Motivating ourselves to live with God
- This page is part of an ERW course, Meeting God. By John Eagles, October 24, 2009.
To whatever religion we belong, for most of us it is again and again difficult to motivate ourselves to go our course to live with God. What can be done about it?
First we need to realize that God never wants us to do something involuntarily. The reason for this is that we are created to have freedom. The deeper meaning is that God made it such that when we give to God or to others, it also really will be a free gift. Love that is received by demanding it from someone or by tempting someone to give it has no deep meaning. It isn't really love because the person giving that love does it to acquire a certain self-centered benefit.
Therefore, God never asks us to do something that we don't really want to do. How does this relate to our own motivation to live with God? It means that whenever we seriously lack desire to do what we may think we have to do for God, we should not do it. That is my own take on life. Instead, I go in prayer until I found out from where my disliking came. Sometimes in prayer I realize that I did not deeply enough understand God's desire. Sometimes also I realize that what I thought was God's will, wasn't really wanted by God. In the first case, my motivation has deepened and I can do what I know i have to do. In the second case, I was right in not wanting to do it and I can find out what I should do instead.
One big problem can be when God's will is passed on to us by a religious leader. Sometimes a religious leader misunderstands what is God's will. Sometimes a religious leader knows what externally is God's will but he or she does not represent God in terms of love and understanding.
Even when a religious leader knows what is God's will and also has a good relationship to God and love for us, it still is essential that we establish a direct relationship to God about God's will. We all are children of God and God wishes to relate to each of us directly. Furthermore, even if our leader correctly understands God's will, it is not enough for us to blindly follow. We may entirely misunderstand the meaning of what God wants from us and if we have such misunderstanding, it will lead to problems in our life of faith. Even if we can totally trust a central figure, we still need to ask God because we may be lacking in our own comprehension of what he or she tells us.
So we always need to pray to God about all that we do, because it is the right relationship between parents and child and because it is the only way for us to be sure that we have the right understanding of God's will.
Sometimes this can lead to conflicts with the people around us. If a leader or a parental figure has a bad time and isn't connected well to God, we may get problems in our relationship with him or her. If we perceive it to be God's will to do certain things in life, our relatives and friends may have other opinions and find us weird or even openly oppose us.
Also in these cases, the only way to solve it is in prayer. When we pray, God can explain to us the meaning of the problems we have. God always wants to help us with each problem in our lives of faith. We have this assurance because of God's deep love for each of us.
Maybe the most common problem of lacking motivation to do God's will is when we are addicted to a life style that isn't centered on God. It is the nature of sin that it is liked by many people, but sin destroys our heart of love and our desire to do good. Always when our lack of motivation is caused by our own sins, there is only one solution. It is to stop sinning and to go back to God in repentance.
There are still many other ways in which we can motivate ourselves to love God and to live with God. One important method is the study of God's Word. Another gate to God's love is the beauty of creation. Maybe the most effective way to understand God's love and to be motivated in our love for God is by giving out good love ourselves.
But all these roads can be misdirected as well. We could enjoy the beauty of creation in a selfish way. We could be blinded by wrong doctrine to see the real truth in Books of God's Word. We could give love but forget to establish a personal relationship to God and our love may not be the best way of expressing God's love. Therefore, we do absolutely and always need sincere and personal prayer to keep a close relationship to God.
Comments
- Question: You said: "God never asks us to do something that we don't really want to do." I'm a bit puzzled by this sentence.
In my understanding this is not in contradiction with to be willing to lose our lives in order to gain it. God is God of love and God loves each of us more than we could ever love ourselves or each other in the original way. From this understanding it is logical that whatever God asks us is good for us. And if we have this kind of faith in God's love then how could we feel against what God is asking? Even if we should lose our physical lives, if God is asking us, it serves a higher purpose and will also be the best for our own spiritual future.
When in daily situations we deeply perceive God's desire for what we do, being united with that desire, we won't feel against what God is asking. So if we do nevertheless, I advise to pray to find out if we have the correct understanding of God's will. It happens so often that people think to know what is God's will but they misunderstand. They have no personal connection to God and just assume that what their religion is demanding equals God's will.
Examples for these experiences are countless. For example, I have been doing things like study of history. For some time I know that God wants me to do that but suddenly on a morning I wake up and have no desire to do that work anymore. So I prayed until I understood that I had to do something else and gradually found out the reason why. I have experienced that in prayer God suddenly sent me out of my normal daily affairs to leave everything behind, rent a car and go to a city a day drive away. I did not know why I had to go there at all. Coming in that city I was sent to a square where I had never been before. And when I arrived at that square I met an old friend who happened to visit that city and who had lost the relationship to God longer ago but who desired to find it back. Such kind of experiences I have had many times in my life.
I also have experienced that from my prayers I knew that God wanted me to invest in a certain person but gradually it did not feel so good anymore. Praying about it I came to realize that the person had fallen and that I should not anymore relate to that person but give my love and service to somebody else. Also this happened many times in my life.
- Question: Can we 'see' whether a person has fallen?
It is possible to see this by looking at the energy of the chakras and the condition of the spirit body. Yet this by itself should not be something to determine if we should relate to a person or not. It is of course not so that I am suggesting that we should never relate to people who have fallen. But sometimes people fell so deeply or we ourselves might be incapable of dealing with grave situations that for the sake of our own protection it is better to discontinue a direct relationship.
That is not something that we could easily determine by ourselves as there is always so much we don't know about ourselves and others and the entire spiritual situation around a person.
Furthermore, consider the nature of spiritual sensing. We can spiritually sense what we can understand. We cannot sense what we have no way of knowing of. To a degree this is the same for physical perceptions. If you are a farmer you may detect weeds that in the eyes of a novice may look exactly like the crop. In the spiritual reality, we cannot sense well what we have no awareness of. In the case of somebody who has fallen, it is possible to see this but we cannot see how serious it is, how deeply it affected the heart of the person.
To give a comparison that may elucidate this. Suppose that someone is a very dirty person who never cleanses his clothing. Another person also has dirty clothing but it is because you just stumble upon him after he did a cleaning job at a dirty place. He had not yet the time to cleanse himself afterward. Externally looking the two people may look the same but the people are entirely different. This may teach why we never should just rely on what we spiritually sense, but we should always pray about the deeper meaning.
- Question: You said: "I should not anymore relate to that person but give my love and service to somebody else." So the principle here is: With limited time and energy available, it is desirable to invest and give priority to that which yields to God the greatest return on investment. The economical aspects of restoration?
I already answered this a little in my above comment. There may be some economical aspect to this, meaning that it is 'pays off' better to give love and service to some people than to others. Yet I don't think that we ourselves could determine this on the basis of certain principles, although there are principles for this, I am sure.
If we seriously ask God to whom to relate, we will get answers and this surely isn't just so that we should relate only to those who are fishes most easy to catch. There are so many considerations to this and yet it is also true that restoration is always so complex that we can never reason it out by ourselves.
Let us think of Jacob's course. He had to 'witness' to and serve his uncle Laban. Even after he had done this for some 20 years, Laban still had not converted to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as he was still trying to reclaim an idol that Rachel had taken with her on their flight away from Laban. Yet, Jacob for other reasons had to serve Laban for all those 20 years.
In Home Church we serve all people regardless their background and spiritual level. But in witnessing you would try to find people who are ready to understand and follow. Both Home Church and witnessing have their significance. I think that this shows that there is more to it than trying to be economical.
- Question: How "intense" are you during prayers? Or is the "tone" of a prayer similar to that of a normal conversation with a physical human being?
Speaking for myself, my prayers are sometimes like normal conversations and sometimes very intense. It depends entirely on the situation. I do everything to keep a continuous connection to God in prayer, during all that I am doing. When I was younger, it meant that I spent some seconds in prayer before I pronounced any spoken sentence in conversations with people. I had not yet learned then to stay in prayer to God during such conversations. And you can imagine that people sometimes pronounced me to be crazy for acting so 'strange.' Now I have learned to better 'hide' my continuing prayers and people won't notice it easily.
But there are times that we need to go in serious and deep prayer. It is not something that we can determine. It is set by what happens in and around us. It is mostly determined by the spiritual reality of that moment and we must develop our intuition for this and learn to respond to it.
Answers to some questions in prayer come quickly. Other answers may require deep and intense and long prayers of fighting through a night in most difficult spiritual fights. Again other answers can only come on the basis of having experienced certain things in life and such prayers may have to be repeated on and off over several years.
