What's Your Motive?
“How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, ‘Your God reigns!’”
Isaiah 52:7
“What’s your motive? What motivates you to just pick up and move your family, not once, but twice now?” These are questions that I’ve been asked by my friends and family and when I start to share my story with new people I meet.
I accepted Jesus at the age of thirteen, but did not fully surrender to the Holy Spirit until I was twenty-nine. That’s sixteen years of wrestling, destruction and pain that led to finally giving all of myself to faith in God through Jesus Christ.
In 2016, God prompted me to quit my job I had held for two years with a great construction company and take my family to go serve for a year at 5Rock Ranch in Yamhill, Oregon. While there, we got to walk closely with single moms, fatherless children, and struggling adults. Prior to heading out on this adventure, I was asked many questions like, “Why are you doing this?”
These questions challenged me to think about my motive more than I had up to this point. As I really started to think about these questions and our motive, it made me wonder what our friends and family thought it was. Maybe an explanation would help everyone around us understand why we were making a pretty big decision to go on a one year mission as a family. We decided to set up a website and use it to update our friends and family with pictures and stories of our journey. My wife Jamie expressed the processing that we were going through as we transitioned to the ranch. We know very well that we are not perfect people, so we wanted to be honest about how we were processing as things came up in our lives.
If you had been around my wife and I for any amount of time, then you’d know that we are willing to share our struggles. We do this intentionally to show our imperfection as that is the reality we are working through, but not our hope. We don’t stay in the place of believing we are imperfect. We are constantly reminded daily through God’s word and conversations with Him that we indeed are perfect in His eyes. We live in the hope that what we have read and experienced is real. We believe that what He says about us is true. Our faith has been strengthened by moments that are unexplainable, but only could have happened if God is who He says He is.
After our one year at 5Rock Ranch, we moved back to Southern California to reunite with family, friends, and back to work for me with the same construction company. After another two and a half years, here we are again packing up our family and moving across the country to Jacksonville, Florida. This time it was for me to step into a pastoral role and Jamie to be an assistant to our Lead Pastor at Bold City Church. Again, those same questions came up as we made this transition away from family and friends across the country into a new career at age 40, nonetheless. It really sounds like a very dumb decision to many, but it came down to our motive.
As I was thinking about our motives as followers of Jesus Christ, I came to this: I think it is clear to us that we only really have one motive, and that is to see God’s name proclaimed in Jesus Christ. We really have to believe that God is real, that God's words are true and that through Jesus Christ we are saved into God’s eternal family. If we believe this, then this is where our motive comes from. The motivation comes from our Father in Heaven. We don’t get to choose the motive because that has already been established for us long ago. We just get to choose whether we are driven by it or not.
For Jamie and I, this motivation is coming out in the form of living alongside people that are broken because of sin and death. We love all people as they are because God’s words are alive in our lives. We don’t actually always get to choose where God calls us, we just know that He calls us to sit with the lost ones and bring them the Good News. This is the same Good News that was brought to us with the same motivation from God that someone else was driven by.
We heard God’s voice saying it was time to go to 5Rock Ranch and His voice again about Bold City Church and we said okay. That direction from God is why we went to 5Rock Ranch and came to Bold City Church, instead of staying in the comforts of Southern California. So, we have the motive that was set long ago driving us and the overwhelming pressure on our hearts from God’s prompting to make big decisions like these because they will continue growing us closer to Him.
Obviously, we have had to give up a lot as we made these choices and it has gotten very hard at times. But, we believe there is so much more we will gain in the long run. We are motivated by God and our primary goal is to please Him. It’s not to save anyone, because we do not have the ability to do so. We hope to teach our kids to praise God in everything they do and hope our family grows to know God more everyday. That’s it. I know that seems too simple, but we believe that living out the motives of God are simple. That’s not to say that it is easy, but choosing to say “yes” is simple. We are excited and nervous at the same time as Bold City Church becomes our family. But, we can honestly say that we are at peace with the motive that drew us to Bold City Church and know that God will be with us as we serve Him.