Motives

DEVOTION

THE BOOK OF ACTS

MOTIVES

Acts 12:1-4

12:1 It was about this time that King Herod arrested some who belonged to the church, intending to persecute them. 2 He had James, the brother of John, put to death with the sword. 3 When he saw that this pleased the Jews, he proceeded to seize Peter also. This happened during the Feast of Unleavened Bread. 4 After arresting him, he put him in prison, handing him over to be guarded by four squads of four soldiers each. Herod intended to bring him out for public trial after the Passover.

NIV

This is the king of Israel and he acts upon his fancy to kill a couple of the disciples but then the real king shows up. He sees this pleases the Jews so he decides to kill more. The sad commentary about him is that he acts because it pleases other people. We will focus on Peter in the rest of this story, but for now we should see the wrong in the motive of King Herod’s action, at least regarding going after Peter. He does this to win the approval of others. We cannot be sure why a king would need the approval of his subjects, but it most likely is implied the Jews mean the Judeans. Of course this king was most likely appointed by the Roman Emperor rather than elected by God through a prophet and so he may not have had much popularity among the Jews. The lesson we can learn here is that doing things for the approval of men is not the best course of action. If what we do is to win the approval of men, our motives are all wrong. If we are concerned what men will think of us, we might lose sight of what God thinks of us and what he desires us to do. Sometimes we might get a bit critical of people who act in what we might think is an outlandish manner, over spiritual, radically open in worship of God. We might think ourselves better than those crazy people who put it all out there so to speak. But would we not be far better off to be more concerned about how God views our worship, how he views our behavior, our motives for doing whatever we do, especially in his name. If we are involved in some ministry for the show of it, so men will think us “Good Christian” we aren’t much better than this king. If we do any good deeds for the purpose of our reputation among men, are motives are not pure and we might ask if what we do has any merit in the sight of God at all. We should note that are good deeds are not for the purpose of getting merit from God, but they should be out of a pure love for God. The greatest pleasure we could ever give God is by accepting his Son, Jesus, as our Savior. But after that even motives to win favor from God might be wrong. Our motives should simply be to do because we love him. Our worship should be out of our love for him. Can we muzzle our worship because of what we think others will think of us? Again wrong motives. We need to see that our motives are pure and sincere before God. In all we do let us have pure motives.