The Motive Is Love

I’ve been a Christian for most of my life, basically all my life. And when you are born into a Christian environment, you will get to a point where you consider whether your faith is because of your environment, or you chose God for yourself. My own journey on whether I chose God myself centered on my motive for choosing God.

Like many people, I was introduced to God with the preaching that we were heading to eternal damnation, but Jesus came to save us if we surrender our lives to Him. This is the true gospel to be honest. However, when I was without my parent’s influence for the first time in my life and I had to choose God for myself, my motive was fear.

In my Salvation Story, I mentioned that I had two dreams about rapture, in which I did not get raptured. Those dreams scared me and made me think that my salvation was not secure. With the help of all those scary rapture films, I felt like my salvation was mine to fulfill. This meant that I couldn’t sin or else, rapture would take place and I would be left behind. It’s a good thing to not commit sin. It’s not a good thing for the motive for that to be fear because after a while, you won’t be afraid anymore.

As I grew, my motive changed slightly. While I still was afraid, I began to enjoy being with God. I saw the power of God working through His servants and I wanted that. One of my prayers at some point was that when I sang, people would get healed. That was an honourable prayer, but I wanted that for my own benefit. Not for the benefit of whoever would be getting healed, and definitely not for God’s glory. My motive became walking in God’s power, in the supernatural.

I have mentioned this many times in my previous blogpost but almost everything I did in my relationship with God during that period of my life was solely to have supernatural experiences and walk in God’s power. I now know that I walk in God’s power and I do not need to see any of those dramatic things.

The thing is, at some point you get tired. I got tired of being afraid of going to hell. I got tired of being responsible for my salvation. I felt like I was always chasing after God. I got tired of doing the most and not seeing any dramatic supernatural things.

Ending of 2018, I asked God to reintroduce Himself to me, let’s do this relationship thing again. As we started our relationship again, I kept getting confronted with the reason I was following Jesus. God showed me that I had the wrong motives for pursuing Him – fear and the desire to experience supernatural things.

I began asking God, what is the right motive? What motive should I have for accepting You into my life? During this period, I joined an online community of Christians called True Christianity and one day, someone posted a very long message that got me thinking. He mentioned that God was raising up a new set of people who would disrupt the traditional ways we have done church and there would be real love amongst these people. The part that got to me was where the person said that the motive of these people would be love. And I was like, “Aha! My motive is meant to be love. I am meant to seek God because I love Him.”

Subsequently, I asked God what it meant to love Him because I wasn’t exactly sure how loving Him was meant to be my motive. And this was stressing me out because I started questioning whether I even loved God in the first place. As I was stressing out, some random person in law school (who’s now my friend and may see this blogpost, in that case, hi!) told me that God said I should depend on His love for me and not on my love for Him. He also gave me this verse, Romans 5:5 (NLT)

And this hope will not lead to disappointment. For we know how dearly God loves us, because he has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love.

I was confused for a while, but it later clicked (always be clicking!) that the motive for seeking God is love and not my love for Him but His love for me. That He created me, us, to be in a loving relationship with Him. Even when we strayed away, He had Jesus come down, live as a man and die the most gruesome and embarrassing death ever to demonstrate how much He loves me. Because God went through all this to just get me, His love is more than enough motive for me to accept Him into my life.

God loves you and has showed that on the cross and even the little things in your life. Please do not disregard that. He is calling you today. Please answer His call, open the door to your heart and let Him in. His love is the motive, not fear, not anything else. Just His love.

I love you and God loves you more.