WEEKLY FOCUS ARCHIVE

What's Our Motivation?

February 16, 2005

Dreaming, giving, sacrifice, loving, building the kingdom, the pursuit of holiness, fasting, prayer, living the Christian life; what's the motivation? The love of Christ gives us the compelling drive to pursue Godliness. John 4 reveals to us a vibrant image of the love of God. Jesus, a Jew, breaks through the boundaries of society, politics, expectations and the like, and reaches out to a Samaritan woman. This was no small boundary crossing in that culture. In stepping through the boundaries Jesus demonstrates the extravagance of God's love and His desire to reach us in the midst of the tangled mess we create in our lives. Beyond breaking the rules enforced by the culture, Jesus shows a woman who has lived a life of longing, where real love is found. This woman, who has drank from the well of sensuality and hungered for the bread of acceptance, has her life turned upside down by the one who sees "everything she ever did". In showing her the reality of her own heart, Jesus reveals the futility of this woman's attempts to find meaning in life in the arms of another human. While she had counted numerous men as lovers or husbands, and was now living with another who was not her husband, she had become more and more thirsty for a love that would remain. It had never been found. Jesus tells her that the finding of that kind of love and security could only be found in the wellspring of God's heart. The harder this woman had pursued love in this life the more it had eluded her. Regardless of how much she drank from the stolen waters she never quenched her thirst. The more she drank the more she thirsted.

For years this woman had gone to the well of worldly love just as she had journey to the well for water that day. On this occasion, however, she is unexpectedly offered a new well and a new water that provided at total quenching of her deepest thirsts. Marveling at the prospect and finding the Christ, her quest and motivations were set in a new direction. Leaving her water jar behind (therein leaving what had previously been the depository of unfulfilled longings) she runs into the city to tell of a new kind of love. She yearns to share this all knowing and all seeing love with anyone that would listen. Though this man (a man unlike all the lovers she had known) knew her fully and told her everything she ever did, He loved her and offered her love like she had never seen or heard. Our motivation for the Christian life is our knowledge of the One who sees everything we do, knows everything about us, and loves us still. This One who offers love of a kind we cannot find in any mate, friend, brother, sister, mother, father, or lover, is the One in whom we find all our hopes, dreams, failures, disappointments and hurts set right. This kind of love that goes beyond the expectations of our society, culture, job, family, and friends, is what motivates us to be what God has called us to be. All of our hunger and thirst for the things of God and our desire to see His Kingdom expanded here on earth grow out of our understanding of His great love. As long as we hunger for the imperfect loves of this world we will fall short of a pure motivation. When we accept and find joy in the reality that only His love is complete, we find our motivation for life. In Him, we live and move and have our being, as the scripture says.

Bruce Smith (Rev.)
Director of Development, Teaching Pastor
bruce@uptownchurch.net

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