Having Honest Motives Before God Part I

 Honest motives before God

How can we be sure our motives are truly pure before God? When we come to Him in prayer, are our words rooted in selflessness—or driven by our own ambition?
By practicing the following, we position ourselves for God to reveal what’s hidden within us, so we can release our own agendas and align with His purpose.

1. Ask God to purify our hearts. 

    a. Before He creates a clean heart in us, He will first show us what is unclean in our hearts. Then we need to repent of that sin.

    b. Once we truly repent, we need to fully receive the Lord's forgiveness for that impurity found in us.

    c. Then we can cry out to God to give us His motives.


Psalms 51:10 "Create in me a clean heart, oh God, and renew a right spirit within me."


Psalms 139:23 "Search me, oh God, and know my heart; Try me, and know my anxieties; And see if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting."


Philippians 2:13 "...For it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure."

 In other words, God will us His pure motives so that we can act righteously before Him.

Yet in order to receive God's pure motives, we need to keep a short list with Him and approach His throne covered in the blood and grace of Jesus Christ. We also need to take up the sword of the spirit and fight our impure motives daily.

The battlefield of the mind

Jesus and Adam are the only two people born without the predisposition of sin. 

Adam later accepted sin and tainted the human line so that every human born since was born with a predisposition of sinning.


When we are "born again" that second birth signifies that we are now born as Jesus - without the innate desire towards sin. We are reborn free from the hold of sin and free to follow Jesus and his life's example. 

That's why we "shed the old man". Satan no longer has us enslaved in sin, and our new nature is to be like Jesus.

But we still struggle. 

There is a constant war raging between the old man (darkness) and the new man (light).

--The main battlefield is our mind--

With the sword of the spirit we need to stab our flesh to death daily. 

Every day is a fresh battle, and we need to kill our fleshly desires, thoughts, motives, and habits daily. 

Holy Spirit helps us to fight and gives us righteous motives. 

Galatians 5:24 "And those who are Christ's have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires."


Although we are born again and now have Godly desires in us, we need to practice daily coming humbly to God to re-check our inner man and we need to war daily on those things that will take us back to our selfish motives. 


In part two, we will see how this cannot be done on our own will or merit. We need help.




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