“Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart Be acceptable in Your sight, O LORD, my strength and my Redeemer.” Psalm 19:14
“Your motive is wrong,” the Spirit of God spoke to me early one morning as I sat typing away at my keyboard. Once again, I had been trying to write something. The same thing I had tried writing before. In fact, the same thing I had tried to write over and again. Oh, sure, sometimes it was guised in one writing piece. Sometimes in another. But the same theme kept appearing. And, no matter how much I tried in my mind to justify what I was writing, at some point in the writing, up would pop exactly what the Lord was referring to.
What? My wrong motive! In plain English, my heart was not pure. And, no matter how much I might have been able to convince those reading the writing that what I wrote came from a clean heart, the truth was my heart was not pure. My heart was not clean. My heart was not pleasing to the Lord as far as that wrong motive was concerned. Clearly, I needed to repent of it. For nothing is more important in the universe than being clean and pure and pleasing to the Lord.
My friend, we can fool ourselves. We can fool the world. But we can’t fool God. He sees right down to our innermost being. He sees our thoughts, our feelings, our desires, our yearnings and longings, our plans and agendas, our absolutely everything, including our motives. And when our motives are wrong, they need to be repented of. We need to seek His forgiveness, we need to acknowledge what is wrong and switch tracks so our hearts, and our lives, are honoring to God.
Please check your motives. I have the strongest sense someone reading this has convinced himself or herself he or she is headed down the right path. But remember no matter how acceptable our actions might seem, to ourselves, and even to others, our hearts and our motives within them are vitally important also. The Lord may or may not lead us by His Spirit to go ahead with an action we are considering, or even to continue with something we are already doing, but may we do whatever that is with the right motive, most importantly to bring Him glory. And, if our actions along with our motives are wrong, may we repent and follow His Spirit’s lead as He directs us as He desires in going forth. Amen? Amen!