Our Motivation

At Verve we have a 2011 reading plan through the New Testament and parts of the Old Testament.  (You can find it at our www.vervecatalysts.org site.) A ton of Ververs are doing it. If you aren’t, but want to join us, the year is still young – jump in!

So I’ve been thinking about the (weird) story we read this week in Acts 8 about Simon, who tried to pay for the Apostles to give him special abilities from God. The interesting thing in the story is that it seems like he wanted to do good things. He didn’t have evil intentions, but he did have misplaced motives. And we learn in the story that our motivation is critical.

The easiest thing to do is just do. But we need to examine why we do what we do. We need to make sure our motives are right.

One of the ways I’ve found I struggle with this is that I often do what I do because it’s the right thing to do. Is that the wrong motivation? Well, it’s certainly not the best one. The right motivation is love. The Bible teaches us that if we do what we do, but do it without love, the do we did is doo-doo.

Think about the good things you’re doing – what’s your motivation? Is it love? Or is the good you do really doo-doo?