Listen, my friends! When you are teaching, singing, preaching, praying, counseling, or even performing behind the scenes critical and necessary duties in the church, make sure your motive is right! Definitely use your gifts, abilities, and capabilities that the Lord blessed you with, but make sure your motive is to point others to heaven and not to yourself. Make sure you are not operating under the motif of gaining praise but do what you do from the sincerity of your heart and with the help of the Holy Spirit to ensure that the praises go to heaven. Don’t worry about what people see or say. Look! Heaven knows! Your Father sees ya!
Was this a short meditation toward the end of the week? Yes, but it is a sure teaching related to the question around motive or motif. Have a great day! Be blessed!
“When you do something for someone else, don’t call attention to yourself. You’ve seen them in action, I’m sure—‘playactors’ I call them—treating prayer meeting and street corner alike as a stage, acting compassionate as long as someone is watching, playing to the crowds. They get applause, true, but that’s all they get. When you help someone out, don’t think about how it looks. Just do it—quietly and unobtrusively. That is the way your God, who conceived you in love, working behind the scenes, helps you out. And when you come before God, don’t turn that into a theatrical production either. All these people making a regular show out of their prayers, hoping for fifteen minutes of fame! Do you think God sits in a box seat?” (Matthew 6:1-5 The Message Bible)
Committed to the climb,
Mark L. King
That’s an interesting approach to self-motivation. Am I doing things just for the accolades or am I doing things unto the Lord for His glorification. I can confidently say that my motives are to glorify the Father. Prayerfully that will never change.
That’s a perfect motive, one that should reach every area of life. Be blessed!