26th.: What is Your Motive?
God promises to provide for us.
One such exhortation for prayer is found in Mark 11:24:
“Therefore I say unto you, ‘What things soever you desire when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.’”
At face value, Jesus’ statement says that God will give us whatever we request.
If so, then why not ask God, “Give me a billion dollars!!!”
Yet the writer of the book of James cautions us.
“Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts.” (James 4:3).
God considers our underlying motives.
Is the motive for a particular request:
i) To take care of our basic needs?
ii) To help others?
iii) To spend lavishly on ourselves?
iv) To see God glorified?
v) So that people can adulate us (while we claim, even to ourselves, that it is to glorify God)?
Motives are very important.
Sometimes, we can tell ourselves one motive, yet our heart has a different motive.
Fortunately, we can even ask the Lord to reveal our motives to us.
“Let us therefore, as many as be perfect, be thus minded.
And if in anything, ye be otherwise minded,
God shall reveal even this unto you.” (Phili. 3:15)