Why Your Motivations are Probably OK

This post continues my reflections on Philip Cary's book Good News for Anxious Christians: 10 Practical Things You Don't Have to Do. This week I'll talk about chapter 5, where Cary addresses the anxiety we face over whether our motivations are good enough.

In previous chapters, Cary emphasized becoming a wise steward who seeks to follow God's commands (where they're explicit) and discern what is good (where they're not). Now he moves on to address a couple specific sources of anxiety for the Christian who is trying to please God. Like previous practices that have been discussed, the attempt to have the right motivations is the result of sincere but unsound teaching. In short, motivations are important, but focusing on them leads us to miss what's most important.

Cary argues that we should be more concerned with the question of whether what we are doing is good than whether we have the right motivations. He describes a student who realized she needed to drop his course because she had too much on her plate, but was worried that her motivations were solely about grades and that dropping the course would amount to selfishness. This kind of deliberation, based on motivations rather than on what's good, leads into what he describes as an "endless inner labyrinth": we have many real, mixed motivations for what we do, and furthermore:

"The big problem is that even if you had only one real motivation and could figure out what it was, that wouldn't tell you what's the best thing to do. To find that out, you have to ask—surprise, surprise!—what's the best thing to do. You have to give up poking around in the inner labyrinth of your own mixed motives and ask about the realities outside your own heart. You have to be able to tell what's good and bad out there."

I have a strong appreciation for how he ties this to our treatment of others. What matters is whether we're seeking what's good for others in our treatment of them, not whether we can convince ourselves that we're not doing it for selfish reasons. As good as altruism sounds, making altruism your goal is a problem if you feel guilty for doing what's best for someone else whenever you benefit from it too. In particular, if you love to help others, you might wind up thinking you should take no pleasure in doing good because that makes it bad! Furthermore, focusing on being unselfish points your attention in the wrong direction because you end up fixating on what kind of a person you're trying to be instead of on the other person: Cary calls this perverse, and I think he's right— it's all backwards. He describes similar results for when we fixate on doing something out of love, or doing what 'we as Christians' should do.

One point in chapter 5 where I'm inclined to agree with Cary, but need to do some closer reading of Scripture, is his argument that instead of getting things right from the inside out, we are commanded to "put on Christ" because the heart is formed from the outside in. He suggests that part of being in Christ (which he says Paul references much more often than Christ being in us) is surrounding ourselves with other Christians, and acting like Christ in order to live peaceably with our fellow believers. I'm very curious now about the possible differences between talking about being in Christ, and having Christ in us.