Motives Guided by Love
Study Text: 1 Corinthians 16: 13 - 14
Introduction:
- The command to love is at the heart of what it means to be a Christian. Jesus preached that to love God and others are the greatest commands, and the call to live a life marked by love is a consistent message found throughout the Scriptures.
- We must do everything in love because it is an act of obedience to God, and this keeps our motives right, and guides us to be more like Jesus.
1. The Context of Our Message
2. The Command of Our Master
3. The Challenge of Our Motives
1. The Context of Our Message
- Believers are expected to act and make choices each day out of love that result in being patient, kind, and forgiving. They are to continue to live in ways that reflect obedience and trust in God by doing everything in love.
- Truly, doing everything in love holds our motives accountable to righteousness rather than selfish gain. When we do things out of love, that means we are not doing things out of selfish ambition, and this will help followers of Jesus to be more Christlike.
- What motivates you for Christ? Why do you serve Him, reach out to others, pray, or exercise spiritual gifts? The Bible says our chief motivation for living should stem from the presence of love.
- The only motive that will enable you to remain true is love, as stated in 2 Corinthians 5:14: “Christ’s love constraining [compelling] you will keep you faithful in every situation.”
- Love is the foremost motivation for our work for God and it was Christ’s foremost motivation for rescuing us. It was His primary incentive for entering this world that is infested with sins.
- Jesus said in John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
- You can contemplate the purpose of Christ becoming human from any imaginable angle but there’s only one answer for why He condescended to our lowly estate: He loved us.
- It was infinite agape love that motivated Jesus to live among men, work for our welfare, shoulder our burdens, and die for our sins. And it’s that divine love flowing through us that should inspire all our actions for Him, not ambition or the need for praise or recognition.
- Love should motivate everything we do. Our ambition should be for love to be our driving and compelling force to reach and touch others.
- Do you love with Christ’s eyes? Eyes that don’t see condemnation for the woman caught in adultery, but eyes that see a lonely, confused woman in need of forgiveness.
- Do you love with Christ’s ears? Ears responding to lepers and beggars: those that the society ignores. Do you love with Christ’s hands? With hands willing to touch the world’s rejected?
- Do you love with Christ’s feet? Feet willing to walk toward the stench of Samaria or into homes of tax collectors or before the demonized? Do you love with Christ’s reputation? Making yourself of no reputation and assuming servanthood?
2. The Command of Our Master
- Paul wrote this teaching to the church of Corinth to help them grow and deepen in spiritual maturity. And this same message can help believers today deepen faith and grow more spiritually mature, as well.
- When we do everything in love, we can walk in the ways that God would have us do so. Doing everything in love results in believers choosing righteousness and leaving behind sinfulness.
- Jesus did everything in love, by dying for the sins of all humankind. In our own lives, we may have to deny ourselves in order to do things out of love for God and others.
- It may not be easy, but this is the command of the Lord, and obedience to God to do everything in love, is never a choice we will regret, but the one we will be eternally blessed and be grateful to God for.
- God has called us to love, and this may look different each day and season in life. We can love because God first loved us 1 John 4:19.
- The following steps will help us in making love a dominating characteristic of our lives:
1. Give Priority to Love
- Indeed loving people is difficult. Yet this is what the Bible commands. 1 John 3:11.
- Even though we have the freedom to set our own priorities, Jesus made a point of defining certain ones of them for us: "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and most important commandment. The second is like it: 'Love your neighbour as yourself'" (Matt. 22:37-39).
- Jesus gave love priority over all other Christian virtues. Every thought, response, and act of goodwill must first pass through the fine filter of love, or it means nothing at all.
2. Understand the Significant Position of Love
- When Jesus spoke to the disciples regarding the first and second greatest commands, he explained that "All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands" (Matthew 22:40).
- Love fulfills the law, because if we truly love every person because he is a person, we will not desire to hurt or violate him or her, thus never break the law. God established love as the measure and guidance for obedience.
3. Distinguish yourself by Expression of Love
- When we demonstrate Christian love, it distinguishes believers from the rest of the world. Jesus goes on to say, "By this [love] all people will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another" (John 13:35).
- From the very beginning, God's plan was to develop a people that reflected His character. And what is His character? Love. "God is love, and the one who remains in love remains in God, and God remains in him. 1 John 4:16-17.
4. Demonstrate the Virtue of Love Continually
- We need to demonstrate the distinctiveness of Christian love continually by ensuring the following:
1. Love Values the Other Person
- Love acts for the benefit of others. God loved us not because we had something to offer him, but rather because He had something to offer us.
2. Love Without Restrictions
- In other words, love opens up its life to another person. It goes beyond sentimental feelings. It breaks down barriers. It exposes the heart.
3. Be Willing to Pay the Price for Love
- Christian love inevitably carries costs. Even when the cost is high, we can nevertheless count on God to bring fulfillment to His followers. True love always costs. If there is no cost there is no love.
- Jesus empowers us to do everything in love. We could never do this with our own strength or intent, but with God’s help, it becomes possible to show more love each day.
Matthew 5:43-45
- We are to show more love in our lives by praying for our enemies, by acting good and kind toward those who we do not think deserve it, and by letting our actions and words be motivated by love.
- There are countless ways that we can show more love each day. When we seek God’s guidance, He will show us how to love more.
- To do everything in love means to let love guide our thoughts, actions, and words. It means making choices each day that reflect obedience to Jesus and following His ways rather than our own.
- This will definitely results in walking in the path of becoming more like Jesus, who loved humanity unconditionally even unto death on the cross.
- Paul’s charge to the church of Corinth to do everything in love remains relevant to believers today. Let each of us live in such a way that we would do everything in love.
3. The Challenge of Our Motives
- Why do you do all the good things you do? Occasionally we need to sit back and introspect, asking ourselves some basic questions. And we need to answer them honestly.
- There are so many reasons people do what they do. So many motives for their actions and decisions. Some of these include:
1. Fear Motivation
- It is possible to do some things out of fear, or for fear of the unknown. But God has not given us the spirit of bondage to fear.
- When Paul disagreed with Barnabas over allowing John Mark to follow them on the missionary journey, it was out of fear of his misbehavior and hindering the mission work.
2. Guilt Motivation
- Guilt motivates many actions and decisions of people. For instance, Jonah accepted to go to Nineveh the second time out of the feeling of guilt, and not out of love for God or His people.
- No wonder he was not happy when the people repented and were forgiven by God.
3. Reward Motivation
- Some are only motivated by rewards or benefits that will come out of their actions.
- Do I do what I do for the reward? There are rewards. In fact you can get some of them in this life, and there is the reward in the life to come.
- God wants us to be motivated by love rather than rewards, such that, if there were no rewards, we will still do what we do faithfully and wholeheartedly.
4. Social Pressure Motivation
- Some give in to social or peer pressure to do what they do. It is a good thing to be challenged by others and to be influenced positively by them.
- But this will yield the right fruits if it is done out of love rather than competition or mere trying to match up.
- We have a subtle mixture of reasons for doing what we do. Any one of these in itself would be of questionable validity.
5. Love Motivation
- Love was that quality which marked the life of Jesus as being different from status quo religious living.
- It was what troubled the Pharisees and Scribes, who couldn’t understand Jesus having a friendly relationship with sinners, actually going into their homes and eating with them.
- They tried to discredit Him. After all, why should a religious person waste his time or her time on bad people? Doesn’t God love good people and hate bad people?
- Love is what undergirded all the life and ministry of Jesus. This is what He was trying to illustrate in His parables, as He talked about the shepherd who went out of his way to find the lost sheep, a woman who sought diligently for a lost coin, a father who waited and waited for a lost prodigal son to come home.
- God doesn’t love only those who are righteous. God’s heart is filled with love, not just for those who deserve it or have earned it by religious living.
- His love is not dependent on how religious are your activities. What He wants is to have a relationship with you and to help you have a relationship with others, relationships that are undergirded by love.
- Then the natural actions that emerge from that motivation have integrity. The good deed is more than an activity that is the product of fear, guilt, yearning for reward or social pressure.
Conclusion
In the end, the goal of the Christian life is love. The measure of our maturity is our love for God and our love for others. If we fail in our love we have missed what it means to be a Christian.
