Romans 10
1 Brethren, my heart's desire and prayer to God for Israel is, that they might be saved.2 For I bear them record that they have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge.
3 For they being ignorant of God's righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God.
Thinking of this idea of having a zeal but not according to knowledge.
Among the Christian walk we see many zealous people. People that are lively and full of passion to get things moving, to inspire a crowd of people, to boldly approach people, people that cry out against demonic oppression and proclaim the name of Jesus, who cast out demons and try to heal the sick...
Zeal is a good thing, but not when the motivation for the zeal is tainted with pride/self-interest.
This can be unrecognizable to the one who has the zeal and those who follow the zealous one.
Have you ever seen a child not motivated to do their studies? But when a competition is presented they are suddenly zealous to accomplish what they had no heart to do.
"Johnny, if you can finish your math before Mark I will give you a reward!" Suddenly Johnny who couldn't pick up his pencil for the last 20 minutes, is quickly finishing the 10 math problems. And Mark is also inspired to go faster. Or, even if Johnny was simply offered a reward for finishing his math within 10 minutes you would see a zeal come over him where as before there was mention of a reward he had no interest.
Now math is important to learn and useful, and Johnny's mother could talk to him all day about the importance of learning math to try to motivate him. Yet, Johnny took no inspiration in hearing how important and useful math is, but when he heard, "If you can finish these problems in 10 minutes I will reward you with a cookie." He suddenly was zealously doing math.
It's a relief to his mother to find a way to get him to do what he should do but,...
it's so important that the motivation to do good is born of a discerning of good and a hunger for good. Offering the reward may help to motivate Johnny and at least get him doing what he should, and hopefully, eventually, he will recognize how useful and important it was that he learned how to solve math problems. And better yet, he will learn to recognize good things and desire to do them without any hope of reward, but rather for the sake of loving what is good and right.
Sadly, many adults fall into this zeal that is motivated by selfish interest and in the end will End in devastating results. Results that will effect not only the one with the zeal but all those who esteemed their zeal.
We must honestly examine our hearts and be honest with ourselves about our motivations for what we do. Do we help the poor because we really have a sorrow/sympathy in our heart for their suffering?
Or is the motivation because we get a good reputation from others and/or we believe God will reward us in heaven?
Do we preach the Gospel with boldness because we get the praise of men and/or we believe God will reward us or because we love God's righteous ways and we want others to enter into the rest His Truth brings for their own good because we sympathize with their pain?
Do we choose to be temperate in how we eat because of the way others will think of us and esteem us; or because we recognize that too much of a good thing isn't good and we delight in self-control because it is good and profitable for our good and the good of others? Or do we only restrain our desire for certain foods and/or too much of a certain food out of some kind of spiritual vain glory/ competition?
By the nature of God's creation and the foundations of right and wrong there are good rewards for those who do good and bad rewards for those who do bad.
Even unbelievers have hope that if they live a relatively "good" life they will be rewarded good in the End and they fear a possible bad End if they chose to do what they'd consider evil.
From a young age those who are raised Christian are taught that if they do certain good things they will be rewarded good, and if they do certain bad things they will be rewarded with an eternally bad reward. So they are motivated to try in themselves to do the good and avoid the bad. But the problem is, as they age the things they were taught were bad they see many people doing and appearing to have pleasure in those bad things. They test the bad water and are surprised to discover it tastes sweet!!
Thus a roller coaster type of life begins wherein they take pleasure in what they had been taught was evil... After the evil is performed by them it is bitter in their belly because they feel guilty knowing they were taught it's evil, but they enjoyed it in part... Yet, they now fear that if they continue to choose to do the evil they will lose their good reward in the End and face a fearful End.
So they go on struggling to do good and occasionally they get a zeal to do good, zealously sharing Jesus with people all along they are still a slave to sinful desires.
Thus, you have congregations full of people that are slaves to sin, showing up to Church on Sunday in hopes they can keep their good reward in the End ...while though they may appear zealous among their church group doing great things for the poor and bold to witness to others, they are still a slave themselves to sin.
These people have never learned to love God for His goodness alone and to zealously serve Him for His goodness alone. And some of us who have come to this Revelation (that God's goodness is good and for that reason alone He is worthy of our zeal) still need to guard our hearts and make sure no wrong motivations subtly come into our hearts to do the good that we do. We need to guard our hearts that we aren't just going through the motions because we fear hell, but because we are fully embracing the beauty of Holiness, we love it, hunger for it because God is Holy and that makes Him beautiful and to be desired above all else!
May we be purely motivated with the knowledge of God's goodness and may this Faith that He is good, His ways are good even though they often require of us self-sacrifice and suffering and trust, we can have confidence knowing His goodness is good for the good of all even if we can't see good will in His will in the moment, by eyes of Faith we believe His will is for the greater good though it may bring us momentary suffering.
A pure zeal for God is born of a pure Love, it seeks not it's own good, it is not puffed up, it does no ill to a neighbor.
We can be inspired to be zealous for things that have the appearance of good but they do not follow the requirements for a "pure good" as listed above.
BLM (Black Lives Matter) has an appearance of good because Black lives do matter. But when that zeal turns into harming others to get it's point across, it is no longer a pure zeal, it is no longer good.
Taking a stand for someone who is being mistreated can appear to be a bold and zealous/ heroic endeavor, but if in the process, you bring harm to others your zeal lost its purity, it's goodness.
God help us to know our own heart's motivation whether it is truly rooted in a pure love that seeks not it's own.
We can love God with a pure heart, with a heart that doesn't care if it receives a reward but simply loves Him because He is the essence of LOVE, He is Love and that makes Him to be desired above all else because nothing is better than God, nothing is better than pure Love.
Oh, may we utterly love Him with total abandonment of all that would cloud our vision of Him.
This is a good thing He requires of us, to love Him with ALL OUR HEART, MIND, SOUL AND STRENGTH and He does not require this for His personal gain, but out of His PURE, HOLY LOVE FOR US and for the Good of All.
God manifested the greatness of His love for us when He took on the nature of man through Christ; and showed us how to live a selfless life for the love of others and GOOD OF ALL. May we also for love of Him and others embrace whatever suffering we must to fulfill the will of God in our life.
