The question first arrived in a parking lot at a men's retreat in his early thirties and it has never really gone away.
He had said something in a session. It was a true thing, and it landed, and two men came up to him afterward and one of them said something he still remembers word for word.
And walking back across the gravel he noticed that he was replaying it. And then he noticed that he had enjoyed the replaying. And then, standing at his own car with the keys in his hand, he had the thought that has followed him for eighteen years.
Do I want God, or do I want to be a man who wants God.
And here is what has happened since, which is worse than the question. He cannot answer it, because every time he examines a motive he finds another one underneath it, and then he examines that one and it happens again. He has gone round the loop so many times that he now has a motive for examining his motives, and he has caught himself being pleased about his own honesty in doing it, which is where the whole thing collapses into something like vertigo.
So he has got quieter. He does not say things in sessions any more. It is safer not to, and he knows that the safety is also suspect, and around it goes.
If you have been down that particular staircase, come and sit down. Nobody here is going to ask you to work out what you really meant.
Jesus names the mixture and does not ask anybody to sort it
Here is the verse that has been prosecuting him for eighteen years, and I want to read it with the emphasis in the right place.
Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven.Matthew 6:1
Now look at what the instruction actually is. Take heed. Pay attention. Watch out for this.
That is not: audit yourself. It is not: determine your true motive before proceeding. It is a warning of the kind you give somebody about a step that is loose, and the appropriate response to a warning about a loose step is to keep an eye on it while walking, not to sit down on the stairs for eighteen years.
And notice what Jesus does with the mixture everywhere else in the Gospels. He works with people whose motives are visibly compromised, constantly. The mother of James and John asks for thrones for her sons and He does not send her away, He answers her. Peter is a mess of genuine love and self-regard in every scene he appears in and Jesus builds the church on him without ever pausing to have him disentangle the two.
He is not squeamish about mixture. He warns about performance, which is a different thing, because performance is a decision and mixture is just what a human being is.
You are being warned rather than examined, and it was already a warning rather than a test. Matthew 6:1 is where that sits, in a phrase that means keep an eye out rather than sort yourself out, and the same Spirit who moved Matthew to record the warning is the one who gets a man off a staircase he has been sitting on since his thirties.
The audit cannot terminate and that is not your fault
Let me say plainly why he cannot answer the question, because it will help to know that the failure is structural and not moral.
Any motive can be examined, and any examination is itself an act with a motive, and that motive can be examined. There is no bottom. This is not a spiritual problem, it is a property of the operation, and a genuinely honest man is more likely to get stuck in it than a careless one, which is a cruel arrangement.
And notice what the loop has produced in eighteen years. Not humility. He is not more humble than he was, he is quieter, which is a different thing and is mostly fear. Not clarity. He is no closer to an answer than he was on the gravel.
What it has produced is a man who has stopped speaking in rooms where he might have helped somebody, because he cannot certify his own reasons in advance.
That is what the loop costs, and it costs it to other people as well as to him, and nobody ever tallies that side.
You have a self that God already knows the whole of, and He knew it before you started looking. That sentence belongs to Psalm 139:23 and 24, where a man asks God to do the searching rather than doing it himself, and His Spirit is the one who searches without the vertigo.
The paragraph that outranks the teaching
Before anything else, this outranks everything above it.
Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there is not going to be one.
And a word for a man who audits himself. If any of this ever becomes another surface to check yourself against, put it down. That is not a failure and it is not a smaller path, it is the wise one, and I would say it to my own brother.
The privacy in all of this is about audience and never about hiding, too. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your wife is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is basic courtesy. None of it is a failure of anything.
You have never been further along or further back than anybody, and you were never being ranked. It is written into Romans 2:11, where God is named as no respecter of persons, and the Holy Spirit carries that into a man who has been quietly scoring himself since a retreat.
If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.
So here is the turn, and it does not require you to answer anything.
You are already known all the way down, and it is already settled, and there is nothing left for you to discover about yourself that would change how He is with you. Scripture settled that in a warning that says take heed rather than take inventory (Matthew 6:1), and the Holy Spirit is not the source of a loop that has made a good man silent.
Both are true, by the way. That is worth saying out loud once. You do want God and you also want to be a man who wants God, and both of those have been in you the whole eighteen years, and He has never once been confused about which was which or required you to separate them before He would work with you.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, in your own voice, wherever you are sitting. The standing to speak like this is yours in Christ and it is not issued on the strength of anybody's certified motives. Scripture is the ground under it and the Holy Spirit is what makes it living rather than merely willing, and what God does through anything you say in a room, and when, is His, however He answers.
- Audit I have been running on my own motives, you are closed and you are finished. Jesus said take heed, which is what you say about a loose step, and He never once asked a man to establish whether he wants God before He would meet him. In the name of Jesus I am standing up off this staircase.
- Vertigo of eighteen years, you are named and you are not humility. The loop produced silence rather than clarity, and it cost rooms full of people a sentence I did not say, and His Spirit is settling that in me tonight.
- Father, You have known the whole of me since long before that parking lot. I thank You that You work with mixed men constantly and have never once paused to make one of them sort himself out first. Here is the next true sentence, and I am not checking it.
Matthew 6:1
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