In the cartoon Mother Goose and Grim, the cat is sleeping.
Someone asks, “What are you doing?” the cat says, “Nothing, I’s a cat. Cats always do nothing.”
“When are you going to get up?” the questioner asked.
“I don’t know,” says the cat. “The hardest part of doing nothing is knowing when you’re finished.”
How motivated are we in our Christian life?
Are we like the cat?
Doing nothing and not knowing when we are finished doing nothing?
The cat was not very motivated in life.
Motivation is very important to success in life, especially living the Christian life.
Motivation in the Christian life doesn’t come from pep talks or trying to pump people up.
It comes from the Word of God through the Holy Spirit teaching and applying it to our hearts.
We need to be open to His work and allow Him to work in us.
We read this in 2 Corinthians 5:14 in the Amplified Bible:
“For the love of Christ controls and urges and impels us, because we are of the opinion and conviction that if One died for all, then all died;”
We see here our true motive for living the Christian Life: the love of Christ.
He showed us His love by not only dying for all our sins, but crucified our old life in Adam.
The phrase “then all died” is referring to our death with Christ as Paul mentions in Romans 6:6:
“Knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him.”
When Christ died, we died with Him.
Just as Adam’s sin became our sin, so Christ’s death became our death, that is the death of the Old Man connected to Adam.
We are now identified with Christ, not Adam!
The Old Man is all we used to be in our unsaved life connected to Adam, which is our dead human spirit.
But, because Christ died for us and crucified us with Him, our dead human spirit was made alive in Him when we trusted Him as our Savior.
We were raised with Him to newness of life and we became a New Man in our human spirit, which is indwelt by the Holy Spirit.
As a New Man, we now have the Holy Spirit motivating us in our Christian life through the love of Christ.
Because this is true, we should have an all-out desire to let Him live out His righteous life through us.
At the busy dental office, one patient was always late.
He was called to confirm an appointment; he said, “I’ll be about 15 minutes late. That won’t be a problem, will it?”
“No,” the receptionist told him. “We just won’t have time to give you an anesthetic.”
He arrived early.
The power of motivation!
What is our motivation?
The love of Christ through His death and resurrection for us and our death and resurrection with Him!
Blessings!
Pastor Ken Keeler, Director of Church Ministries