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Don’t Do God’s Will Like an Atheist

After my message to the Liberty University student body recently, a perceptive student asked this clarifying question: So you don’t believe that altruistic acts are possible or desirable?

I asked for his definition of altruism so that I could answer what he was really asking. He said, “Doing a good deed for others with no view to any reward.” I answered: “That’s right, whether or not it’s possible, I don’t think it’s desirable, because it’s not what the Bible teaches us to do; and it’s not what people experience as genuine love. Because it isn’t genuine love.”

When God is Glorified

I had said in the convocation message: Doing right for right’s sake is atheistic. Christians should do what’s right for God’s sake; because the Bible teaches us to do everything for the glory of God (1 Corinthians 10:31). But God is not glorified if we leave him out of account, and say that doing a right deed is its own justification. Nothing is its own justification, if God is left out.

Christians should do what God says is right because, in doing it, we enjoy more of God. Jesus was motivating us to be generous to others when he said, “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35). I’m simply saying that this motivating, promised “blessedness” is not mainly more money, but more God. God delights to reveal more of himself to the generous than to the stingy (John 14:23).

This motive glorifies God. God is glorified when he is desired as a treasure. If we want a deeper fellowship with him because he makes us happier than anyone else, we glorify him. So to be motivated to do right by the desire for more of God glorifies God.

How Jesus Motivates

Jesus said that when we are slandered as Christians, we should rejoice (Matthew 5:12) and love our enemies (Matthew 5:44) “for great is your reward in heaven” (Matthew 5:12), and “so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5:45). The motivation he appeals to is that the path of sacrificial love leads to an increase of joy in our relationship to God as Father.

Jesus motivated us to “invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind” to our feast “because they cannot repay [us].” Then he added: “For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just” (Luke 14:13-14). In other words: Be generous; make sacrifices in this world; because great is your reward in heaven.