Motivation

Thought provoking.

On one hand, I want to agree. How many times have I had someone justify their actions by telling me “Oh, but you know I meant well!”. Grrrrr! But my old folks had a saying (would that be a Talmud, too?) for that. They would retort back “But the road to hell is paved with good intentions!”.

But, and here is my but. (I can be a real goat, sometimes!)

I was suffering from a lack of trust stemming from a broken heart. I was performing for love. The years I did that, I got very sick. Every instant of every day, I was hyper-vigilant in that performance. But I was a broken cistern, and my actions did not hold water, and the ships I was attempting to float with those good motivations AND actions all kept sinking. My heart was good. My actions were good. BUT, somewhere between there and the bank, I was continuing to get robbed. The more desperately I tried to MAKE love work, the more I failed. Why?

I think that even though the motivation was good, and the actions were good, the METHOD was rotten. I was clearly using sin for my method. I was operating out of fear, guilt and shame. I was operating in the wrong spirit. I was being tempted; nay, BLACKMAILED BY, the desire to do good; to accomplish it through sin. Why? Because I had a broken heart, I had lost my trust. When that happened, I also lost the POWER to do good. At that point, I started working my way to heaven, and looking for love for all the wrong reasons. I ran out of power. Fast. In desperation, I turned to my tempter for more power TO DO GOOD, mind you. I did deals with the devil. I traded my gold for his dross. I had lost the peaceable fruits of righteousness, and was running on sheer terror. I was a small child whose parents had ceased to cover me. I tried to partner with God, but I did not know how to keep from getting trashed. Righteousness was not enough, even though I knew a good deal about it. I was just a child, and so I reaped the results of my parents’ sin. Against my will, mind you. I was afraid: even though I knew fear was a sin, I did not know how not to be afraid. How does a child rid herself of terror?

So I listened to accusation. It sounded legit. I knew I was failing, so I decided not to trust myself. I could experience on a daily basis the fact I could not trust others, and none of my prayers seemed to be getting through the ceiling any more, so I naturally concluded that even though I knew God was good, I was obviously alone. Trust in the trash. Rebellion, they say, is what a child goes into to self-protect against the abuse of authority figures. So my heart agreed with rebellion. I could see that if I left it up to them, I was going to die. I continued to always follow the rules, and was gooder than anybody else, even, but I did not trust. I tried not to take offense, but every time I ACTED properly, I got trashed even further. I figured I was just trash.

So I was an open door and the spirits just walked in and helped themselves. Against my will. All kinds of unholy things showed up to ‘help’ put fuel in my empty tank, so that I could get up and try to love one more day. Fear, a need to control, that rebellion again (I kept relying on rebellion so much to get me through the despair, I ended up with my dopamine levels seriously out of whack), suspicion, replay, perfectionism, self-pity (even though I resisted that one with all my might, as I had handed over the correct way to love myself, self pity told me that it was the only way I had left to ‘care’).

Death and destruction stalked my life. I loved tragic people, as I identified with them. I was surrounded with despair and tragedy and death. Time and again, I had to bury my heart. The spirit of suicide knocked on my door, too, and I had no way to keep it out. It was a direct super-natural intervention that saved me on that one. Halleluah!

A deep, deep spirit of rejection and abandonment lay at the bottom of it all. The more I tried to reach out, the more it failed. I knew that the occult was sin, but altered spirits of reality showed up anyway, to help me cope for one more minute in the form of escapism, shame, confusion, self-conflict, deep hurt, denial, depression, and the inability to give and receive love freely. I became seriously addicted to Dependent People, and lost my sense of my own identity and reality that way. The Self Stuff showed up: self bitterness, self sabotage, self consciousness, self doubt, self abasement and condemnation. Every once in a while, selfishness, self exaltation, false humility and self pity would make a run at me, for a ‘respite’. Attention on self is all self-idolatry.

Religious spirits held the whole mess in place. They kept me convinced that, as my heart was good (!) and my actions were exemplary (!) I could not see where I was messing up. It all looked like something else. Pride is the biggest religious spirit of all, and pride is what we use to cover our shame.

Why am I witnessing here? I am trying to share a cautionary tale.

ALL of the above are dead works. They are works worked THROUGH my heart that were out to destroy me, to kill me. They almost did. The human spirit-mind-body can only stand so much abuse; so much torment. I did not invent any of the above junk. It showed up in my life full-blown from the head of Zeus (so to speak). I remember vividly the instant fear jumped on me, and instantly educated me in all its ways and thinking. I know I did not make fear up. When the Bible talks about a spirit of fear, I can tell you that it is.

When I cried out to the Lord, then He healed me. He showed up in His mercy and gave me an education; the same education I am trying to share here. I had to go find and repent all those unholiness wrong spirits. I have tried to list a few of the worst ones I found operating in my life AS IF THEY WERE ME. They were not. I was made and pronounced very good by my Abba. They were spirits from hell. When I repented for entertaining them, and repented for believing the LIES that let them in, and replaced those lies by going back and finding the Truth in that Good Word, those crispy critters had to flee. When they tried to convince me they belonged, I hid behind my Saviour and told them I was going to sic my Daddy on them, and don’t come back. Especially FEAR!

Now that they are gone, it is real quiet in my real estate. I can think the thoughts I choose to think, listen to the sweet Voice I was blocked from hearing by all of the above, and am free to do good works, for the right reasons, and IN THE RIGHT WAY! Halleluah! Hurray for the righteousness of Christ! This is the right power source to plug into for the fuel to run my day. My own adrenaline, activated by fear and performance, is a poor substitute! Finally, my actions of love are starting to produce the peacable fruits of righteousness. The right Power Source is the real key to my life.

My point is that if I am POWERED by the wrong motivations, I can still be sunk. If I kiss the boss’s donkey because I have a fear of man, then I don’t think he is going to feel the love of God. Even animals can pick up on this difference! I don’t think God is going to be fooled, either, and, judging by the level of fear I was operating under, I think I always did know when my foundation was rotten.

I don’t think what you said was wrong, Skip, but I also will tell you that understanding what you said about just doing good stuff, which I clearly did know, even as a child, was not enough to make love work for me, much less keep me safe. There is a reason why we need to be protected from the sins of the heart, which is why I think Yeshua preached the Sermon on the Mount. Rottenness in the heart will always bear evil fruit. I think I have learned that that’s the real order of operations. Amen. Halleluah for Salvation in the here and now!

I have often been in the position of knowing there was a right way to treat someone, and I didn’t want to do it because my attitude was bad. But when I stepped out and did what I knew to be right, even with a grudging heart, somehow, in the process of doing the thing, I typically found my heart attitude was changed. Right action, even with a wrong heart attitude, will bring a positive result — sometimes for the doer with a bad attitude, as well as the recipient of the right action.

On the other hand, there are some living beings we must treat with caution, even (or maybe especially) when they need help. If I came upon a wounded animal, and the animal tried to bite me when I went to help, should I continue with my help in spite of real risk to myself? Of course not! I would look for other means of helping the hurting beast. Sometimes, in Christian ethics, we confuse a responsibility to help with “laying your life down for another,” or “turning the other cheek.” People are told to trust God, and then they end up doing ridiculous things that put themselves at risk in the name of Christian love.

Help – in some circumstances – is a detriment to the working of God in a person’s life. Loving our enemies does not mean that we bring the “enemy” into our bosom to give them a better aim at stabbing our heart! Love, as read in 1 Cor.13, is only a partial definition. Love includes holding people accountable, chastisement when needed, and sometimes letting a person hit bottom as a consequence of their actions, before we offer a hand up. Those who are not in a position to defend themselves — young children, the physically feeble, those who are developmentally delayed, or the mentally deranged — require our immediate response when at risk. But let’s not confuse these parties with the person who has learned to prey upon Christian conscience and take advantage of it. I don’t think that is Skip’s point when he says to love our neighbor.