Motivation

I thought I was a terrific leader, when actually I was a minister of death! To make matters worse, for several years I didn’t even realize what was happening.

The problem started rather innocently when I was one of the leaders of a new church. Being young and idealistic, those of us in leadership positions preached persistently on the areas in which we felt the church was falling short of God’s perfect intention. The series of Sunday teachings would go something like this:

On the first Sunday we gave a message on the importance of evangelism and reaching the lost. During week two we stressed that prayer is the key to the Christian life. By the third week someone exhorted the church members about the dusty Bibles on their coffee tables.

Those of us in leadership began to recognize that our approach was not working. We began to see that telling people how bad they are doesn’t make them better! Instead, people need to be encouraged by an understanding of how God sees them in Christ; then their conduct will increasingly match that reality.

There are two primary ways to motivate people, and most sermons fall in one of these two broad categories. The first type of motivation focuses on God’s love and provision for us, emphasizing Christ’s work on the cross on our behalf and the resources we have by the power of the Holy Spirit. This category can be summarized by the word “grace.”

The other type of message is quite different, centering on our responsibilities before God. This type of motivation typically focuses on the many biblical passages that tell us what the Lord wants us to do or wants us to abstain from doing. Often we add our own embellishments to the biblical passages, much as the Pharisees took the Old Testament laws and made them more burdensome by added requirements. Rather than proclaiming what God has done for us, the emphasis is on what we must do for God. This motivation tactic is basically what the Bible calls “the law.”

It is crucial for every leader to understand the serious implications of these two methods of motivation. Paul explained to the Corinthians the consequences of whether we seek to motivate people by law—focusing on human responsibility and effort—or by grace—emphasizing God’s provision and enabling power by the Holy Spirit: “Our competence is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor 3:5a-6).

Paul goes on to contrast the “ministry of death” and the “ministry of condemnation” with the “ministry of the Spirit” and the “ministry of justification.” To Paul, law and grace are like oil and water—they don’t mix! While one brings death and condemnation, the other brings life and peace.

If you aren’t sure whether you are motivating people by law or by grace, take a look at Paul’s analysis in 2 Corinthians 3. He provides stark contrasts between the ministry of the old covenant (law) and that of the new covenant (grace):

• The old covenant is characterized by the letter, which kills; the new covenant is characterized by the Spirit, who gives life.
• The old covenant is based on human effort and adequacy; the new covenant is based on the grace and all-sufficiency of God.
• The old covenant approach to motivating people is a ministry of death; the new covenant approach relies on the Spirit and gives life.
• The old covenant appeals to an external legal code, written on tablets of stone; the new covenant is an internal work of the Holy Spirit, writing the law of God on human hearts.
• The old covenant method promises righteousness, but results only in condemnation; the new covenant method produces true righteousness and deliverance from condemnation.
• The old covenant creates barriers between ourselves and God; under the new covenant, the veils are taken away, allowing us to behold the glory of the Lord.
• The old covenant puts people in bondage; under the new covenant, the Spirit of the Lord produces liberty.
• The glory of the old covenant quickly faded away; under the new covenant, we are continually being changed to ever-increasing degrees of glory.

So which covenant characterizes your ministry? Is your flock increasingly being built up in the grace and all-sufficiency of the Lord Jesus within them, or are they being beaten down and overburdened with religious requirements they can never achieve? Do you take smug satisfaction in your ability to manipulate people into continual guilt so they will respond to your altar calls, or have you learned to motivate them to come before the Lord with unveiled faces so they are genuinely transformed?

Finding sins and shortcomings to harp on does not require a high degree of spiritual insight! What is more difficult, and more effective, is seeing the believers around us as they are in Christ—a glorious church. As Don Quixote saw the barmaid Aldonza as his virtuous lady Dulcinea, it is crucial that we see and proclaim a vision of people as the Lord sees them, not as they currently behave.

—From Walking The Leadership Highway: without becoming roadkill by Jim Buchan