God Looks At The Motive (Daily Devotional)

Greetings! and thank you for giving us this opportunity to come to you and spend some time with you in God's word and pray together. This week, we want to focus on a very simple topic from the word of God and yet a very important topic. Something that perhaps we don't pay attention to too much, we want to talk about motives, the motives of our hearts. Today, we will look at 1 Corinthians chapter 4 and verse five, the apostle Paul writes, he says, ‘therefore judge nothing before the time, until the Lord comes, who will both bring to light the hidden things of darkness and reveal the counsels of the hearts. Then each one's praise will come from God.’ So, the apostle Paul is writing to the believers at Corinth and of course he is addressing a church matter where people are divided, some are supporting Paul, some are supporting Apollos, some are supporting Peter and because of this there are these divisions in the church and so Paul is addressing that. As he goes about addressing those divisive matters, he highlights something very important, he tells the people, he says, don't judge things before the time because the Lord is coming and when the Lord comes, He will bring to light the hidden things of darkness and things that we can keep secret, God will bring to light and He will reveal the counsels of the hearts. The King James says the motives of the hearts, the word counsel there literally means the motives of the hearts, then each one's praise will come from God. So what Paul is telling us here is that the way God will judge things is He will evaluate the motives with which the things were done. So, we as people, we only look at the outward things, we look at the magnitude of things, how big things are, we may look at how grand things are, we may look at how nicely things are done and all of that is fine, but the real way God judges our hearts, the real way God looks at things is He evaluates the motives. For instance, as a preacher of the word of God, how will God evaluate me? He's not going to evaluate me by how many sermons I have preached, but He's going to judge me by the motives with which I preached them. God is not going to evaluate me, for example, not by how many people came, but He's going to judge me by the motives with which I preached to those people. So, God is going to look at the motives with which we do things. And so, we ourselves need to begin very importantly to start and do things with the right motives and that's what we want to focus on through this week, that we will understand the importance of having the right motives in doing what we are doing. If all of us will start with the right motives in the works we do, the things we do, in our dreams, in our plans, in our activity, then we know that what we do will be pleasing to God and it will stand the test of fire and there will be the mark of God's approval on what we do. So, the very important truth we want to take away today is this God judges us according to the motives of our hearts. The motivation, the why with which we do the things we do. Let's pray, Father, we ask that you will help us have pure motives, to guard our motives even as we go about life and do all the things that we do and have our plans and our dreams. Let the motivations of our heart be pleasing in your eyes, in Jesus’ name, Amen.

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Daily devotions to strengthen your faith each day. Daily Devotional for Spirit filled living. Each daily devotion is about five minutes in duration. These daily devotionals are centered around a weekly theme. So there are seven daily devotions that focus on the theme and bring you insight, understanding and revelation from the Bible. Each week's theme is listed as a series. So you can listen to the current week's devotions or go to any previous theme/series that speaks to your present need (https://apcwo.org/resources/daily-devotions ). Also available free sermons (https://apcwo.org/sermons), and free Christian books (https://apcwo.org/books) to nourish and strengthen your faith.