What Motivates You?

Motivation

What motivates you? What motivates you to seek God? What motivates you to live righteously? What motivates you to live on a budget, watch your health, spend time with your family, work hard to make money?

Finding proper motivation is what produces stress-free success.

What motivates you is a hugely important question. Marketing firms for television commercials and on the internet are highly interested in this. Anyone who does any public speaking is seeking to motivate people to something. Your relationship with yourself and God is a constant working out of proper motivation.

Accountability/Fear Motivation

A preacher sought to motivate:

“We’ll all stand before God and give an account one day. A woman who interceded daily for 40 years, crying out for family and neighbors, seeking only God and not materialism, will have a good reward. A hard working couple who got the right education, the right job, earned well and retired early may have lived a wasted life when they stand before God. It is time we embraced our calling to serve!”

Accountability, a fear of the consequences of standing before God having done very little for the His kingdom, are real things. They are not, however, God’s highest form of motivation. The law and its consequences do exist to keep a lid on bad behavior, but it will never produce intimacy with God. Galatians 4 does say we start out under “tutors and governors” but we are supposed to mature into a heart cry of “Abba Father.” In other words, we are supposed to mature into a passionate love for our Heavenly Father as the motive behind all that we do.

Only Love Matures

Walking with God is not a matter of being sufficiently                                                    convicted by a fear of consequences into maturity.

Walking with God is a matter of learning to truly, experientially love God and then growing in that love the rest of your life. Only in this manner can a person sell out to the purposes of God from a place of love rather than works. The minute my motivation slips back into fear I slip back into works, trying to establish my own righteousness.

Works

Rom.10:2-4 — For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For they being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and seeking to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted to the righteousness of God. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.

So what motivates you?