Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life.

In the time it takes to get to work.

I'm Keith Simon.

Does the reason you do something matter?

We all know that you can do the right thing for the wrong reasons.

Think about the college student who signs up

to volunteer because she wants to get into a good college and she thinks volunteering will make

her college application more attractive. Did she do a good thing or does the selfish motive

corrupt the act of volunteering? Or think about the person who donates a lot of money to a museum

in order to appear on a donor list

so that his co-workers will think well of him. We say that his donation was good, but maybe the

motive was bad. Maybe we wish he would have given the money out of a pure heart instead of a

selfish one. But the bottom line is we'd rather have the wealthy person give to the museum from a selfish heart than to not give it all.

But what if we bring God into the picture? Does God care why we do what we do? The answer is unequivocally, yes. God cares about what we do and why we do it.

The Bible teaches that we should do the right thing for the right reasons. Think of what Jesus

said about prayer in the sermon on the Mount. There he tells people not to pray in public in order to be

seen by people. Jesus isn't saying it's wrong to pray in front of other people. He's saying it's wrong

to use prayer to impress people. To pray in order to be seen or heard by others,

cheapens prayer and turns it into a show instead of being a sincere conversation between you

and God. What if I said you can go to church for the wrong reasons? While that sounds odd,

I think we'd agree it's true. Just to be a little absurd for a second. A person could go to

church because they lost a bet or to make fun of Christians who attend church. Those are obviously

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