Who do you love?

"... the chief motivation behind Paul's service was not love for others but love for his Lord. If our devotion is to the cause of humanity, we will be quickly defeated and broken-hearted, since often we will be confronted with a great deal of ingratitude from other people. But if we are motivated by our love for God, not amount of ingratitude will be able to hinder us from serving one another."

I read this quote last night as I skimmed through my journal from a missions trip to Mexico in 2003. I (obviously) did not write this, but must have read it in one of the devotionals from the trip and copied it into my journal. Good thing, because I definitely no longer have the devotional booklet, but I DO have this journal! ;)

This whole business of motivation for "doing good" could get very cyclical and crazy. If I love people and want to serve them, it is only because I have experienced love from God. But the love for God sometimes is exiled to the back seat, making it no longer the driving force. And this is what whoever wrote this is identifying as a big problem of people who serve.

The point is still painfully fundamental. Christ needs to be at the center of all we do, or it won't work out. Plain and simple. These fundamentals are the kinds of things we graze over most often as cliche and silly, but failure to adhere to these fundamentals seems to be the basis for most of my problems in life. Interesting.