God Motivation is the state wherein the Christian is fueled solely by God and toward God to the glory of God.
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Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Getting Goodness

It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’ But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.
(Matthew 5:31-32)

We're pretty good at wrongly defining goodness.  We look for ways to get around what is best, what is most honoring to God and others, and try to find a rule that we haven't broken in order to make the things that we do appear to be good.  But that's not how goodness works.  Goodness looks toward improvement.  Goodness looks toward blessing.  Goodness doesn't ask what it can get away with but instead what would be most gracious toward all.  Goodness doesn't take what is a huge thing of great disruptive consequence and make it small because it can do so given some loophole in the law.

Jesus took a look at the marriage situation of His day and saw how people didn't look at this union in at all the right way.  Men loved that they had an out through something Moses had written long ago--something he had written which, Jesus tells us elsewhere, was put down because people's hearts were hard...not because he was rewarding them for understanding God's intentions for husbands and wives.  God in His kindness has always taken care of the woman.  Yes, He has held her responsible for her actions just like He has done with every man, but because there have been men who have always wanted to abuse their strength or authority, He has put protections (like certificates of divorce) in place so that abusers could not continue to merely kick wives that they didn't like out to the curb.  To be fair, these things may have at times protected men also when their wives were found unfaithful, but it seems that Jesus in this case is more upset with the men of his culture who were wrongly understanding Moses' (and God's) intentions.

What Jesus wanted to make clear was that a guy who gave his wife a piece of paper (just because he could) that said something to the effect of, "You can marry somebody else," the slate wasn't clean.  If sexual immorality wasn't part of the equation, the divorced woman was put in the awkward and terrible place of seeking another man to provide for her while, in God's eyes, she still belonged to her first husband.  Any subsequent marriages would be seen as adulterous.

This is such a messy subject in our culture (even church culture) today and everyone has their own story of why their situation ought to be the exception.  And, the reality is, we ALL need buckets of grace to dump on one another no matter who we are or what we've done.  But one of the points that we don't want to miss in looking at passages like this one is that we shouldn't make small things that God says are large and of profound consequence--things like divorce.  If God Himself is our motivation for why we joyfully persevere through life and jobs and child-rearing and marriage, then we will not look to make our own standards of goodness and look for loopholes that help us gratify twisted desires.  We'll instead yearn that His love fill our hearts and our way match the way of Jesus.  We'll take His words and build the structures of our lives on them, setting down anchors deep.