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The Truth About Motivation

Whenever I babysit, I often find myself having to bribe kids to convince them to behave. For example, I’ll tell a group of siblings that they can only have dessert after dinner if they can make it the entire day without fighting... Most of the time, this method works great, and the kids are super well-behaved! I leave the day thinking that we’ve made a lot of progress in improving their behavior, but then the next time I watch them, they are just out of control as before. Why is this? It’s because this time they didn’t have any incentive to motivate them. Turns out, while my reward system worked well to improve the kids’ behavior, it did nothing to improve their character.

You and I are a lot like this. Oftentimes, we too need rewards and incentives to motivate us to go the extra mile. There is nothing wrong with a healthy dose of motivation, but sometimes we need to check our hearts and evaluate where that source of motivation is coming from. We need to ask ourselves, “Am I working to glorify God, or am I just trying to make myself look good?”

It can be very easy to do good things for the wrong reasons because in most cases, no outside person could possibly know whether or not our heart is in the right place. I know I caught myself several times early on in college doing good things simply because I wanted my peers to like me, or because I was seeking validation from my professors. Just like the little kids that I babysit, my behavior was good, but my character, and more specifically, my integrity, was lacking. The definition of integrity is to do the right thing even when no one else is watching. The next time you go out of your way to do something good for others, consider checking your heart first by asking yourself, “Would I still be willing to do this thing even if no one else knew about it?”.

Challenge: Read the story of the Widow’s Offering found in Mark 12:41-44. Consider the question, are you truly giving God the best of what you have to offer like the Widow did? Or are you simply contributing what you know will look good in the eyes of others?