Revenge, lust, ambition, pride, and self-will are too often exalted as the gods of man's idolatry; while holiness, peace, contentment, and humility are viewed as unworthy of a serious thought.

We celebrate hunger, not peace

We live in a time that celebrates ambition and hunger the way previous centuries celebrated virtue. Every success story we encounter is packaged as the triumph of relentless drive, of someone who wanted something badly enough to take it. The quieter achievements—the person who made peace with their limitations, or chose contentment over the next rung on the ladder—rarely make headlines. There's something deeply unsettling about that gap.

What's interesting is that Spurgeon identified a real trade-off we still face today. The explosive emotions and desires he lists—revenge, lust, ambition—they feel alive and urgent in ways that peace and humility simply don't. They demand action, they generate stories worth telling. You can film ambition. Contentment doesn't have the same narrative energy. So we end up pursuing the dramatic emotions partly because they feel more real, more like proof that we're actually alive and not just coasting.

The catch is that most people who achieve real, lasting satisfaction eventually describe something closer to Spurgeon's "worthier" list. They talk about finally letting go of something, about the strange relief of accepting themselves. But we usually have to burn through quite a bit of the other stuff first—or watch others do it—before that clicks.