Faking Right

All a person’s ways seem pure to them, but motives are weighed by the LORD (Proverbs 16:2, NIV).

How much trouble have I gotten myself in because I convinced myself that my motives were pure? More than I would like to admit, that’s for sure. I have been learning that most of us (myself included) have a strong innate ability to rationalize our motives. I am not talking about being rational, I mean rationalize. The definition of rationalize is to tell yourself rational lies!

This is one of the central themes in the book of Judges. Without a king, without leadership in place to teach, model, and to hold people accountable to the revealed will of their God and Father, everyone rationalized what was right and wrong in their own mind. Judges 17:6 and 21:25 (NLTse) say, In those days Israel had no king; all the people did whatever seemed right in their own eyes. In between those book-end verses in chapters 17 and 21, Judges 18:1 and 19:1 repeat a truncated version of that same verse, saying In those days, Israel had no king. In each case a story follows that shows what happens when we rationalize our motives and actions; and none of them are good.

Proverbs 16:2 tells us that our motives are weighed by the Lord. God doesn’t just weigh our actions, He weighs the motives behind our actions too. Proverbs 21:2 (NIV) says it like this, A person may think their own ways are right, but the LORD weighs the heart.

If our heart is not correctly motivated we are not going to do the right thing, even if we think we are right. This happens more often than we may care to admit. For instance, my red flags go up when I hear people say, “I need to tell you something in Christian love.” I have been learning that this is often nothing more than a poorly veiled disguise attempting to hide that what is coming next is neither Christian nor loving. What is really going on when we say things like that is that we have rationalized a way for us to justify acting out of pride or fear instead of love.

An even more insidious counterfeiting of righteousness happens when we do the right action for the wrong reason. There is a word we use for people who do something that is meant to be seen as an act of love, devotion, or compassion, when in reality it is being done for other reasons—the word is hypocrite. Few things in Scripture seem to earn God’s wrath more than this. Consider how harshly Jesus spoke to the Pharisees on this very point:

Matthew 15:7-9 (NIV) You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you: “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are merely human rules.”

Matthew 23:23-24 (NIV) Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.

Matthew 23:27-28 (NIV) Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.

When we do the right thing for the wrong reason, it ceases to be the right thing.

We need to remember that doing the right thing includes two things: the right action and the right motive, and that while we may fool ourselves and others about our motives, God sees them for what they are. So let’s not only be thoughtful about what we say and do, but also about why we say and do them.