Motivation, My Story

Allow me to share my story as a victim of motivational doctrines, if I may call them thus.

As I have written in a past post, I was an avid consumer of motivation, probably from the time I learnt to read well, that is in the seventies (1970s)

I have read everything from books to magazines on everything motivational I could lay my hands on.

The other reason is that motivation really sells. People love hearing what they love to hear as opposed to what they need to hear. Motivation is not energy consuming, at least in the spiritual. It is not demanding on the person, except for the gifts the motivator needs to continue churning out newer motivation. Motivation will rarely demand a study, an examination to verify or even refute what one is consuming. It is simply exciting, sweet morsels for the soul like gossip.

That is why students can spend hours reading forbidden romance novels instead of the text books that will be used to set the exams they will need to move to the next level. That is the reason I equated motivational preaching with fast food.

I have also severally written about my earlier struggles as a believer in Christ, especially as concerns the many questions I had and the responses that did not attempt to provide or even guide me to a place I could get answers.

As I look back today most of my questions had to do with my consistent intake of motivational content. Plus of course the fact that my spiritual ‘parents’ and family then was not open to anything different.

Simply speaking, motivational doctrines have no place for struggles and discomforts. Motivation has no real answers to uncertainties and insecurities. Motivation has no responses to actual life because it simply wants to paint life as one would want it to be.

In short, motivation is the doctrine that guides its practitioner to subtly reject reality and create an alternative reality, a reality that has no capacity of becoming real.

The answer to pain is not, ‘you can have your best life now’ or, ‘claim your breakthrough now’.

The answer is understanding what caused that pain and what you can do to deal with it.

Motivation is for the most part escapist.

However, because it sells, its preachers live very well. What with all the bounty poured on them for that motivation!

In many ways it is like gambling. Millions are betting so that one of them can hit the jackpot. And he will be displayed to demonstrate to the addicts that betting pays really well. This ensures a steady supply of fools pouring all that money into those bottomless pits of destruction and despair. And because there is always a winner, very few will ever question the narrative.

Another similar thing is the pyramid scheme. Again, someone is always at the top. And someone else is climbing that pyramid. And it will continue until it lacks enough fools to sustain it and crashes.

Motivational preachers are churning out book after book, sermon after sermon. Their popularity ensures that they are doing much better than the average preacher who insists on preaching the word as God has released it.

Before they started preaching motivation, they used to walk to church. Years after switching to motivation, they are driving the latest fuel guzzler that they do not even need because the fools he preaches to ‘insist’ (don’t mention his subtle hints) that he needs to live as per his preaching. I suspect that the devil is in that detail to block the preaching of the cross that transforms.

Allow me to add another shortcoming of motivation, and the reason I call motivators false prophets.

Motivation is very short term. It has very little to do with any long-term progressions unlike true prophecy and scriptural preaching.

People fear true prophecy because its immediate proclamations may be unsavory, even dangerous. But then prophecy never ends with the immediate or present.

Let me give an illustration.

Jeremiah was a prophet of doom to the Jews because he was always challenging their faith and announcing judgment because they did not repent. That is why many times they wanted to silence him, even to the point of plotting to kill him if slander failed to stop him.

Yet was it all doom?

This verse we so love from Jeremiah is one such message.

Judah will be exiled for seventy years. But God will be with those who are taken to Babylon. The Jews will eventually return.

For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the LORD, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end. (Jeremiah 29:11)

That favorite verse is not floating for us to grab it when we need it.

Look at another incident in this prophet’s life.

He has been preaching about the exile for many years.

Then God tells him to buy a piece of land and have adequate evidence for the same.

Until Jeremiah wonders.

You see it would have been impossible to expect him to outlive the exile.

Why do I say so?

He has been a prophet for at least forty years by then. Assuming he was called at twenty (since he was still young as per his call) he was already sixty. This means he would have been way over a hundred years by the time the exile ended.

He had also been forbidden to get married and so he did not have any children to inherit that land.

Yet God still orders him to buy that land.

Why?

Because God was giving a dramatical lesson. he wanted to assure the Jews that the exile will end since that was in His plan.

That is why obedience and motivation are not good friends. Simply because obedience for the most part is painful since it calls on us to sacrifice our comforts for God’s assignment.

Unless you can prove to me what is so pleasurable for someone leaving his job and moving his family across the world to be able to reach to an unreached community where there are no amenities. Unless you can demonstrate to me what was enjoyable when Noah was building that ark yet not a single drop of rain had fallen on earth. Unless you show me the joys Abraham had contemplating sacrificing his only son, the son of the promise no less. Unless you can show me the excitement Christ had going to the cross.

The long and short of what I am saying is that motivation is short term and completely selfish. The one who devours motivation can accurately be called a spoilt brat in more ways than one. He must have his own way irrespective of what even God says or he will push God to say what he wants to hear.

That is why they pamper those motivational preachers so much to continue fueling their rebellion by making it appear otherwise.

But I was on my story. Yet as a teacher of the word it sometimes is more important to digress when a point comes than stick on the narration. And those who have read my posts know that I do it all the time.

I was fed on motivation in my growing up though as I have said many things did not make motivational sense. No wonder I had those many questions that did not seem to have any answers.

Getting into the Bible answered many of those questions as I have written elsewhere.

But my operating system was basically motivation. In short things worked well when I was Christ’s follower. There were exceptions but I do not think they were enough to reform my theology, many times because God would always show me the big picture and eventually fight for me.

Then God asked me to leave employment.

In my mind, God wanted me to continue the very fruitful ministry I had amongst an unreached people group. Like I have said elsewhere, probably God spoke to me about what He wanted me to do but my system was not attuned to anything else but what my heart had assumed was God’s will.

I eventually had to leave that mission field due to circumstances beyond my control.

Then I went home, the only thing I was sure was that God had called me to ministry outside employment or other occupations, what people call full time ministry. It was for me the culmination of the call I had responded to over ten years prior to that, a call that had led me to quite some adventure and many testimonies of God’s faithfulness.

As I continued waiting on God’s word on what He wanted me to do in my ministry, I poured all my money into a farm I had bought when I was working.

Then El Nino swept all that investment away.

I couldn’t look for work or even start a business because I was not in doubt that God had called me out of those.

Then things became very thick. But I couldn’t back down on God’s call on my life.

Now think with me how a motivator would think in that circumstance.

Things are not working because of sin. Or isn’t it what Job’s friends said? Isn’t that what motivators teach?

And that is what I presumed. Because I could not fault my faith or obedience at that point.

I then looked for sins to repent of. Still nothing worked.

I even created a few more sins to ensure that I left no sin since according to motivation that is the only block to a breakthrough.

Even then nothing worked.

Remember I recently shared that the motivator has no answer to God’s silence?

That is where I was, for a few years.

Then God spoke and opened doors, the doors that required me to have been weaned out of motivation, though I didn’t know it then.

From then I could identify motivation and its dangers though I did not know it as such.

It was many years that I could point at motivation as the great danger it is to the church of Christ.

Be it what is erroneously called the prosperity gospel, name it claim it, and many other variations, motivational preaching is a very virulent cancer to the church of Christ.

I hope you now understand where I am coming from.

You can ask for any clarification, though for the most part reading the Bible plainly and without motivational shades will make God’s doctrine clear.

I hope you now understand where I come from in a nutshell.

I will share more as God prompts.