Motives and the Heart

Matthew 6:1

Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven.

A. Orendorff

Motives matter. As Tom Wright points out, “What matters [when it comes to “practicing your righteousness”] is learning to do [it] simply to and for God himself. All the Sermon on the Mount, in fact, is centred on God himself, who easily gets squeezed out of religion if we’re not careful” (55). Who we aim to please, in other words, is a far more fundamental question than what we actually do. The second—what we do—will inevitably flow out the first—who we aim to please. If my aim—i.e., the motive of my heart—is to please my wife, to, as Jesus says, “practice my righteousness” before her that I might be seen and appreciated, then one of two things will inevitably happen. One, I will either fail to please her, stumble in my righteous practice, and be crushed by defeat or, two, I will slowly but surely begin to accommodate what I do and who I am to fit her expectations and desires, thereby pushing God, as Wright says, more and more to the periphery.

While pleasing one’s wife (as well as the other people in a person’s life) is a good thing, when it becomes an ultimate thing it warps and perverts our motives such that we stop worshipping God and begin to worship an idol. God must be God in order for our motives and therefore our hearts to be pleasing in his sight. And (most wonderfully) it is there that the greatest reward lies.