Motives
From the Series—M6
January 15, 2004This evotional continues our M6 series. We’re exploring three themes in Matthew 6—secrets, motives, and priorities.
Last week’s evotional focused on the ancient spiritual discipline of secrecy. And I gave you a simple assignment: do something for somebody without anybody knowing it.
I’m not going to tell you what our family did, but afterwards, my six year-old Summer said, “That was the funnest thing I’ve ever done.” When you give in secret you will experience a joy in giving that cannot be experienced any other way! And if you didn’t get a chance to put that principle into practice last week let me encourage you to do it this week. Do something for somebody without anybody knowing it.
Four Prescriptions
A few years ago I read a great story about Arthur Gordon titled “The Turn of the Tide.” It’s a story about his spiritual renewal. He went through a season of life where he seemed to flat line. He lost his energy and enthusiasm for life. And he felt like he was at a stalemate spiritually.
Gordon actually went to see a medical doctor and his doctor couldn’t find any physical problems, but he asked if he’d be willing to follow his instructions for a day. Gordon said he would and the doctor told him to spend the next day where he was happiest as a child. He told Gordon he couldn’t read or write. He wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone or listen to anything. Then the doctor wrote out four prescriptions and told him to open one at nine AM, one at Noon, one at three o’clock in the afternoon, and one at six PM.
Arthur Gordon spent the following day at the beach. At nine AM he opened the first prescription. It said, “Listen Carefully.” At first he thought his doctor was crazy. How can you listen for three hours? But after three hours of listening to the sound of the waves and the birds and the silence he felt like it recalibrated his spirit.
At noon he opened the next prescription. It said, “Try Reaching Back.” He spent the next three hours reflecting on his life.
At three o’clock in the afternoon he opened the third prescription. It said, “Examine your motives.” At first he was sort of defensive, but eventually he just took a deep look at why he did what he did.
At six o’clock he opened the fourth and final prescription. It said, “Write Your worries in the sand.” He took a broken seashell and wrote his worries in the sand. By the time he finished the tide was coming in and it literally washed away his worries.
I don’t think it’d hurt any of us to spend a day and take those four prescriptions, but this evotional focuses on the third prescription: examine your motives. It was during that three hour period that Arthur Gordon experienced a breakthrough. He said, “In a flash of certainty I realized that if one’s motives are wrong, nothing can be right.”
That is Matthew 6 in a nutshell. Matthew 6 is all about motives— why you do what you do. And if your motives are wrong nothing can be right. Behavior— what you do —is important. But what you do is not nearly as important as why you do what you do. In God’s economy, if you do the right thing for the wrong reason it doesn’t count. T.S. Eliot said, “The last temptation is the great treason: to do the right thing for the wrong reason.”
Reward
Matthew 6:4 says, “Your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” Jesus says the same exact thing in Matthew 6:6 and Matthew 6:18. So Jesus repeats himself three times and seven times in these first eighteen verses of Matthew 6 he talks about “reward.”
I think one common misconception when it comes to seeking and serving God is that we shouldn’t do what we do for God because of what He’ll do for us. And on one level it seems disingenuous to do something for someone because of what you expect to get in return. But I want to challenge our thinking because when I read Matthew 6, I don’t see Jesus shying away from this idea of reward. Seven times Jesus says you need to do what’s right not just because it’s right but because you will be rewarded by your Father in heaven.
Hebrews 11:6 is a linchpin in my theology. It says, “Without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and he rewards those who earnestly seek him.” To remove reward from our relationship with God is to ignore the character of God—He is a rewarder of those who earnestly seek Him. God loves to reward us when we do what’s right. Or another way of saying it is you can’t do what’s right and not be rewarded for it.
Win/Win
Here is the fundamental mistake I think many people make in the way they view God. They think of a relationship with God in win/lose instead of win/win terms. Let me share one of my personal convictions.
I don’t think there is any such thing as sacrifice for a follower of Christ. I’ll be the first person to say that Jesus calls us to “deny ourselves” and “take up our cross” and “lose our lives so we can find them.” And we certainly experience “temporary loss.” But I don’t think we sacrifice anything.
On December 4, 1857, the famous missionary David Livingstone gave a speech at Cambridge University. He said, “People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. Away with the word in such a view. Say rather it is a privilege. Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger now and then with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life; All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall be revealed in and for us. I never made a sacrifice.”
Here’s a question: if you always get back more than you give up have you sacrificed anything at all? Martyred missionary Jim Elliot said it best. “He is no fool who loses what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”
Let me push the envelope a little further. If you were to always act in your greatest self-interest you would always obey God. That’s what I mean by win/win. You can’t do what’s right and not experience the rewards that come with it. A relationship with God is the ultimate win/win relationship.
I like the way Flannery O’Connor talked about sin. “Don’t assume that renunciation is good in itself. Always you renounce a lesser good for a greater; the opposite is what sin is.” Sin is settling for anything less than the glory of God. Sin is short-changing yourself and God.
Romans 3:23 says, “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” The way we “fall short” is by settling for something less than God or being motivated by something less than God’s glory. We settle for money or sex or fame when we could have something so much better. I think John Piper is right. “All sin comes from not putting supreme value on the glory of God.”
Natural Instincts
We all have natural instincts or biological needs like food and sleep and sex. Those needs vary from person to person in terms of intensity, but we all need food and sleep to survive and all of us have a God-given sex drive. And those things are good.
God is the one who created a world with all kinds of different foods with different tastes and I for one am grateful. Last week Lora and I had dinner at Ruth Chris. We don’t get to eat there very often, but someone gave us a gift certificate. It’s hard to describe, but when I eat at Ruth Chris Steakhouse it is a spiritual experience. And I’m not kidding. When the waiters walk by with sizzling steak and I can smell the butter sauce I just mutter a “hallelujah” under my breath! By the time the evening is over it’s like a “hallelujah chorus.”
I genuinely thank the Lord for filet mignon with extra butter sauce. I genuinely thank the Lord for caramelized banana deserts. What I’m trying to say is this: food is good.
Sleep is good. Sex is good. Sex is God’s gift to a husband and a wife. Those natural instincts or biological needs are good. It’s the way God has wired us. But here’s where it gets interesting. Some people live their entire lives on a biological level obeying natural instincts . And that’s not good.
Creatures of Instinct
Jude 18 says, “In the last times there will be scoffers who follow their own ungodly desires.” And then it says they “follow mere natural instincts and do not have the spirit.” The NLT says, “They live by natural instinct because they do not have God’s spirit living in them.”
What you have in this passage is two levels of existence: a biological level and a spiritual level. II Peter 2:12 calls people who live their lives on a biological level “creatures of instinct.”
The bottom line is this: God doesn’t want us to live our lives on a biological level. He wants us to live our lives on a spiritual level. He doesn’t want us to live our lives on a temporal level. He wants us to live our lives on an eternal level. And that’s what Jesus calls us to.
The highest and purest form of motivation is when we do what we do for God. We don’t live our lives for the applause of others. We live our lives for an Audience of One—the God who created us.
Treasure
The first eighteen verses talk about rewards and it culminates in verse 18. “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is there your heart will be also.”
Several years ago I heard about a fascinating sociological survey that interviewed 50 people over the age of 95. This group with approximately 5,000 years of life experience was asked one question: if you had to do it all over again what would you do differently? There were lots of different answers, but three responses seemed to be pretty consistent across the board. They said they’d risk more, reflect more, and they’d do more things that live on after they die.
That third response is profound. They would do more things that live on after they die. That’s what Jesus is talking about in Matthew 6:18.
Eternity
Blaise Pascal said, “Our mind so magnifies the present that we are constantly thinking about it, and so reduces eternity, because we do not think about it, that we turn eternity into nothing and nothing into eternity.”
In his book, Seven Secrets to Spiritual Success, Wood Kroll shares something that could revolutionize your life if you put it into practice. He begins everyday at the Judgment Seat of Christ. Kroll says, “In 1973 I decided I needed to begin every day at the judgment seat. After all, if everything we enjoy for all eternity is awarded at the judgment seat of Christ, shouldn’t we know now what the Lord is looking for in our lives, rather than wait until then, when it’s too late? Makes sense to me. So everyday I start there and work backward.”
Here’s the bottom line. Matthew 6:20 ought to be the driving motivation of our lives: to store up treasures in heaven. The New Year is a time to go back to basics. And here’s the bottom line: only one life will soon be past and only what’s done for Christ will last.
Pure Eye
Matthew 6:22 says, “You eye is a lamp for you body. A pure eye lets sunshine into your soul.” Titus 1:15 says the same thing in a slightly different way. “To the pure all things are pure, but to those who are corrupted and do not believe nothing is pure.” Motivation comes back to the purity of our hearts.
John Merrick was born in 1863 with a medical condition known as neurofibromatosis. In short, John Merrick may have been the most deformed human being in history. At the age of four he was abandoned by his mother. At the age of fourteen a traveling carnival turned him into a human freak show. He was treated like a circus animal. People would pay to get into the show and then shriek in horror when they saw him.
One day a surgeon named Frederick Treves wandered into the carnival, paid a shilling to watch the show, and could hardly believe what he saw. Treves said, “He was the most disgusting specimen of humanity that I have ever seen.”
Dr. Treves arranged to have John Merrick examined and here is his detailed description of Merrick’s deformities: a bony mass protruding from his brow; spongy skin; a misshapen head the circumference of a man’s waist; the mouth a distorted slobbering aperture; the nose a dangling lump of skin; his right arm overgrown to twice its normal size, its fingers stubby and useless; and deformed legs that can not support his body weight.
After the examination, Treves tried to communicate with Merrick but because of his mouth deformities, Merrick’s speech was unintelligible. Treves assumed he was an imbecile. Treves gave him his card, told him to contact him if he could be of assistance, and returned him to the custody of the carnival.
Several years later, the police found Merrick in a dark corner at a London train station muttering words they couldn’t understand. But they found a card with the name of Dr. Frederick Treves. They notified him and Treves found Merrick huddled in a corner whimpering like a little baby. He took him back to the hospital and ordered a tray of food, but when the nurse who delivered it screamed when she saw Merrick, dropped the tray, and ran out of the room.
Over time the hospital staff became accustomed to the sight and Treves learned to decipher Merrick’s speech. He discovered that Merrick was anything but an imbecile. In fact, he was a voracious reader of Scripture. Treves took care of Merrick the rest of his life.
One day he arranged for a woman to enter his room, smile at him, wish him a good morning, and shake his hand. Treves said, “The effect upon Merrick was not quite what I had expected. As he let go of her hand he bent his head on his knees and sobbed until I thought he would never cease. He told me afterwards that this was the first woman who had ever smiled at him , and the first woman in his whole life, who had shaken hands with him.” Treves said it was a turning point. “He began to change little by little from a hunted thing into a man.”
Treves arranged to smuggle Merrick into private boxes of London theaters to see plays. He gave him books to read. And he introduced him to the world of nature. Merrick loved to listen to songbirds, flush rabbits, and pick wildflowers. Treves said that to each new experience Merrick responded by saying, “I am happy every hour of the day.”
John Merrick, better known as The Elephant Man, died at twenty-seven years of age, but not before inspiring those who could look past his deformities and see his heart.
You’ve already read Dr. Treves’ description of John Merrick’s physical deformities. Listen to his description of John Merrick’s soul. “His troubles have ennobled him. He showed himself to be a gentle, affectionate and lovable creature without a grievance and without an unkind word for anyone. I have never heard him complain. I have never heard him deplore his ruined life or resent the treatment he had received at the hands of callous keepers.”
Treves was absolutely mystified by Merrick. He was robbed of his childhood. He was treated like a wild beast. Yet he emerged with such a pure heart. John Merrick wrote a poem that he would often recite to guests.
Tis true my form is something odd
But blaming me is blaming God
Could I create myself anew
I would not fail in pleasing you
If I could reach from pole to pole
I would be measured by the soul
Was John Merrick deformed? Or was John Merrick what all of us should aspire to? He was abandoned by his own mother. He was treated like a wild beast. But “a pure eye lets sunshine into the soul.” May your life be measured by the size of your soul.
Everyone’s life is full of bumps and bruises, but I’m not sure any of our lives even begin to approximate the mental and spiritual and emotional anguish that John Merrick endured. Merrick most certainly walked through valleys of doubt and despair like all of us, but somehow he was able to say, “I am happy every hour of the day.”
The Apostle Paul had an impressive resume of pain and suffering, but he said in Philippians 4:12, “I know what it is to be in need and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation.” If your motives are right you can’t go wrong!
Mixed Motives
I think I do just about everything with mixed motives. On my worst days I’m just like the hypocrites in this passage who do what they do to be seen by men. In other words, praise me. But on my best days I’m pretty close to doing what I do for the God—praise God. Usually I’m somewhere in between.
I’m not sure where you land on that motivational spectrum between “praise me” and “praise God,” but I hope you’re moving towards “praise God.”
That brings us back to the ancient discipline of secrecy. One way to move towards “praise God” is to practice secrecy—give in secret, pray in secret, and fast in secret. Do something for somebody without anybody knowing it. Find a secret place to be alone with God. Begin the New Year with a secret fast.