Joyce Meyer - Why Do I Do The Things I Do? (08/20/2019)
God sees and cares deeply about the "why" behind everything we do—motives reveal the heart. A pure heart, free from hidden selfish agendas, impresses God and produces lasting reward. Wrong motives (seeking attention, status, or control) waste our efforts and burn up like wood, hay, and stubble. Pure motives—doing everything out of love for God and obedience—build with gold, silver, and precious stones that endure the fire and receive eternal reward. The Holy Spirit continually purifies us so we live to please God alone.
Why Do I Do the Things I Do?
God sees and cares about the why behind the what in all areas of our life. And God desires that we have a pure heart.
A pure heart is an absolutely phenomenally beautiful thing. And I think if we don't ever talk about this, then we can just live our whole life. And we can be real surface-y. And we can do all kinds of things that impress each other. And a lot of things that we impress ourselves.
And, you know, we really do like to impress ourselves. We like to do things to think, ah, yeah, yeah. Hmm. Not bad. And we like to impress God.
You know, we love to feel important. And that's not a bad thing. You know, it's almost like every person's got an invisible sign around their neck that says, make me feel important.
Well, it's my job to try to make you feel important. And it's your job to try to make somebody else feel important. But it's not our job for all of us to try to make ourselves feel important. That's when it becomes a problem.
Now, I'm going to say that again because I want to make sure you're hearing what I'm saying. If I pray long hours so I can feel spiritually important and so I can feel that I'm impressing God. And then I make sure that I tell people how many hours a day I pray so they can think I'm important. And now I'm impressing them.
All of that pretty much is useless and wasted. Because I'm going to show you scriptures tonight that are very eye-opening that says plainly when we do things with wrong, impure motives that we lose the reward of them.
We're just literally wasting our time. But when we do things out of a right heart, just because we love God and we want to do... ...what's right. It is amazing what God can do in our lives.
God Dealt with Motives Early
Now, interestingly enough, motives is one of the first things that I can remember God dealing with me really seriously about when I started studying the Word of God 35 years ago.
I think it's extremely important for everybody, but I think it's especially important for anybody that's going to be used by God in ministry because you really literally cannot be very successful at anything you do if you're doing it with a bunch of hidden, wrong motives.
People like that always end up coming apart at some point in their life. We can hide things from people. We can even hide them from ourselves, but we cannot hide them from God. Did you hear me?
I said we can hide things from people. We can hide them even from ourselves, but we cannot hide them from God.
And thank God for the ministry of the Holy Spirit who guides us into all truth, into all truth. And it's not always this nebulous, just word truth. He guides us into the truth about us.
And if we're willing to face that truth, man, then we can go to a new level. Every time that God has promoted me to a new level spiritually, or even in the ministry, there's always been something that God has had to deal with me about.
I always say, in order for you to come up higher, your flesh has to go a little bit lower. Amen? Amen?
So I, for whatever reason, maybe because I had a lot of really bad motives, I don't know, but God dealt with me early in this thing about motives. And I remember these scriptures, and I'm going to share with you, probably at least 34 years ago, God began to show me these scriptures.
Building on the Right Foundation
And so here we go. Verse 11, For no other foundation can anyone lay than that which is already laid, which is Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One.
Now Paul, the Apostle Paul, in verse 10, he said, According to the grace of God that was on me, I've been laying a foundation in your life. And it was the foundation of faith in Jesus Christ. We're saved by grace. We're saved by grace, total grace, nothing we can do to earn salvation.
And that foundation of knowing who we are in Christ has to be first in our lives. And then he says, But if anyone builds upon the foundation, whether it be with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, or straw.
So here's what I like to say. We have a foundation in our life now of Jesus Christ. How many of you are born again? Okay. Then you have a foundation in your life of Jesus Christ.
Now, the reason why you're here tonight is you're wanting to build a life. You're building. God is the master builder. And he's helping us through the Holy Spirit to build a life.
But how we build that life, the kind of material, the motives that we build that life with is extremely important. He says you can build with gold, with silver, with wood, with hay, with stubble, with straw.
What kind of a life are you building? Are you building a real genuine life? Are you building a phony life? Are you wearing masks and playing games with people?
Or are you really sincerely trying to do the very thing that you believe that God is telling you to do and you're doing it strictly for him and not to impress anyone else?
I don't know. It's between you and God. But I hope every person in here tonight goes home and does some serious thinking.
Questions to Examine Motives
Let me ask you a question. How many things are you doing in your life that you feel absolutely no anointing on at all, nor does it minister any kind of life to you, but you're doing it, you don't even know why you're doing it.
You're doing it because everybody else you know does it, and you don't want to be the only one not doing it. How many things are you doing to please people, but way down deep inside, you don't feel right about it?
See, we have to learn to live before God and God alone. Because when all this is said and done, and it will be sooner than we think, I don't care if you live to be a hundred years, that's one grain of sand on the ocean of eternity.
And God is the one that we need to live to please. If we want to impress anybody, it needs to be God. We have to learn to do everything that we do for God and not for anything else. Amen?
You know, there's a lot of young people here tonight, and it just thrills me to think that, boy, you could get a hold of this now. Man, if you got a hold of this now, instead of waiting until you're 50, like most of us do. How wonderful that would be. And how dynamic you could be for God.
See, God can only use us to the degree that we will let Him purify us and give Him all the glory for what goes on in our lives.
Well, how many things do you do that overload your schedule and create stress, and you do it just to make more money or just to climb the ladder of success, or just because you want to be in the know?
I remember when I used to get involved in all kinds of stuff at church, just because I was nosy and I wanted to know everything that was going on. Well, I'm just telling you the truth.
And you know, God began to tell me, you don't need to know that stuff. You're wearing yourself out, running up there every night on this committee, that committee involved in this, involved in that, listening to all the gossip.
And you don't need to know none of that. You need to know me. Yeah, it's getting a little better, isn't it?
You know, when Dave and I were still in the denominational church we were in, and I just, I wanted him to be an elder, and I, you know, I don't remember if he wanted to or not, but, you know, I probably talked him into it, and I think because Dave was never, he was never trying to impress anybody, and I just finagled around and tried to get in with the right people and get in with the right groups, because, you know, the right people had to vote for you to be an elder in the church.
And, you know, I just, I just wanted to know everything that was going on. It just nosy. He wanted to know everything that was going on.
Well, however much time we spent serving God... Come on. Serving God? How much time we spent serving God like that? It was wasted time. We lost all the reward for all that. Hmm.
Okay. How many things do you do for somebody else to put them in your debt? So then you can have the attitude, well, you owe me. Because I did thus and so, now you owe me.
Or we could look at the brighter side for a minute, which I think we will. How many things do you do only for the love of God? How many things do you do strictly to serve God?
You're not wanting anything. You're just doing it to serve God and just strictly in obedience to Him. How many things do you do to help somebody else? And you can honestly say, I don't want anything back from them. I just have this deep desire to help.
Now, these are the things we're after. This is the transition that we want. We want to have a shift in our motives.
And I tell you what, I catch wrong motives in me all the time. And I change those motives. I change my heart before I go get involved in something.
Because I am not going to waste any more of my life doing things that are useless and wasted time and effort. I want to do what is going to produce good fruit in my life, nothing else.
The Fire Tests Our Works
Verse 13, The work of each one will become plainly and openly known, shown for what it is, for the day of Christ will disclose and declare it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test and critically appraise the character and the work of the work that each person has done.
And if the work which any person has built on this foundation, any product of his effort, whatever survives this test, he will get his reward. But if any person's work is burned up under the test, he will suffer the loss of it all, losing his reward, though he himself will be saved, but only as one who has passed through the fire.
You're probably thinking, man, I got some really deep problems in my life. How is this going to help me? Oh, honey, sweetheart, baby, Christian, you have no idea how much this is going to help you.
I mean, if you can get your motives right, if you can get rid of all this, I want to impress you. I want to impress you. I care what you think about me. You know, I'm doing for you.
If you can get to the point where you're just like, God, I don't want anything to do with it if it's not you. If it's not you, if you're not in, I'm not in. I don't care to be involved in any lifeless, non-anointed, dead works anymore in my life.
What I want to do, I want to do with a flow and an ease and a power and God's smile of approval on my life. And the earlier we can learn that, the quicker that you can work with the Holy Spirit to purify your heart, the more powerful, more successful person you are going to be.
You have no idea. No idea. It is yet to be seen what God can do through one man or woman who will let their heart be purified and give God all the glory for everything that they do.
And we're always looking for keys to success. I believe this is probably one of the most major ones. Because God sees what other people doesn't see. And He wants truth and purity and honesty.
And that doesn't mean perfection. That doesn't mean we do everything perfect. But it means to the best of our ability, we are not being phony. We're straightforward. We're pure-hearted. And we're doing what we're doing to the best of our ability for the right reason.
This is the motherlode tonight on motives. Come on. We have this life that we live out here that we show to everybody. But the life that God is really concerned about is the one in here. It's the inner life.
I desire that men should have truth in their inner being, Psalm 51 says. That hidden man of the heart is what's beautiful to God. You've got a private life that only you and God know about. And that's the one that is the most important of all. Amen?
The Fur Coat Lesson
I wonder how much we give up of what God would love to do for us that we miss because we're busy trying to get a little bit of credit, a little bit of attention for ourselves.
I just wonder what God would love to do for us if we would just trust Him enough to just zip our lip and wait a little bit to see what God might like to do.
Let's go to Matthew 6. Matthew 6. Take care not to do your good deeds publicly or before men in order to be seen by them.
Now, there's the motive. In order to be seen by them. It doesn't really mean that nobody can ever see you do good works. It's not possible to always hide everything you do from people.
But the point here is motive. Don't do them in order to be seen by them. Do you ever notice how Jesus, many of the things that He did, He would quickly just slip away and nobody even knew where He went?
And then many times He would even say, make sure you don't tell anybody about this. Well, what was that all about? He didn't want to get a bunch of attention. That wasn't why He was doing it. He wanted to keep it just a pure thing that was going to glorify God.
Always keep in mind that when people don't make on over you, God is making on over you in heaven. He's excited about what you're doing, even if nobody else sees anything that you're doing.
Otherwise, you'll have no reward reserved for and awaiting you from your Father who's in heaven.
When you give to the poor, don't blow a trumpet before you as the hypocrites in the synagogues and in the streets like to do, that they might be recognized and honored and praised by men.
Truly, I tell you, you have your reward in full already. When you give to charity, don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.
You know what I have... For me, how God explained that to me is like, you know, I'm involved in getting to do a lot of really great things for people. And, you know, I'm busy like, oh, you know, we'll have a great conference here. We may have 1,600, 1,700 people saved by the time we go home. A lot of awesome things are going to happen.
You know, I get a lot of compliments. A lot of people tell me good things. But what I have to do then is I have to take every one of those and give it to God like a bouquet of flowers.
And then when I lay down in my bed tonight, I cannot lay there and think about how good I am and the good things that I did. You can't... you just can't afford to do it.
You got to say, God, I am nothing without you. At least, probably 10 times every day, I say, God, I am nothing without you. If you move one little teensy tiny bit, I'm going to fall flat on my face.
I cannot do anything without you. I am an everything, nothing. Everything in you and nothing without you. And I don't say that to put myself down or to make myself feel bad about myself, but I cannot afford to get full of myself because if I do, then it's over.
You see, I am painfully aware that what I'm doing is God. Because to tell you the honest truth, I am not really all that talented. I talk.
And if I don't have an anointing on my life, that's it. People are not going to cram into these buildings for hours on end and travel from other places and buy hotel rooms and get babysitters to listen to a woman yell at them and talk if there's not something there besides her.
I have to have God's presence on my life or it's not going to do any good. And I cannot have that if I don't do everything I can do to keep my motives right.
Now, believe me, my motives are far from 100% pure. But I want them to be right. And I don't want to do things for wrong reasons. And I want to obey God and I'm growing every single day.
And I'm just trying to open eyes tonight and wake some people up if maybe this is something you've never paid that much attention to or maybe you've never even had anybody teach you this kind of stuff.
We need to hear this. God is not impressed with what we do. It's why we do it that matters.
All you got to do is take the woman who gave what we call the widow's mite. She gave two mites, which was like a half a cent each. I mean, I forget what all the numbers were, but it was a very teeny, tiny, tiny sum of money.
And there were people throwing money into the treasury right and left. And the Bible says that Jesus stood by the treasury and he watched how people put their money in.
And he wasn't watching how much they were throwing in. He was watching their heart attitude. He was watching their attitude. And she gave less than probably everybody else there.
But he said she gave more than all the rest of them. You know why? Because he saw her heart. She was willing to sacrifice everything that she had and she did it strictly out of her love for God.
And he said she gave more than anybody. God counts differently than the way we count. Amen.
The Fur Coat Story
Okay, so I'm going to tell you another story. Boy, did I learn a lesson about motives. Thank God I can say this was 35 years ago, but my prayer life was so pathetic and I didn't know it.
Now, you know, God meets us where we're at and I'm so grateful that he does because he answered many of those silly, pathetic prayers just to show me that he was good.
But that doesn't mean he doesn't want to change us. And I ask God for things. I'm not saying you can't ask God for things. But that can't be the primary focus in our lives is just, I want this, I want this, I need this, I need this.
Change Dave, change my kids. So anyway, of all things, of all the things that I needed, of all the spiritual depth that I needed, and all the things in my personality that were haywire, I was believing God for a fur coat.
It is funny, isn't it? Go ahead, you can laugh as loud as you want to. It's just as dumb as dumb can be.
But you know what? I had a few friends that had one, and I wanted one for status. I described it to God, the color, the kind of fur I wanted, and so on and so forth.
Well, I had a neighbor that I loved, but I didn't like very much. Do you ever, do you have people like that?
One day my doorbell rang, and she's standing outside with this huge box, and she is so excited. You are not going to believe what God gave me!
I let her in, she opened the box, and it was my fur coat. My fur coat! I mean, I can tell you, I honestly thought they had to deliver it to the wrong house.
There was no way that I believed that God would give her that fur coat because she was not nearly as spiritual as me. She didn't pray as long as me. She didn't study as long as me. She didn't give as much as I did. She didn't fast like I did.
There's no way God could give that to her because she didn't deserve it. Come on now, we're going somewhere with this.
And I'm thinking while I'm saying, praise the Lord, God, you have got to get her out of this house before I just slap her.
Well, when she left, I had a fit. I mean, I told God, I do not understand. I am doing this. And I, are you hearing it? I'm doing and I deserve. I'm doing and I deserve.
Come on, I was doing everything that I was doing for the wrong reason. I was doing it all to get something rather than because I had been given something.
I wasn't serving God out of pure motives. If you have a huge problem and you think, how could this happen to me? I pray two hours every day.
Then you know what? You've just revealed that you're praying for the wrong reason. Or when you see someone get blessed that you think is not nearly as spiritual as you and not nearly as committed as you, uh-oh.
Well, guess what? God may be blessing them right in front of you just to reveal to you that you've got a wrong heart attitude.
So I'm having my fit. How could you give that to her? I don't understand it. She doesn't this and I that.
But man, I tell you what, the Holy Ghost got in the middle of me. The last thing you need is a fur coat. And if you needed one, I would see to it that you got one.
But what you need is to recognize the bad attitude you have, which is jealousy, and wanting a bunch of stuff that you don't need anyway that's not even important.
Well, I didn't realize it now, but I know now God gave her that fur coat that I wanted simply so He could use that to pull the rotten attitude out of me that had to come out if God was ever going to do through me what He wanted to do.
And now I look back and I think, why did I want something that dumb when I didn't know how much God loved me? I was controlling and manipulative. I was trying to impress people. I had so many things screwed up in my life and I had a call of God on my life.
And yes, God was using me, but I had a mixture of motives and God is always in the business of bringing His fire into our life so He can purify us so He can burn up the junk and leave on fire everything that's left. Amen?
Come on, if you're single and you've been believing God for a long time to get married and you've got 20 friends that have already gotten married, you better bless them and be happy.
Oh, my, my, my, my, my, my. Let's start praying, God, please, please, please, please, please work with me and purify my motives.
I want to do everything that I do for God because of what Jesus has done for me. Not to ever get Him to do something for me.
Let me tell you something, God doesn't owe me anything. He has already given me everything. Everything. He has given you everything and He's given me everything.
And no matter what happens in our circumstances, God is good and we all have gotten more blessings than we could ever possibly deserve.
Come on, give God praise. Give Him a big praise tonight.