Morning Devotional

October  8, 2005
"A Good Race" (Part 8)     
    by Don Emmitte

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Some are preaching out of jealousy and rivalry. But others preach about Christ with pure motives. They preach because they love me, for they know the Lord brought me here to defend the Good News. Those others do not have pure motives as they preach about Christ. They preach with selfish ambition, not sincerely, intending to make my chains more painful to me. (Philippians 1:15-17 NLT).

It is important in all of our lives, in any activity, to check the motive behind what you are doing. Jesus taught a lot about the heart and said, “… where your treasure is there your heart will be also.” You will usually do your best with those things that you love the most. If you have a baby in your home you probably have to change some “smelly” diapers, but the passion you have for your baby gives you the motivation to change diapers willingly.

Why are you doing the things you do? Over the last few months I have been thinking about the word “passion.” In our dealership we have an annual name for our conference/training room. The name represents a theme that we have adopted for the year. This year’s name is “Presence.” The idea is that we should be “present” in our work. It is another way of saying that we should conduct ourselves with passion in our work.

Recently I listened to a well-known motivational speaker as he asked, “For what tasks are you having to manufacture energy?” In other words, what are you doing at work that you have to make yourself get excited about? He then encouraged his listeners to either “fix it” or “kill it”. Those are hard words, but the fact remains that we will never do our best at something unless we are really passionate about it.

Last week Kyle and I spent the better part of a day dethatching and reseeding his lawn. It seems that this is an annual task. After completing it, I understand why the yards are so small in this part of the world! It is nothing short of hard manual labor! Several blisters later and with plenty of sore muscles, we surveyed the job and decided that once again, the old adage of “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right” is correct.

If our problem is one of passion, we should examine the passion. Shouldn’t we have a passion for whatever our tasks in life are? Most of the time our passion can be determined by our motivation to do the things we are doing. Obviously if our motivation is one of greed or self-serving interest then we have a poor motivation. You and I will do greater works for the Kingdom of God, and really even perform better in our personal life, when we have the proper motivation to do those things that we do.