5. Only One Concern
chapter five
Only One Concern
Imagine that you have traveled to northern India in the early 1900s to a little village where a tall, turbaned man is the center of attention. A heart-rending scene begins to unfold before you as you watch, invisible to the cast of characters in this real-life drama.
The man, Sadhu Sundar Singh, is about to leave on a long journey. The others, who appear to be his friends, are weeping and begging him not to go. But you can see from Sadhu’s face that although he is touched by their love for him, he is determined to go. He says he is on his way back to Tibet, where he has apparently been before—a forbidding land where “principalities and powers” hold the citizens captive. He knows the dangers he faces and so do his friends and co-workers.
They continue to cry out, “Please don’t leave us!”
But Sadhu tells them, “I must go.”
The curtain falls on this scene and rises on another one. Sadhu has arrived in Tibet and is preaching the Gospel openly, but he has been seized by the local priests. He threatens their existence and they act accordingly.
They fling Sadhu into the death well, a place from which no one has ever escaped. A bone in his arm crunches painfully beneath him as he lands. He hears the key turning in the cover of the well. His eyes grow accustomed to the murky darkness. Snakes writhe in the dank hole. Rats skitter around him. He can feel around him the skulls and bones of those who have been thrown into the well before him.
As Sadhu lies there with a broken arm in the midst of the filth, he begins to pray: “Lord, I am so grateful that You have given me this privilege to suffer for Your name’s sake.”
Over and over he repeats this prayer as the night grows deeper and darker.
Suddenly the well cover opens and a rope is thrown down. After a few seconds of amazement, Sadhu grasps for the rope and is pulled out of his filthy tomb. When he reaches the top of the well, no one is there.
In the next scene we see Sadhu preaching once again in the streets of the Tibetan village. The lamas are confounded, for they know that only the head lama has the key to the death well.
Let’s allow the curtain to fall on the drama and take a closer look at the life of this early 20th-century missionary. We know from books and oral accounts that Sadhu Sundar Singh underwent times of intense persecution and hardship. Ultimately he laid down his life in Tibet for the sake of the Gospel.
Yet as this real event from his life shows, something allowed him to rise above his circumstances—something that enabled him to endure and even rejoice in hardship, because he considered it a privilege to serve and suffer.
Sadhu Sundar Singh had the key to what many of us are looking for.
Horizontal Motivation
As human beings we cannot survive any commitment for long without motivation, whether it is godly or self-centered.
Self-centered motivation can be money, power, appreciation—anything that gratifies us. Have you ever wondered why some people tolerate boredom, frustration or pain just to work at a job they hate intensely? They dislike everyone there and cannot stand what they do, but they stay with it anyway. Why? Because they get a paycheck every week. That is their motivation.
Self-centered motivation has its spiritual side, too. We may do wonderful things for the kingdom because we want to look good, or because we feel guilty if we do not do this or that, or because we got charged emotionally from some challenge we heard in the pulpit. It is easy to fall into the trap of horizontal motivation. Our motives may be impure but, we think to ourselves, Who knows? And does it really matter?
It does matter when we convey the outward appearance of holiness without the inward foundation. Here is what A.W. Tozer said about horizontal motivation in his book The Root of the Righteous:
The test by which all conduct must finally be judged is motive.
As water cannot rise higher than its source, so the moral quality in an act can never be higher than the motive that inspires it. For this reason no act that arises from an evil motive can be good, even though some good may appear to come out of it. Every deed done out of anger or spite, for instance, will be found at last to have been done for the enemy and against the kingdom of God.
Unfortunately, the nature of religious activity is such that much of it can be carried on for reasons that are not good, such as anger, jealousy, ambition, vanity and avarice. All such activity is essentially evil, and will be counted as such at the judgment.
In this matter of motive, as in so many other things, the Pharisees afford us clear examples. They remain the world’s most dismal religious failures, not because of doctrinal error nor because they were careless or lukewarm, nor because they were outwardly persons of dissolute life. Their whole trouble lay in the quality of their religious motives. They prayed, but they prayed to be heard of men, and thus their motives ruined their prayers and rendered them not only useless, but actually evil. They gave generously to the service of the temple, but they sometimes did it to escape their duty toward their parents, and this was an evil. They judged sin and stood against it when they found it in others, but this they did from self-righteousness and hardness of their heart.
So with almost everything they did. Their activities had about them an outward appearance of holiness, and those same activities, if carried on out of pure motives, would have been good and praiseworthy. The whole weakness of the Pharisees lay in the quality of their motives.
That this is not a small matter may be gathered from the fact that those orthodox and proper religionists went on in their blindness till they at last crucified the Lord of glory with no inkling of the gravity of their crime.
Horizontal motivation will not sustain us long. It takes only a few people, a few challenging circumstances or an unfavorable environment to cause us to fizzle out in our activity for the kingdom. From the inside we can muster up only so much strength.
We need continuous input. The physical life, in which we must have food and water to survive, illustrates what is needed in the inner man as well. We need motivation that is objective—from the Lord.
Vertical Motivation
The life of the apostle Paul is the story of any “normal” Christian. Paul was no superstar or extra-anointed person. He crafted tents with his hands, making his living like anyone else. But every tent he made, every trip he made to the market, every voyage he took in a ship, was incidental to his real goal in life: to pull a few more people out of the fires of hell.
About reaching his own people, Paul wrote, “For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, those of my own race, the people of Israel” (Romans 9:3–4). Paul was ready to give his life if it meant the Jews would be saved. Why? And what kept him going when he was misunderstood and forsaken by those around him? When he was left to die after being stoned? When he was shipwrecked?
Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 5:14 that “Christ’s love compels us.” The Amplified Version uses the words controls and urges and impels. Paul was not moved to live as he lived by any factor other than his relationship with the Lord. He was motivated to do everything he did for one reason: Jesus.
God said regarding Paul when he was first converted, “I will show him how much he must suffer for my name” (Acts 9:16). Later Paul himself, in his letter to the Philippians, wrote, “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21). Paul could live like this and endure hardships because of one thing: He lived constantly for the approval of his Master.
Hebrews 12:3 admonishes us to “consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.”
Psalm 119 contains two dynamic verses that deal with this vertical, objective motivation from the Lord.
First the psalmist wrote, “Indignation grips me” (verse 53).
Have you ever seen how a ravenous lion holds his helpless prey by the scruff of the neck? That is how the psalmist felt—that “burning indignation” (NASB) had grabbed hold of him. Had someone beaten him up? Had someone violated his rights? Had he lost his salary or did he have to keep working overtime? No, he was indignant “because of the wicked, who have forsaken your law.”
Now verse 136: “Streams of tears flow from my eyes.” In our culture people experience all kinds of hurt, whether through personal problems or situations imposed on us. Our own sins may hurt us, our expectations may not be met, other people may fail us or harsh circumstances may bear down on us. There are many reasons we experience sorrow, pain, agony, self-pity, discouragement, disillusionment, mental breakdown, even suicide.
I remember when my mother died. If I don’t control myself, I thought when my mother’s body was carried from our house to the cemetery, I know I will begin to cry. I need to be rational about this. I know she is happy with the Lord and in the best place she can be. I’ll see her soon. But when I saw others weeping out loud, I completely lost it. I sobbed. As I walked outside, following the casket, I could not even stand up; I had to hold onto a tree for support.
But my weeping lasted a few hours, perhaps a day at the most. This man was brokenhearted and could not stop crying. Why? Because “your law is not obeyed.”
All his grief had to do with one small word: Your.
You Are Mine, Life Is Yours
One of the most beautiful statements I have ever read on genuine vertical motivation was made by E. Stanley Jones in his book Victory through Surrender. He made it a habit to spend time before the Lord during “a time in the early morning when I don’t ask for anything but listen to see if God has anything to say to me.” This is what Jones heard one day:
He said to me, “You are Mine, life is yours.” I was startled and asked Him to repeat it. And He did: “You are Mine, life is yours.”
That saying has been singing its way through my heart ever since: If I belong to Christ, life belongs to me; I can master it, rescue some good out of everything, good, bad and indifferent. ... I do not have to be concerned about this, that or the other. I have one concern and only one—that I be His.
If you want to stand firm when trials come, like Sadhu Sundar Singh; not be moved by circumstances; not waver in your faith—then know that you cannot even begin to do it in your own strength. For the people of God to stand firm and even to survive in the days to come, we must relinquish our lives and all they mean to Jesus.
Your only concern is to be His—to be approved by Him, to please Him, to belong to Him. All that you are and do must be centered around Him and His purposes. Then, as you walk through life, every emotion you feel and every circumstance you face will be secondary. Are you His? Then life is yours.
In the next chapter we will take a closer look at motivation—signs that we are horizontally motivated and steps to make us more vertically motivated.