legacy of your creative life.
Let your influence be shaped today by the desire to lift Him higher. Not as a performance of humility, but as a genuine orientation of your work toward the One who is worth pointing people toward. That shift changes everything about how you create and why.