[Note: This post continues our two-month-long series through the month of July on the topic of “desire” and “longing” in concert with my recent book on the topic. Thanks for letting me be in your life each week. God is with you!]
Just three weeks ago, my wife, Quinn, and I hosted a final gathering at our home for six interns from our church. Over the course of the last three years, we’ve set aside every other Monday night to serve an intimate gathering of some of the younger leaders in our congregation to touch on some of the necessary skills for ministry and life-long discipleship that we had picked up along the way. We had a syllabus and everything. The main goal was to equip each of these students with the stuff they need to follow the way of Jesus for the rest of their lives. But, for a few, specific energy was given to help bring clarity to what seemed to be a distinct sense of call to serve the local church vocationally.
There was a litany of things to discuss. Admittedly, there is no shortage of vital areas one must attend to cultivate a flourishing spiritual life: healthy boundaries, Bible reading habits, prayer, Sabbath-keeping, emotional health, and even how to cook and host a decent meal. But for a few of these interns, we were able to discuss one of the more weighty matters for working in a church: how do you guard your love for God when you are paid to be a Christian leader? This is a vital yet sticky conversation.
Being a Christian leader has proven itself to be a dangerous task. We have all grown exhaustingly tired of seeing stories of Christian leaders who have misused their power to gain that which brings a downfall. We warned our interns, however. Those same impulses lurk inside each of us. No Christian leader is immune to sin. The most assured way we can set ourselves up for moral compromise is by failing to believe in our own capacity to be deceived. Pride is always a prequel to a fall. When we do the work of ministry exclusively for the purpose of gaining power, authority, reputation, fame, or resource wealth, the call gets lost in the shuffle. What may have begun with good motivation and intention gets swallowed up by the wonky desires of the human heart. This is particularly true when it comes to money. “The deceitfulness of wealth,” Jesus would tell in one of his most pointed parables, “choke the word, making it unfruitful.” (Matt 13.22)
Money has an odd way of impacting one’s motivations. Jesus was keenly aware of this. And why he taught that religion could be so dangerous—it easily provides cover for nefarious desires that betray Christ and his kingdom. Jesus often critiqued the motives of the religious leaders of his day, warning against the desire to please the crowds, seek money, and attain power that too often pervades toxic religion. Jesus sternly warned the Pharisees who fronted with piety but were “full of greed and self-indulgence.” (Matt 23.25) The hidden desires in toxic religion can devastate; they hide behind robes and theological rigidity. Michel Foucault—that postmodern philosopher of the 20th century—scathingly argued the same thing, believing that religious truth claims were often what he called a “desire for power.”1 Awkward bedfellows as they may seem, it seems as though Jesus and Foucault shared similar critiques of the possible dangers of unchecked religious desires.2
When we discussed money with the interns, we wanted to expose what can be the dark side of working in a church. Money can so quickly mess up our hearts. Personally, this has created difficulty for me in my more mature years. Widely being seen as a writer, teacher, academic, and public theologian, I am more and more being invited to speak at this or that event. And the thing that always seems to mess with my heart is the honorarium. Don’t mishear me: being paid to do the work we are called to do is not bad. The worker is worth their wages, Paul would write to Timothy.3 It’s just that money can get in the way of our discerning what our true motives are. Are we doing this out of obedience to what Christ is calling us to? Or, only for the money? Or, more often, an awkward blend of both?
Behind every decision is a will. And behind every decision of the will is a hidden motivation. This is part of human nature within that we often become skilled at veiling and keeping in the dark. And while we may act out of hidden motivations known only to us, part of the holy life is recognizing that God is aware of every single motivation of our heart. “All a person’s ways seem pure to them,” the author of the Proverbs writes, “but motives are weighed by the Lord.” (Prov 16.2) While we may harbor the true motives for why we do what we do hidden under lock and key in our hearts, the Lord always knows. The Spirit sees them. This is why an intimate relationship with sacred Scripture is crucial for any of us. God’s word—what God himself has uttered to speak truthfully to humanity—is “sharper than a double-edged sword...it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.” (Heb 4.12) Nothing is hidden from God’s sight.
More important than making the right decision is increasingly inviting the scrutinizing work of the Holy Spirit into why we decide to do what we do. Those motivations shape everything about us. And without God’s voice giving them shape, we all have the capacity to do some dangerous things.
The power of these motivations (why we do what we do) gave shape to the way Jesus went about ministry. In John 6.1-15, we see Jesus feed the recorded crowd of 5,000 men (of course, there were way more, including women and children) out in the middle of the desert. John tells us that a little boy has brought Jesus five stone barley loaves and two little fish to Jesus. With these, Jesus does a miracle. And he feeds the throngs of hungry people. Jesus did restrain himself—when done for the right reason and with the holiest of intentions—from multiplying bread to feed people in need. There were times to make bread.
But there were other times. Earlier in his public ministry, we must carefully note that time that Jesus is taken by the Spirit into the desert where he is tempted by the devil in Matthew 4. Alone, tired, and hungry (the result of not having eaten for weeks on end), the devil instructs Jesus to ‘turn stones into bread’ (v. 3) so that he might satiate his hunger. Again, we’ve seen that later in his ministry Jesus would willingly use his divine capacity to turn whatever into bread he so desired. Adding to which the fact that there was no commandment in Scripture against turning stones into bread. Jesus could do it. And there was no command against it. But he doesn’t. Jesus resists. He rejects the serpent’s instruction. There were times when Jesus refused to make bread.
Why, one wonders, would Jesus willingly make bread in one instance but not in another? In his little book on discernment, God’s Voice Within, Christian writer Mark Thibodeaux offers a suggestion as to why Jesus would resist an activity at one moment of ministry he would clearly undertake at another point in his ministry:
Why would Jesus resist? Making bread appears at first glance to be a good and holy thing. Bread, after all, was destined to be an important instrument in Jesus' ministry. So why did Jesus resist so vehemently? He resisted because he knew that the source of his attraction to making bread at that particular moment of his life was not of the true spirit. This holy attraction was not rooted in the stirrings of the Father and would not have drawn Jesus closer to the Father.4
Thibodeaux is helping illuminate for us Jesus’s inner logic. When the motivation for action was one of service, love, and care for the other—with a desire to carry out the Father’s will—Jesus made bread. But when the act was in service of self alone, birthed out of hungry impulse, and out of obedience to the invitation of the dark one, Jesus does not make the bread. The difference was one thing: the motivation behind the making of bread.
Why we do what we do matters. Perhaps even more than what we do. Taking the time necessary to slow down to come to grips with why we do what we do should be our default approach toward following Christ. Slow down. Ask the heart: why do you want you want? What are you after? Because there simply are times when doing the miraculous is not the right thing. Take it from the first humans in Genesis 3: just because you’ve got some fruit in your hands doesn’t mean you’ve done the thing God has asked. There’s such a thing as toxic fruitfulness. We’ve been doing it since the beginning. There remain many times when we do the good out of the wrong spirit, for the wrong reason, with ill-placed motivations. Yes, God is gracious. He can still work through us when we act out of dark motivations. But as we grow into maturity—entering into Christlikeness—it is the task of the one following the Jesus way to give increasing space to the Spirit’s voice to illuminate the why of our ministry.
In other words, don’t always make the bread.
Thanks, again, for reading my work. As always, you can always find me wasting time on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Or you can listen to my podcast, Slow Theology. If you found this content helpful to your journey, yay! Consider enjoying my most recent book The Gift of Thorns: Jesus, the Flesh, and the War for our Wants, which was released with Zondervan in February of 2024. Within, I explore what the topic of human desire from the perspective of Scripture, theology, and experience—with particular interest to how we can be formed into the image of Christ through our desires. In short, it’s about why our cultural mandate to “you do you” is so profoundly unhelpful to the follower of Jesus. You can support my work by reading it! And sharing about your experience. Click on the image below to get yourself a copy.
I’m a product of sermons. I’ll not soon forget Dr. Tim Keller’s sermon “Absolutism” preached at Redeemer in New York in which he contends Jesus and Foucault share a similar critique of religion. I owe this thought to the seed Dr. Keller planted years ago.
1 Tim 5.8.
Thibodeaux, Mark, God’s Voice Within: The Ignatian Way of Spirituality (Chicago, IL: Loyola Press, 2010), 36.
Thank you for the thoughtful exhortation, but even more so for investing so much time and wisdom into young leaders in your community. I hope the seeds you've planted and watered in those young people will reap an enormous harvest for the body of Christ.
Your clear way of stringing complex ideas continues to bless me. You have put into words an entire spiritual discipline I’ve wrestled with for a long time. Thank you for sharing. I will be coming back to this often as I continue to examine my motivations and lay them before the Lord. Your students are blessed to by stewarded by you!