Perseverance (Part 2 of 5) - Adopt The Heart Motive Of Jesus

We began a series of blogs last week on perseverance.  It may surprise you that one of the biggest keys in persevering is to have the right Christ-like motive in everything we do.  

We live in an hour where motives are very questionable among politicians, corporations, and even among so-called Christians and Christian leaders.  

We need to have a pure heart and motives.  We need a transforming motive that will work through our lives like yeast, until it permeates everything we do.  This kind of motive has eternal meaning and opens the door to answered prayer and anointed ministry.  It gives us Christlike courage.  It helps keep you going when the going gets tough.  It is the heart motive of Jesus.  That motive was His burning desire to bring glory to His Father.  

Perseverance must have motivation that keeps us going in the hard places.  If a train is already stopped, a tiny block of wood in front of a wheel can keep it stopped.  But if the train has already built up momentum and is moving at high speed, not even a brick wall built across the track can stop it.  It has unstoppable momentum. We must have that same kind of momentum in place because of our motivation.  

Jesus had some barricades to His obedience.  He would be betrayed, denied, falsely accused, rejected, tortured, blasphemed, and murdered.  Yet, his obedient love for the Father was unstoppable.  He had momentum built from His motive that would propel Him and carry Him to the resurrection and exaltation.  He had a controlling motivation that must be ours, as well.  

It’s too late to look for this motivation when things get hard.  It must already be inside of us and cannot diminish when we pass through despair, confusion, or a terrible attack of the enemy.  We must have the heart of Jesus.  He wasn’t into self-glorification.  He had love for the Father and a burning desire to bring glory to the Father at any cost.  

It’s important that we do not want to sing, testify, preach, or even win people to Jesus, just to bring glory to ourselves.  The motive of Jesus has to be rooted in us.  Jesus had a desire to bring glory to the Father, to seek out people, to love them, and to hate evil.  That should be ours, as well.   

I remember a time at Rhema Bible Training Center, where I was going to Bible school.   We had a special missionary speaker in chapel that day.  It was powerful.  He was speaking about motivation.  He talked about having used furniture that he knew he could leave behind easily when God told them to go overseas.  I was so touched.  Afterward, I listened to some of the alumni that were in town for special services.  I heard them comparing numbers of their churches, asking one another how big their church was.  Somehow the contrast between what the missionary said and what they were saying, hit me like a sledge-hammer.  I knelt down that day and prayed a prayer of surrender. I wanted my heart to be clean from false motives.  I prayed, “God, when you send me out, please send me to a dark, cold place where I can make a difference spiritually.  I don’t want to go to some fancy church that will increase my reputation.  I want to make a difference”.  I had no idea that God was taking me so literally.  My first assignment was to be a missionary to the “Alaskan Bush”.  It was dark alright, as in six months out of the year.  It was also cold.  That goes without saying.  I ministered in places where temperatures dipped to sixy-five degrees below zero.  Be careful what you pray.  

People who operate in the gifts of the Spirit without the right motives, will eventually fall away and lose the anointing.  We need to pray that the Holy Spirit will use us to bring glory to the Father.  Then, we are not resisting temptation just so that we won’t lose the ministry or our reputations.  We won’t be operating out of fear of paying the consequences for sin.  Instead, we will resist because we love God and do not want to bring Him shame.  We want to please Him constantly in every action.  

There is a strong connection between pleasing God and having a strong anointing of the Holy spirit.  John 8:29 - “And He who sent Me is with Me. The Father has not left Me alone, for I always do those things that please Him.”

When we want to bring God glory, we are always thinking about how we can please Him.  Then we have a lot in common with The Holy spirit who wants to bring glory to Jesus.  John 16:14 “He will glorify Me, for He will take of what is Mine and declare it to you”.
When you want to bring glory to God, the Holy Spirit will show you how and empower you to do it.  Then the devil can’t stop us.  When people aren’t motivated to bring God glory, spiritual weeds can grow all around them.  Their desire is for other things and their focus is not upon pleasing God.  Our desire to bring Him glory will keep us spiritually safe.  I can then prosper without being corrupted.

What kept Jesus going when it was so difficult?  He always went back to the root motivation and was able to persist in obedience.  John 12:27-28  “Now My soul is troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Father, save Me from this hour’? But for this purpose I came to this hour. 28 Father, glorify Your name.”Then a voice came from heaven, saying, “I have both glorified it and will glorify it again.”
 
Nobody can persist in Christlike obedience with a satanic root motivation of self-glorification.  What’s in your heart?  Ask the Holy Spirit to show you the truth about your heart motivation.  Then make adjustments with His help so that what motivates Jesus also motivates you.  

Sins of all kinds trip up Christians, and even ministers.  We were all warned in Bible school of the gold, the girl or the guys, and the glory.  We were told not to covet any of those.  We were warned about the bad spiritual fruit that comes from bad root motivations such as greed, lust, and pride.  However, we should have also been warned more about bitterness and self-pity.  We will avoid all sin when our desire to glorify God is our strongest desire.  

We hear a lot today about spiritual discipline and accountability networks.  Those are good, but when our motivation is pure, the desire to please God and glorify Him keeps us safer than any of these.  Temptations can jump over our boundaries but over comers will have pure motives that will not allow them to jump.  They are the ones Jesus speaks of in the book of Rev. that have the same motivation as Christ.  That is the motivation to passionately desire to glorify the Father.  

If we were always operating in this things would be done a lot differently.  There would be no jealousy in the church or on the job.  We would want the person who God wants to be doing anything.  We wouldn’t care if we were noticed, thanked, or passed up.  We would not worry about staying in control and our reputation.  We would not take offense at rejection and what others do and say.  This would take care of a lot of problems.