Test Your Conduct: What Are Your Motives?

    By A. W. Tozer

    But ye denied the Holy One. . .And killed the Prince of life,
    whom God hath raised from the dead:  Acts 3:14, 15

        The test by which all conduct must finally be judged -- is motive.

         As water cannot rise higher than its source, so the moral quality
    in an act can never be higher than the motive that inspires it.
    For this reason, no act that arises from an evil motive can be good,
    even though some good may appear to come out of it.

         Every deed done out of anger or spite, for instance, will be found at
    last to have been done for the enemy and against the Kingdom of God!

         In this matter of motive, as in so many other things, the Pharisees
    afford us clear examples.

         They remain the world's most dismal religious failures, not because of
    doctrinal error nor because they were careless or lukewarm, nor because
    they were outwardly persons of dissolute life.

         Their whole trouble lay in the quality of their religious motives.
    They prayed, but they prayed to be heard of men. They gave generously
    to the service of the temple, but they sometimes did it to escape their duty
    toward their parents, and this was an evil. They judged sin and stood against
    it when found in others, but this they did from self-righteousness and
    hardness of heart.

         That this is not a small matter may be gathered from the fact that those
    orthodox and proper religionists went on in their blindness, until at last they
    crucified the Lord of glory, with no inkling of the gravity of their crime!

---

    Yours in Christ,
    Paul N. F.