Soli Deo Gloria

"It's not about what you do.

It's about why you do what you do.

Ultimately, it's about who you do it for.

In God's kingdom, it's our motivations that matter most. If you do the right thing for the wrong reasons, it doesn't even count. God judges the motives or the heart, and He only rewards those who do the right things for the right reason, To be perfectly honest, i think much of my reward has been forfeited because I did things for me, not for Him.

SDG [Soli Deo Gloria] is living for an audience of one. It's doing the right thing for the right reason. It's living for the applause of the nail-scarred hands. You go all in and all out because Jesus is your All in All.

Just Jesus.

Nothing more, nothing less, nothing else."


    -Mark Batterson, All In: You Are One Decision Away From A Totally Different Life, page 118       (Italics in the original)

A Problem of the Heart

David Poulson on Idolatry 

“The last line of 1 John woos, then commands us: ‘Beloved children, keep yourselves from idols’ (1 John 5:21). In a 105-verse treatise on living in vital fellowship with Jesus, the Son of God, how on earth does that unexpected command merit being the final word?”

“If ‘idolatry’ is the characteristic and summary Old Testament word for our drift from God, then ‘desires’ is the characteristic and summary New Testament word for the same drift. Both are shorthand for the problem of human beings.”

“Idolatry is a problem of the heart, a metaphor for human lust, craving, yearning, and greedy demand.”

“The deep question of motivation is not ‘What is motivating me?’ The final question is, ‘Who is the master of this pattern of thought, feeling, or behavior?’ In the biblical view, we are religious, inevitably bound to one god or another. People do not have needs. We have masters, lords, gods.”

“Unconditional love says, ‘I love you just as you are.’ But the Gospel is better than unconditional love. The Gospel says, ‘God accepts you just as Christ is.”

Read the rest. 

HT Vitamin Z

Performance Driven or Grace Motivated?

Great teaching on the danger of being performance driven vs. grace motivated from Jerry Bridges: 

Evangelicals commonly think today that the gospel is only for unbelievers. Once we’re inside the kingdom’s door, we need the gospel only in order to share it with those who are still outside. Now, as believers, we need to hear the message of discipleship. We need to learn how to live the Christian life and be challenged to go do it. That’s what I believed and practiced in my life and ministry for some time. It is what most Christians seem to believe.

As I see it, the Christian community is largely a performance-based culture today. And the more deeply committed we are to following Jesus, the more deeply ingrained the performance mindset is. We think we earn God’s blessing or forfeit it by how well we live the Christian life.....

......So I learned that Christians need to hear the gospel all of their lives because it is the gospel that continues to remind us that our day-to-day acceptance with the Father is not based on what we do for God but upon what Christ did for us in his sinless life and sin-bearing death. I began to see that we stand before God today as righteous as we ever will be, even in heaven, because he has clothed us with the righteousness of his Son. Therefore, I don’t have to perform to be accepted by God.

Now I am free to obey him and serve him because I am already accepted in Christ (see Rom. 8:1). My driving motivation now is not guilt but gratitude. Yet even when we understand that our acceptance with God is based on Christ’s work, we still naturally tend to drift back into a performance mindset. Consequently, we must continually return to the gospel. To use an expression of the late Jack Miller, we must “preach the gospel to ourselves every day.” For me that means I keep going back to Scriptures such as Isaiah 53:6, Galatians 2:20, and Romans 8:1. It means I frequently repeat the words from an old hymn, “My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness.

         - Jerry Bridges, The Pursuit of Holiness

Hat Tip:  Take Your Vitamin Z: Are You Performance Driven?