This is what I thought I heard recently from God when I was praying to know Him more. It is a good question that got me thinking about my motives. Do I want to know God because I want to learn how to access the power to make my life better? I think there is a part of me that pursues knowing God as I would pursue scientific knowledge about how the world works. The more I am able to understand how the world works, the more I am able to live in such a way that gets the world to work for me and my life. Take Covid as an example. The more I understand how Covid works, the better I am able to avoid getting it.

God is the author of life, the designer of me and the world. The more I understand Him and how He works in the world, the better my life is going to be. There is truth in this, but there is also a self serving motivation for knowing God and His ways. I think this motivation is at the heart of fleshly religious devotion… please God or the Gods in order to gain favor in your life. My flesh wants a consumer relationship with God.

I think we see both the truth and the danger of this motivation in the purity teachings of the church which have come under criticism. It is true that God designed sex for marriage and that sexual activity outside of marriage is not good for us. But connecting a call to purity with a promise of marriage and a great sexual relationship in marriage was a self serving motivation that did not always deliver on what was promised.

This can be a part of a theology of work. The idea that if we focus more on pleasing God and serving Him in our work, He will bless our work with success. I have heard this presented as a good motivation for better integrating your faith with your work, often through the form of testimony of increased financial success as a result of this integration.

This is exactly what Satan says is motivating Job to fear the Lord. Job 1:9-10 “Does Job fear God for no reason? Have you not put a hedge around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land.” God then allows Satan to inflict suffering on Job.

This raises an interesting question….How is God going to relate to us in a way that fosters devotion to Him without feeding this fleshly devotion? I wonder if pondering this question might take us closer to understanding the puzzling array of experiences of God at work and seemingly not at work in our lives. More on this next week.

For this post, integrating our faith with our work is not a means to having more successful work lives. That is a fleshly motivation. A better motivation for the integration of our faith and our work is for our work lives to be where we come to know God better and fall more in love with Him.

I would love to connect with you about these posts if they have stirred any thoughts or questions. Take a minute, shoot me an email at bo@leavenedlives.org, and let’s see where that takes us.