Proverbs 16:2
If
someone could invent a Motive Detector, they could make a mint. You could weed
out all the con artists of the world. Thieves would become a thing of the past.
Wave it over potential mates, politicians, babysitters, chaperones. We could
even wave it over ourselves, in private of course, just to check to see if our
motives were on track.
It
can be hard to know someone’s motives for doing what they do. I sometimes even
wonder about my own. Do I write this BLOG to get famous? I hope not, because
the few people who read it haven’t been very successful at getting the word
out! Why do we do some of the things we do? So often we don’t even consider why
we are doing something. We just do it out of habit.
Our
proverb gets to this very difficult hidden matter of motive and the fact that
sometimes our motives aren’t pure. The LORD isn’t fooled by this. He sees the
motives. Knowing our own motives means that we must slow down and take time to
think, reflect, pray, consider.
What
do we do if our motives are mixed, part of us doing something for the right
reasons, and part doing it for selfish reasons? We must either pray through the
selfish part, or find a way to accomplish the task in a different way that
eliminates the selfish side.
We
all have mixed motives at times. We all do things with selfish motives. We occasionally
do things with pure motives. We as humans are a mixed up lot.