Sermon: Look to Your Motives by
Alexander Whyte
With Mercy and With Judgment, pp. 44-56
"If
thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be
evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness."
(Matt. 6:22,23)
Look to your motives! - our Lord says to us
over and over again in this chapter. Our Lord's words always go to the bottom
of things. They always go to the bottom of our hearts. Our Lord's words are
always quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even
to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow: they
are discerners also of the thoughts and intents of our hearts. Our Lord's words
strip our hearts bare of all affectation and pretence, display and insincerity,
ostentation and hypocrisy. "Thy word, O Lord, is very pure: therefore thy
servant loveth it." "Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and
know my thoughts. And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the
way everlasting."
Our motives are the secret springs of our
hearts. Our motives are those hidden things in our hearts that move us to speak
and to act. Our lives all issue out from our hearts, like so many streams out
of so many deep and hidden springs: and thus it is that we are so often told in
the Word of God to "keep our hearts with all diligence." And thus it
is that our Lord's teaching is so full of all the matters of the heart; and
especially of the hidden motives of the heart. Take good heed of your motives,
He says three times to us in this single passage. Be simple in your hearts, He
says to us. Be sincere in your hearts. Be pure in your hearts. Be not
men-pleasers. Be not eye-servants. Be not "hypocrites." Seek not to
be seen of men. Seek secret places. Seek obscurity. Seek and keep silence. Do
nothing for the praise, or for the approval, or for the rewards of men. Let not
your left hand know what your right hand doeth. Live all your life in the
presence of God. Lay open your heart to His eye alone. Seek to have praise of
God. Work for His approval and for His reward, Who seeth in secret. "The
light of the body is the eye: if, therefore, thine eye be single, thy whole
body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be
full of darkness."
1. Now, men alone, of all God's creatures on
the earth, have motives. The sun, and the moon, and the stars all move. They
all move with the motion which their Maker gave to them at the beginning, and
which He continually conveys to them by His upholding and impelling hand.
"In them hath He set a tabernacle for the sun: which is as a bridegroom
coming out of his chamber. His going forth is from the end of the heaven, and
there is nothing hid from the heat thereof." The fowl of the air also, the
fish of the sea, all sheep and oxen also - they all creep, and walk, and run,
and fly, each one of them after his kind - but it is never said of any of them
that they have a motive in what they do, or in where they go. They eat and they
drink: they lie down and they rise up: but they never say- "When I awake I
am still with Thee!" The ox knoweth his owner, indeed: and the ass his
master's crib; but all the same, they cannot enter into their master's mind
with them. They do what by bit and bridle he compels them to do; but, with it all,
they do not consider. They have no understanding. They have no power of
contrary choice. They were not made in their Maker's image. Their chief end is
never said to be to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever. They have all their
appointed ends, and they all stand in the same ordinances in which they were
placed at their creation; but they do not know their own ordinances, nor who
ordained them. To man alone God saw it good to give understanding, -
understanding, and conscience, and will, and a contrary choice. Alone, of all
things that live, and move, and have their being in God, man is moved by his
own motives.
2. And thus it is that God goes down to our
motives when He would know us altogether, and would discover us, and would
conclusively judge us. We ourselves make every effort to get at men's motives
when we would know them, and would judge them. But we cannot wade with any
security into that deep sea. Men's motives lie deep down beyond our discovery
and jurisdiction. God's eye alone can see and search out a motive. We all feel
that we are not truly known till our motives are known. We all feel that we are
not yet fully and finally judged till our motives are laid naked and open. I
may do what seems to your judgment right or wrong, praiseworthy or blameworthy
- but hold your peace about me till you are quite sure that you have all my
motives laid out under your eye. When you praise me, you pain me and humiliate
me, if my motive was not a pure motive: and when you blame me, I appeal from
your judgment to His before whose tribunal all my motives lie bare:
"For
I am ware it is the seed of act God holds appraising in His hollow palm: Not
act grown great thence as the world believes, Leafage and branchage vulgar eyes
admire."
What I am in my motives, that I really am:
that, just that, and neither more nor less. And it is the prerogative and glory
of God to hold all my motives, "appraising them" in His righteous
hand. "Talk no more so exceeding proudly," Hannah prayed and said, "and
let not arrogancy come out of your mouth: for the Lord is a God of knowledge,
and by Him actions are weighed." "God weigheth more," says
Thomas, "with how much love a man worketh: He weigheth the motive more
than the actual work. He doeth much in God's judgment who loveth much."
And we all have by heart Paul's fine passage on motive under the name of
Charity in the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians.
3. Now from all this, it follows as clear as
day that our true sanctification, our true holiness of heart, our true and full
and final salvation, all lie in the rectification, the simplification, and the
purification of our motives. The corruption and pollution of our hearts - trace
all that down to the bottom, and it all lies in our motives: in the
selfishness, the unneighborliness, the unbrotherliness, the ungodliness of our
motives. We are all our own motive in all that we do: we are all our own main
object and our own chief end. And it is just this that stains and debases so
much that we do. It is just this that so pollutes our hearts in the sight of
God: and it is this that makes all we do so polluted in our own eyes, when we
look at ourselves with the eyes of God. It is this that makes so much of our
very righteousness to be filthy rags; and it is this inward bondage to bad
motives that makes all God's saints to cry out with Paul under their utter
wretchedness. Our Lord's blessedness, amid all His labors and burdens and
sorrows, arose out of this that His motives in all that He did were good. His
eye was single, and therefore His whole body full of light. He pleased not
Himself. He pursued not His own ends. He had all His motives outside of
Himself, and above Himself, He was always, even in His early youth, "about
His Father's business." He worked for praise, and for approval, and for
reward indeed - but it was never the praise or the approval or the reward of
men, but always of His Father. And thus it was that He had a clean heart, and
clean hands, and a clean and a peaceful conscience in all that He did; and,
after His work was finished - because of the simplicity, and the purity of His
motives in all parts of His work - He had such a reception awarded Him in His
Father's house as no other son or servant of God has ever had. Now, where our
Lord was pure and perfect, we are still impure and imperfect. Where His eye was
single, our eye is double; and where His body was full of light, our body, at
its best, is but twilight and darkness. There are all degrees of purity and of
impurity in our motives. But it is he whose motives are purest, and whose eye
is singlest, who is most prostrated and humiliated and overwhelmed with the
impure, selfish, ungodly mixtures of his own motives. In all he does, when he
does his very best, in almsgiving, in fasting, in praying, in preaching, and indeed
in all his actions and words and thoughts - so deeply is it all infected with
the deadly taint of himself that his motives are a constant source of
self-despising, self-hatred, and self-despair. And just as his Master will
never be pleased with His disciple till all His disciple's motives are as pure
as His own, so neither can the disciple of Christ ever be pleased with himself
till he is pure as his Master is pure.
"Saints
purest in God's eyes Are vilest in their own."
4. "The one thing needful," then,
in all that we think and say and do is a good motive. The new birth that we
must all every day undergo, the one all-embracing change of heart that God
demands of us and offers us in His Son every day, is a completely new motive.
The fall of man took place when God ceased to be man's motive and man's end,
and when each man became his own motive and his own end. And the supreme need
of all men is just the restoration to their hearts of God as their true motive
and their chief end. Every human heart cries with Augustine - every human heart
in its own language: "Thou hast made me for Thyself, and I know no rest
till I find my rest in Thee. Thou hast made us to be moved by one motive, and
to be directed by one intention, and to rest, with a perfect rest, in one end:
and both our motive, and our intention, and our rest are in Thee."
"Capable we are of God," says Hooker in one of his magnificent
passages- "capable we are of God both by understanding and by will: by
understanding, as He is that sovereign Truth, which comprehendeth the rich
treasure-house of all wisdom: by will, as He is that God of goodness, whereof
whoso tasteth shall thirst no more... Under man, no creature in the world is
capable of felicity and bliss. First, because their chiefest perfection consisteth
in that which is best for them, but not in that which is simply best, as ours
doth. Secondly, because whatsoever external perfection they tend unto, it is
not better than themselves, as ours is. How just occasion have we therefore,
with the prophet, to admire the goodness of God! 'Lord, what is man, that Thou
shouldest exalt him above the work of Thy hands' - so far as to make Thyself
the inheritance of his rest and the substance of his felicity." "Whom
have I," exclaims Asaph the psalmist- "whom have I in heaven but
Thee! And there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee. My flesh and my
heart faileth; but God is the strength of my heart and my portion for
ever."
5. Now, all serious-minded and
self-observant men will surely say to all this that they know all this already
and have long known it: they accept all this, and delight to hear it; but the
longer they live, the more they fail to attain to it. They see purity of
motive, and simplicity of end, and directness of intention, and godliness of
life - all shining like the sun and the moon and the stars high up above them,
so high above them that they despair of ever rising up to them. My brethren, be
patient: be instructed. The new heart of a saint of God was never yet attained
at a bound. A new life of motive, and of disposition, and of intention, and of
aim and end is not the growth of a day or of a year. All this present life is
allotted by God to His saints to make them a new heart. This inward work will
fill up your whole life to it last moment, - God, till that moment, working in
you to will and to do, to rectify your motives and to protect and purify your
ends to the last. Believe that, and the great work of your life is already half
wrought. Believe what God's purpose with your life is. Lord, I believe, help
Thou mine unbelief! Believe nobly. Believe magnificently. Believe with Christ
the greatest Believer, and the chiefest Saint. Believe that all your life is
laid out, and filled up - not and never for any earthly and temporal end, but always
for a heavenly and an everlasting end! Not to give you rest, and pleasure, and
satisfaction, where those ends are not; but to give you, and to prepare you
for, these ends where they alone are, where they are worthy of you, and where
you will be both capable and worthy of them. Threescore years and ten, with all
their deep providences, ordinations from everlasting, searching exercises and
subduing and weaning experiences of heart, means of grace, and foretastes of
glory - are all not for one moment too much for the perfect sanctification and
everlasting and secure salvation of an immortal soul. Ask yourselves then, amid
all those things divine and human, earthly and heavenly, outward and inward -
ask yourselves if the one work of your life, the one undertaking and
achievement of your life, is making progress. And you have a sure test of your
progress just in this question: "What is my motive in this that I now do?
And in this that I now suffer? In the light of God, and under His eye, why do I
do this and that? What is my motive? What is my intention? What is the end I
have set before myself in this and in that?" And then we shall no longer
be as the horse and the mule that have no understanding. We shall say in every
enterprise, What would my Master have me here to do? And we shall answer
ourselves: "O Lord, I am Thy servant: I am thy servant, and the son of
Thine handmaid. Thou hast loosed my bonds!" At the same time, it is by no
means necessary to torture ourselves and to be in continual bondage to the letter
of the law. We do not stop at every step of a journey and ask ourselves what
place we are going to, and why we are going to that place. We weigh our motives
well before we start, and if they are right we set out; and if they are not
right, we turn back. But once having made up our mind and started, we go on,
enjoying the way, conversing about many things by the way, refreshing and
resting ourselves by the way, and setting out again on our journey. And let the
love of our heart be once rightly placed; let our treasure once be in heaven;
let our motive once be God and our neighbors and not ourselves; and with many
halts, and many hungerings and thirstings, with many stumblings and falls even,
yet our faces are still steadfastly set to the end of our journey, and the path
of the just will lead us at last to our journey's end. Walking under the
finger-post of the golden rule, walking in the light of a single eye and a
right intention, we shall more and more walk at liberty, till all we think, and
all we do, is pleasing in God's eyes.
(1) Now from all this there follow two or
three plain lessons. And this very plain lesson to begin with, - that we
cannot, by any possibility, know, so as to judge, our neighbors' motives. God
has not given us the ability. He has reserved that divine ability to Himself.
And at his peril, therefore, let a man intermeddle with another man's motives.
Every human being holds secrets in his heart that the day of judgment shall for
the first time publish abroad. Every human being holds in himself a whole world
of mystery to all his fellows; and most of all to those who know him best.
Attempt to judge no man's motives, then, for you cannot do it. You are a wise
man, and a true man, and a good man if you can judge your own, and yourself on
account of them. Judge yourself, then, and you shall not be judged; but judge
other men, and with what measure you mete it shall be meted out to you again.
Leave all judgment of other men's motives therefore to the Judge of all the
earth, - to Him Who will judge you and all men by the thoughts and the intents
of the heart.
(2) Again, it is surely a great comfort to a
good man to know that a good motive makes the smallest act both great and good
in God's heart-searching sight. Splendid deeds that are blazoned abroad by a
thousand trumpets are but "splendid sins" in God's judgment, unless
they are done out of a secret motive of true and genuine goodness. Unless love
to God and to man, unless self-forgetfulness and self-conquest, lay at its root,
the most far-sounding deed that ever any man did was but dust and ashes, and
far less than that in the sight of God. Whereas, - one single cup of cold
water, one visit, in passing the door, to a sick-bed, a salutation on the
street, a shaft of love and honor and goodwill shot in secret over the city or
over the sea, for love's sake, and for Christ's sake: "Come, ye blessed of
my Father: inherit the Kingdom prepared for you!"
(3) And to come back to this chapter for our
last lesson: - Three times it is told us, - and it must therefore be a lesson
of the last importance to us to learn, - three times over our Lord says of the
Pharisee: Verily, I say unto you, they have their reward. Verily, I say unto
you, they have their reward. And the third time - Verily, I say unto you, they
have their reward. And then, over against that, our Lord says to His disciples,
and through them to us: "Give all your alms in secret: fast and pray in
secret: seek out secret places: and hide yourselves, and all that you do, with
your Father in secret, and your Father which seeth in secret will reward you
openly. And, blessed are ye, when men, not knowing your good motives, shall
revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you
falsely, for My sake." As much as to say: Go down, if need be to your
grave, unknown and undiscovered, hated, despised, misjudged, misrepresented,
misunderstood: only, keep your heart hidden with Christ in God: and when
Christ, who is your life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with Him in glory!
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