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Thursday 11 November 2010

Mr Motivator

I was talking to a friend today about the motivation that drives us to do the things we do. More so the good things rather than the bad things. Its fairly clear (I think) why we do things that are harmful to us. Normally its because they are fun, pleasurable. It may only be short term but for a while at least, they make us feel good. I think that's why its so easy to get addicted to things. Things like smoking, getting drunk, taking drugs, looking at porn, making fun of other people...they all make us feel good, but that quickly goes away, and we need then to do them again in order to feel good again.

But that's not really what we were talking about. We were talking about our motivation for doing good. And sometimes we don't think about that. We assume if we do something good, or if we can make someone else do something good, it doesn't matter how or why we get them to do it.

Generally (and I am stereotyping here) Christians do things for one of two reasons; Guilt - that is they feel bad about the situation in Africa, or see someone else doing something good and feel they need to do something too. And Fear - I don't want to go to hell, I don't want my friends to go to hell, so I better do something in order to avoid becoming eternal firewood.

I think the Church generally likes to use these two feelings in order to get people to act a certain way. Recently I heard someone preaching. The preacher said someone had asked him if it was okay to date a non-Christian. The preacher said he felt it was a bad idea, to which the questioner responded; "But she's hot." Preachers response was; "So is hell!" At this point everyone laughed apart from myself and a couple of other people. I don't know whats worse, we use fear of eternal punishment to scare people into living a certain way, or the fact that we can laugh at a joke like this, whilst believing that people will actually go to a place of eternal conscious torment. I find it kinda weird.

But anyway, I don't think I believe that God wants to scare us or make us feel guilty. I think that God is my daddy, and I think my daddy truly wants whats best for me. I believe he loves me unconditionally, that any act of inherent good I do is not done in order to retain my salvation, or pay God back for what he has done for me, but rather that with every decision I make, I want to be the highest possible form of me I can be at any particular point in time.

Imagine if evangelism teams were not teams who went about handing out calendars! As I joked today;

"Here have a calender with a picture of my Church on it! Thats how much I love you, enough to give you a calender!"

Seriously! Is that the best we can do? Maybe if through the unconditional love of God, we learn to unconditionally love others, and live as the highest form of ourselves, maybe then rather than having to scare people into following Jesus, we will be able to offer them a beautiful lifestyle of love and compassion that attracts them to us, and to Him.

Anyway, thanks for the inspiration (you know who you are) and the space to think this through...the coffee was good too!

I spotted this online today. I think its a true example of the kingdom of God here on earth, that's what we want, right?

http://xxxchurch.com/getinvolved/index/blog/jesuslovespornstarsespeciallyjessielee.html


I don't know about you, but I have not been given a spirit of fear, and I want my motivation to come from the love bestowed upon me by my daddy.