I realized some time ago that God is very often less concerned with what I do than with why I do it. In Romans 14:23 Paul writes, with regard to eating meat, “but whoever has doubts is condemned if they eat, because their eating is not from faith; and everything that does not come from faith is sin.” Thus, doing something that is not, in itself, wrong becomes wrong when done for the wrong reason. Conversely, Paul told the people of Athens that God had overlooked their worship of idols up to that time, because it was done in ignorance (Acts 17:30).
The ideal, of course, is to do the right thing for the right reason. I don’t always succeed in that. Far too often, I’ll grudgingly do what I’m “supposed” to do, as though that were acceptable to God. But what God wants is a heart that is fully in love with him, obeying the greatest commandment (Deuteronomy 6:4-5). It’s better by far to mistakenly do something God has not commanded, out of love for him, than to do what he has commanded, but for selfish reasons.
But motives can easily become complicated. For one thing, we often have more than one reason for the choices we make. And sometimes our true motives are hidden, even from ourselves. Nor do I mean to suggest that every possible motive is either clearly right or clearly wrong. Still, it can’t be denied that some motives are better than others, and that even a good motive for doing something still might not be the best motive.
I was thinking about that recently when I read this passage from Romans:
I myself am convinced, my brothers and sisters, that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with knowledge and competent to instruct one another. Yet I have written you quite boldly on some points to remind you of them again, because of the grace God gave me to be a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles. He gave me the priestly duty of proclaiming the gospel of God, so that the Gentiles might become an offering acceptable to God, sanctified by the Holy Spirit.
Therefore I glory in Christ Jesus in my service to God. I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me in leading the Gentiles to obey God by what I have said and done – by the power of signs and wonders, through the power of the Spirit of God. So from Jerusalem all the way around to Illyricum, I have fully proclaimed the gospel of Christ. It has always been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not known, so that I would not be building on someone else’s foundation. Rather, as it is written:
“Those who were not told about him will see,
and those who have not heard will understand.”
This is why I have often been hindered from coming to you. (Romans 15:14-22)
As I considered this passage, there were several points that particularly spoke to me.
Paul’s Motive
Paul’s heart to preach the gospel to the Gentiles comes through clearly in this passage. But interestingly, he does not write anything here about the need for dying people to hear about the source of life. There’s nothing about need in this passage at all. Rather, Paul’s focus is on pleasing his Lord. His responsibility to preach comes from the grace God gave him, his goal is to make the Gentiles “an offering acceptable to God,” and he glories in his service to God.
What’s more, Paul does not measure his success in the fact that the Gentiles who received his preaching have been saved from God’s wrath (although they certainly have), but that they have become obedient to God. And his ambition to preach the gospel “where Christ was not known” is not because those people have a greater need than anybody else, but because Paul recognized that his ministry was the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy – in this case, from Isaiah 52:15. In every way his motivation is not the needs of unbelieving people; it’s giving glory to Christ by obeying God.
This might sound scandalous to many in the church today. I’ve sat through a great deal of preaching about the needs of lost people, both on the mission field and in my own community. I’ve heard a lot of messages urging me to have compassion for people dying without Christ. And whether intended or not, the tendency of this preaching is to create a sense of guilt. Now compassion is absolutely a good reason to share the gospel, but there is a problem with the appeal to compassion, and that is that there are too many mission fields, too many ministry needs, for anybody to respond to more than a tiny fraction of them. So I will either have to live with continual guilt for all the things I’m not doing, or reject the guilt and, very likely, the appeal along with it.
The truth, however, is that God hasn’t given me everything to do; he’s only given me some things to do. It takes everybody to do everything. Genuine compassion does not require me to do more than I, or any human, am capable of doing. It’s not heartless to observe that simply knowing a problem exists does not automatically make it my problem, it’s simply a recognition of the fact that I am finite. Unfocused compassion, trying to have God’s heart for all the lost, seems like a good thing, but it’s actually a hindrance. Feeling a need to do everything will keep me from doing anything.
But what if I come from a different motive entirely? Paul’s goal was to please God by doing the work Christ appointed him to do (2 Corinthians 5:9). He didn’t measure success by the number of people saved, but by whether or not he had obeyed God and completed the work he’d been assigned (2 Timothy 4:6-7). This was the driving passion of his life, as other passages of Scripture attest as well. In 1 Corinthians 9:16-17, for example, he writes “For when I preach the gospel, I cannot boast, since I am compelled to preach. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel! If I preach voluntarily, I have a reward; if not voluntarily, I am simply discharging the trust committed to me.” He was under orders, in other words, and had to obey.
Similarly, he writes in 1 Corinthians 5:14 that, “Christ’s love compels us.” His meaning is not that he was inspired by Christ’s love for the lost, but by Christ’s love for him. This is clear in the rest of verse 14 and 15: “because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.” Because Christ died for him, in other words, he had an obligation to live for Christ. Preaching the gospel, for Paul, was nothing less than giving Jesus what was due to him. It was an act of worship.
The Interdependence of the Body of Christ
When I was in the Air Force I had nothing to do, directly anyway, with airplanes. I was a telecommunications control specialist, which is a fancy way of saying that I was a troubleshooter for long distance communication systems. It was not my responsibility to fly, to keep the planes working, or load the bombs. If our base had come under attack, it would have been somebody else’s job to shoot back, to put out fires, repair damaged runways, care for any wounded, or prepare to launch a counterattack. My job was to make sure we could communicate with other bases and with higher headquarters. That’s not because I had considered everything and decided that this was the most important task. It wasn’t my decision at all; it was my assignment. If a situation had arisen in which it would be better for me to work at some other task, someone higher up in my chain of command would have made that decision and reassigned me.
Being under authority, whether in the military or in the body of Christ, means interdependence. God has many servants and many children. Trusting him to be God means also trusting that he will send the right people to do all the things that he didn’t send me to do. It means trusting that even if some of his children prove unfaithful, God will manage them in such a way that what needs to be done will be done. For Paul, that meant he could hand off the churches he had planted to be led by other servants of Christ.
This is the message of 1 Corinthians 12. God has given us different gifts so that we can do different jobs, and all of them are necessary. None of us is independent of the others, and that is by design! God does not want his children to be able to get by on their own; he wants us to work together. I recognize that not everyone will obey what God has called them to do. And I recognize also that none of those who do obey will obey perfectly, including me. But filling in the gaps that this creates is my Father’s responsibility, not mine. My responsibility is to work at the assignment I’ve been given until such time as I am given a different assignment.
Looking back again at Paul’s ministry:
But now that there is no more place for me to work in these regions, and since I have been longing for many years to visit you, I plan to do so when I go to Spain. (Romans 15:23-24)
He had completed the work God gave him in to do in Asia Minor, Macedonia and Achaia when he wrote that. But when he says that there is no more place for him to work, he obviously does not meant that there is no more work needing to be done in those regions. There were young churches to teach and to lead, after all. And only a small fraction of the people had yet responded to the gospel, or even heard it. But the task that Christ specifically gave to Paul in those regions was now finished.
Serving in Humility
One of the dangers that we often encounter when we help others is the temptation to pride. It’s all too easy to start thinking that I am the benevolent one, graciously using my abilities to help out others who aren’t as well equipped for life as I am. I can even start to believe that the people I minister to owe me, at least their gratitude, for the sacrifice I made for them. That’s not just offensive to the people I’m serving, it offends God who, “opposes the proud but shows favor to the humble.” (1 Peter 5:5).
And this goes beyond just my motive for sharing the gospel; it applies to everything I do. When Paul set out to deliver a contribution for the poor he asked for prayer, “that the contribution I take to Jerusalem may be favorably received by the Lord’s people there.” (Romans 15:31). Instead of arrogantly assuming that the Jerusalem believers will welcome his ministry, he asks God for a favorable reception.
Pride would say, “if they don’t accept my help, then that’s just too bad for them! I’ll use the money to help somebody else.” But the churches who had made that offering had an obligation to share (Romans 15:27), and Paul had an obligation to carry their contribution to Jerusalem. By accepting what he offered, the Jerusalem believers would be doing him a favor, enabling him to complete his assigned task. Because Paul framed his work in terms of obedience to Christ instead of meeting human needs, he avoided a temptation to pride.
If I follow the example of the Apostle Paul, my reason to tell people what Jesus has done for me is not awareness of their need, but awareness of my assignment, and of God’s grace to me. My motive for serving in every other way is the same. Instead of running from one urgent need to another, I’ll keep my focus on the tasks that God gave to me, and trust him to make sure that everything else gets done. And I’ll recognize that none of the people I end up serving own me anything in return, not even gratitude, because I’m acting under orders. Whatever they owe, they owe to the one who gave me those orders.
And as for me, I am owed nothing. When God adopted me as his son he gave me far more than I could ever pay back by any amount of obedience. Christ died for me, so that I could live for him.