Check Your Motivation

Before you say one more word to anyone — before you send the text, start the conversation, invite someone to coffee, or share your faith with a stranger — there's a question worth asking first. And it's not "What should I say?"

It's "Why do I want to say it?"

That question can feel awkward, even a little invasive, like someone just turned on a light in a room you weren't ready to have seen. We'd rather talk about skills: how to start a conversation, how to listen well, how to ask good questions that open a door instead of closing one. Those things matter — this course is going to spend plenty of time on them. But skill without the right heart behind it doesn't just fall a little flat. It can quietly turn real relationships into a project. It can turn people into targets instead of neighbors. It can make ministry about us — our growth, our comfort, our résumé before God — without our even noticing it happening.

So before we build the "how," we need to sit with the "why." Longer than feels comfortable. This lesson isn't about making you feel guilty every time you talk to someone. It's about giving you a habit — and a theology — that will keep your engagement with people genuine for the long haul, even when no one is watching and nothing "comes of it." Especially then, actually. That's usually where you find out what was really driving you all along.

The Uncomfortable Truth: We Can't Fully Trust Our Own Read on Ourselves

Here's what makes this so hard. Motive-checking isn't like checking your grammar. You can't just glance at yourself and clearly see the answer, because the very thing you're inspecting — your heart — is also the thing doing the inspecting. It's like trying to see your own eyes without a mirror. Jeremiah names this bluntly:

"The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?" — Jeremiah 17:9

That's a hard verse to sit with. It means your first answer to "why did I reach out to that person?" might not be the true one — not because you're lying on purpose, but because self-deception is one of the heart's specialties. We are experts at dressing self-interest up in spiritual language. "I just want to encourage them" can be true. It can also be a cover story we've told ourselves so often we've started to believe it. The heart doesn't announce when it's doing this. That's what makes it deceitful — not that it lies to other people, but that it lies convincingly to you.

This is exactly why Solomon says the same thing twice in Proverbs, almost word for word, as if to make sure we don't read past it too quickly:

"Every way of a man is right in his own eyes, but the LORD weighs the heart." — Proverbs 21:2

"All the ways of a man are pure in his own eyes, but the LORD weighs the spirit." — Proverbs 16:2

Notice the pattern in both: it is right in his own eyes. It seems pure. Your own internal sense of "I'm doing this for the right reasons" is not proof that you are — it's just your own eyes looking at your own heart, which is exactly the arrangement Jeremiah already warned us not to trust too far. And 1 Samuel 16:7 drives the same point home from another angle entirely — spoken to Samuel, a prophet, in the very moment he was about to anoint a king based on how impressive the candidate looked standing in front of him:

"The LORD said to Samuel, 'Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature... For the LORD sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.'" — 1 Samuel 16:7

Even a prophet needed correcting on this. You and I aren't exempt.

So checking your motivation isn't a one-time diagnostic you run before a conversation and then move past forever. It's a posture — an ongoing, humble willingness to say, "God, I might not see myself clearly here. Show me what's really underneath this." That's exactly the prayer David prays, and it's worth making your own:

"Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!" — Psalm 139:23–24

Notice David doesn't ask God to confirm what he already believes about himself. He asks God to search him — to go looking for what he can't see on his own. That's the posture this whole lesson is inviting you into.

What Jesus Says About Doing Right Things for Wrong Reasons

Jesus takes this further than almost anyone else in Scripture. In Matthew 6, He warns His followers about doing good things — giving, praying, even fasting — for the wrong audience:

"Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven." — Matthew 6:1

Read that closely. Jesus isn't warning His disciples away from bad deeds. He's warning them about good deeds aimed at the wrong set of eyes. You can give generously, pray publicly, serve faithfully — all things this course will actively encourage you to do — and still miss it entirely, because the engine underneath was applause, not love. The deed looked identical from the outside. What was different was invisible to everyone except God.

Mark 7 goes even deeper into where all of this actually originates in the first place:

"For it is from within, out of the heart of man, that evil thoughts come..." — Mark 7:21

Our actions aren't random events that just happen to us. They're downstream of something. Every conversation you start, every relationship you invest in, every act of outreach you plan, is coming from somewhere in you — and that "somewhere" is either being shaped by love, or it's being shaped by something else wearing love's clothing.

Jesus also tells a short, sharp story in Luke 18 about two men who go up to the temple to pray — a religious leader confident in his own righteousness, and a tax collector who can barely lift his eyes:

"But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, 'God, be merciful to me, a sinner!' I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other." — Luke 18:13–14

Jesus says it was the tax collector — not the impressive one — who went home justified. The difference wasn't their actions in that moment. It was what was actually driving each of them. One man was managing his image before God and everyone watching. The other was simply honest. That's the whole lesson in miniature, and it's worth carrying with you every time you walk into a room hoping to connect with someone.

Naming the Counterfeits

Part of what makes motive-checking hard is that impure motives rarely announce themselves. They don't walk in wearing a name tag. They come disguised as normal, even admirable, impulses — which is exactly why they're so easy to miss. A few common ones are worth knowing by name, so you can recognize them the moment they show up in you rather than months later, looking back:

• The Approval Motive — engaging with someone so you look caring, faithful, or spiritually mature to the people watching.

• The Fixer Motive — engaging with someone because their mess makes you feel needed or important, more than because you actually love them as a person.

• The Scoreboard Motive — engaging with someone because they represent a "win" — a conversion story, a testimony, a number to report back to your mentor or group.

• The Fear Motive — engaging, or avoiding engaging, out of fear of what a mentor, leader, or church community will think of you either way.

• The Loneliness Motive — reaching out to fill your own emptiness more than to meet someone else's actual need.

None of these make you a fraud. They make you human. Paul names this exact tension directly, writing not as someone above the pull but as someone intimately familiar with it:

"For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ." — Galatians 1:10

Paul isn't writing that to condemn people who struggle with this. He's writing it because he understands the pull firsthand — and he wants you to feel the weight of the choice underneath every relationship you build: whose approval are you actually working for? The question isn't whether these impulses will ever show up in you. They will, probably regularly. The question is whether you let them run the show unexamined, or whether you bring them into the light the moment you notice them.

Mixed Motives Aren't the Same as Bad Motives

Here's a piece of grace worth holding onto tightly: your motives will probably always be a little mixed, and that's not a crisis. You might reach out to someone both because you genuinely love them and because it makes you feel good about yourself. Welcome to being a sanctified-but-not-yet-glorified human being. Every believer who has ever loved another person has done it with a heart that was still partly under construction.

Paul's famous words on love in 1 Corinthians 13 aren't a demand for flawless motives before love counts. They're a warning against love's total absence:

"If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing." — 1 Corinthians 13:3

That's a warning about a heart with no love in it at all — not a call to achieve 100% pure motives before you're allowed to reach out to anyone. That day of perfect purity won't come this side of eternity, and God knows it. The goal of this lesson isn't to paralyze you until your motives are spotless. The goal is honesty and direction: naming what's mixed in, and asking God to grow the love and shrink the rest, a little more each year.

Colossians 3:23 gives you the reset button for exactly this moment — the moment you catch a motive drifting:

"Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men." — Colossians 3:23

When you notice a motive has drifted, you don't need to spiral into guilt or disqualify yourself from the relationship altogether. You realign. You refocus on the Lord and the person right in front of you, and you keep going — a little more honest than you were five minutes ago. That realignment, repeated over a lifetime, is what spiritual maturity looks like. It's not the absence of mixed motives. It's the habit of catching them and turning back toward love.

Why This Matters for Connecting With People

Think about the last time someone was kind to you, but you could tell they wanted something from you — your attendance, your agreement, your conversion, your approval. Even if the words were warm, something in you pulled back a little. You probably couldn't have explained exactly how you knew. You just knew.

People read motive the way they read tone of voice — instinctively, underneath the actual words being said. If you're engaging with someone because you genuinely see them and value them as a person made in God's image, they will feel it, even if you fumble your sentences, forget what to say next, or run out of the "right" words entirely. And if you're engaging with them because you need a win, a story, or a sense of your own usefulness, they'll feel that too — even if your words are polished and your delivery is flawless. Authentic engagement was never primarily a communication skill to be mastered. It's the overflow of a heart that has been searched, checked, and quietly realigned toward love, over and over, for as long as it takes.

That's the real starting point of everything else this course will teach you — not a technique, but a heart being made honest before God, one relationship at a time. So before you build the skills of connecting well, let this be the ground you keep returning to: a willingness to be searched, a readiness to be corrected, and a love that's more interested in the person in front of you than in what engaging with them might prove about you. Get that right, even imperfectly, and everything else you learn in this course will have somewhere true to stand.

Before You Move On

Checking your motivation isn't about disqualifying yourself from engaging with people, and it isn't a bar you have to clear before God will use you. It's the opposite — it's what keeps your engagement real over the long run, in the seasons when it's hard and no one's watching. When your "why" is being continually shaped by love, your "how" will follow, even imperfectly. People don't need you to arrive with flawless motives. They need you to keep showing up honest, willing to be searched, and willing to be changed.

"Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting." — Psalm 139:23–24