Proclaimer Blog
Motives: “making a thorough search”
Part of putting sin to death is putting sinful motives to death. It’s hard, for we are not always good assessors of our own motives, nor do we want to put in the hard work of addressing this kind of sin. But we must. Otherwise we run the risk of being righteous for the wrong reasons, and we know what God’s word says about that (Matthew 6.1). It counts for nothing at all before God.
These sobering words have got me thinking about how precisely I tackle motives. Here’s what my friend and I are trying. This may seem a bit formulaic to you; but we’re hoping it might help us make progress. Each day, as part of our devotions, we’re taking just one thing from the previous day – one apparently righteous action or one word, and then we’re honestly and prayerfully trying to assess what good motives were at work and what sinful ones. Then we’re committed to confessing our sinful motives and asking God to deal with them.
So, maybe this is a little programmatic – and to be honest, it feels at the moment a little programmatic to me too. But we have to start somewhere and we know the place to start is in the heart. In his great work, The Mortification of sin, John Owen explains the danger of missing this great truth:
“This is a deceit that lies at the root of peace of many professors and wastes it. They deal with all their strength about mercy and pardon and seem to have great communion with God in their doing so; they lie before him, bewailing their sin and their folly, that anyone would think, yea they think themselves, that surely they and their sins are now parted; and so receive mercy that satisfies their hearts for a little season. But when a thorough search comes to be made, there has been some secret reserve for the folly or follies treated about – at least there has not been that thorough abhorrency of it which is necessary; and their whole peace is quickly discovered to be weak and rotten, scarce abiding any longer than the words of begging it are in their mouths.”