There is a fear that only ever comes after a man has done something good.
It is worth saying that plainly at the start, because it is the strangest thing about this particular fear and the first clue to what it is. The wrong a man does, he may lie awake over for years. But he does not lie awake wondering what his motive was. That part he is sure of. When a man has done something he is ashamed of, the intent of the heart was plain to him before he acted and plainer still afterward; he knows exactly why he did it, and the knowing is its own kind of torment. There is no mystery about the motive behind a sin. The motive is the one thing the sinner is never in doubt about.
The fear I mean runs the other direction entirely. It waits until the deed was good, and then it asks the one question the good deed makes possible and the bad one never could. You taught the class. You raised your children in the faith. You gave to the need when no one was watching, or you served in some quiet way that cost you something. And then, sometime after, the thought slips in behind the good thing and asks: but why did I really do that? Was it for God, or was it so that I would be thought well of? Did I want it to succeed for His glory, or for mine?
I suspect that fear is carried by more people than would ever say it out loud, and I want to take it seriously, because it is not a foolish fear. It is what an honest man feels when he turns and looks back at his own best work and cannot find the bottom of his own reasons for doing it.
Here is what happens once that question has its hook in.
It has no bottom. That is the first thing to understand about it, and the cruelest. If a man is honest with himself, really honest, the answer is never clean. He goes looking for the pure motive, the single undivided reason that was all for God and nothing for himself, and he does not find it, because it is not there. There is something in it for him. There is always something in it for him. Somewhere in the good he did is the wish to be seen doing it, the quiet pleasure of being the kind of person who does such things, the reach for his own name folded invisibly into the service he told himself was for God. He examines the deed and finds the mixture, and the mixture is real, and he cannot wash it out no matter how long he looks.
And then the heart does something the honest examination did not require of it. It jumps. From my motive was mixed, which is true and which a man can say of himself without despair, it leaps to a different and a darker thing: then the whole of it was rotten. The good I did was pride wearing a coat. I am not a servant of God at all.
I am a builder of my own small tower.
I want to mark that leap, because the reader who knows this fear will have felt the two steps run together as though they were one, and they are not one. The first step is honest self-knowledge: the motive was not pure. The second is a verdict: therefore the deed was worthless and the man is a fraud. The first is simply true. The second does not follow from it at all, and the speed at which the heart travels from the one to the other is itself a thing worth noticing, though I am going to leave it noticed for now and come back to it, because the reader is not yet at the place where he can be told why the leap is a lie. He is still at the bottom of the fear, and the bottom of the fear is where this chapter has to sit for a while before it can do anything else.
And the man at the bottom of it reaches for Babel, and he uses it against himself.
He has read the story by now; he knows what the builders said. Let us make for ourselves a name (Gen. 11:4, NASB). And he turns it on his own life and sees, or thinks he sees, the same sentence written under everything he has done. The class he taught — was that not partly a tower? The children raised, the gift given, the quiet service — was there not, in every one of them, a brick laid for his own name? Babel was the chapter where he learned to see the reach for self hiding inside the work, and now the lesson has come home and turned prosecutor, and he stands on his own plain of Shinar reading the indictment against himself, and he cannot answer it, because the evidence is real. The self was there. He has not imagined it.
So what does a man do with that?
The fear has an answer ready, and it is the wrong one, and almost everyone tries it first. The fear says: settle it. Sift your own heart until you can declare it clean. Find the bottom of your motives, separate the gold from the dross, and when you have proven to yourself that the love of God was really there under all of it, then you may rest. It sounds like diligence. It sounds like exactly the kind of honest self-examination a serious man ought to do.
It cannot be done. The bottom never comes. A man can search his own heart for the rest of his life and never reach a floor he can stand on and call clean, because every layer he turns over has the mixture in it, the next one down as much as the last, and the searching produces nothing in the end but exhaustion and a despair that has learned to call itself humility.
And here is the part the fear keeps hidden, the thing underneath the exhaustion that a man has to see before Babel can turn back into good news. The endless self-audit is not only fruitless. Carried on long enough, it becomes the very thing it was trying to root out. A man bent over his own heart, sifting and sifting for a purity he can certify, is still a man with himself at the center of the work — only now the work is contrition instead of construction. The self that would not leave the seat when it was building a tower does not leave the seat when it takes up the spade to dig for its own sins; it has only changed clothes. Humility performed without end is pride that has found a quieter room to sit in. And that is why the cure cannot be a better audit. A self that cannot be trusted to leave the center will not be trusted to run the search, because it is the same self, and it will protect itself in the searching as surely as it served itself in the building.
The verb has to pass to someone the self cannot deceive.
That is what David does, and it is the whole of the way through.
Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me and know my anxious thoughts; and see if there be any hurtful way in me, and lead me in the everlasting way (Ps. 139:23–24, NASB).
Look at who does the searching. Not David. God. The psalm does not say I will search myself and bring You the clean result. It says search me — the verb belongs to God, and David hands it over. He does not purify himself to certainty and then present the finished article for inspection. He brings the heart as it is, mixed and anxious and divided, the same heart he cannot get to the bottom of himself, and he asks the One who can see all the way down to do the seeing. And then — this is the part that breaks the fear — he trusts that God will lead him, and he keeps walking. The purifying was never David’s job to finish. It was God’s. David’s job was to keep offering the heart and to keep going.
See what that single move does to both of the things that were killing the man. To the despair, it says: you were never asked to finish this, so stop measuring yourself against a floor you were never meant to reach. And to the hidden pride underneath the despair, it says: you cannot be the searcher, because you are the thing being searched; hand the lamp to the One whose hand it belongs in. The same renunciation closes both exits at once, not because David was clever enough to aim it at both, but because both were the same error — the self holding a post that was never the self’s to hold — and the cure for that is always the same cure. Give the post back to God.
The man does not come away from Psalm 139 certain that his heart is clean. He comes away having stopped requiring himself to be certain, which is a different and a better thing, and the only thing on offer.
Now I can come back to the leap I marked and left, and to Babel, and turn the prosecutor back into what he should have been all along.
Notice what the fear actually proves. Turn back to the men on the plain, and look for the thing that is not in the story. Nowhere does the text tell us that one of those builders lay awake in the night asking whether his motive was pride. Not one of them turned the brick over in his hand and wondered whether he was laying it for God or for his own name. They knew it was for their own name; they said so, out loud, with no torment about it at all — let us make for ourselves a name — and they went on building. That is how pride actually works. The self-exalting heart does not interrogate itself. It does not lie awake. It is confident, and it congratulates itself, and the last thing it would ever do is tremble over the question of whether it had been serving itself, because serving itself is the water it swims in and it cannot see the water.
So the trembling is the antibody, not the disease.
The very fact that the question torments a man is not the evidence of his pride. It is the evidence against it — or at least the evidence that something in him is fighting it, something that the builders of Babel did not have and did not want. A man genuinely given over to building his own name does not feel this fear. He cannot. The fear requires a heart in which the love of God is actually present, present enough to be grieved by the rival sitting next to it, and that grief, the very thing the man took as proof he was a fraud, is the proof that he is not. The proud do not ask the question. He cannot stop asking it. That is not the same heart.
There is one more thing the man needs, because even with the trembling read rightly, the mixture is still there, and he still has to live and work with a heart he knows is not clean. And here a man has to be careful, because the freedom Scripture offers him at this point is easy to state in a way that turns false.
The commandment is total. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might (Deut. 6:5, NASB); Jesus named it the greatest of them all (Matt. 22:37–38). All the heart. The standard is not mixed and was never meant to be, and a man should not let the comfort of this chapter talk him into pretending the standard is smaller than it is. It is not smaller. The whole, undivided heart is exactly what the love of God deserves and exactly what he is commanded toward.
But notice the difference between a standard a man is commanded to grow toward and a gate he must pass through before God will receive the work of his hands. They are not the same thing, and confusing them is the whole of the trouble here. God commands the whole heart. He does not withhold His acceptance of a man’s service until that man’s heart is whole, and the proof that He does not is the entire history of the people He has used. He received David, who is called a man after His own heart, with the matter of Uriah still standing against him. He received Peter after the denials and made him preach the first sermon of the church. If unmixed love were the gate, no work of any man would ever have passed through it, because no man but One has ever brought a whole and undivided heart to anything. The commandment is the destination of the long work in a man, not the toll he pays to begin it.
So the freeing thing, said carefully, is this: God commands unmixed love, and He receives the mixed love a man actually brings, and grows it, over a lifetime, toward the whole-hearted thing the commandment asks. He never made the arrival the price of admission.
Listen to Paul, writing from prison, in the first chapter of his letter to the Philippians. He says that some are preaching Christ from the worst possible motives — from envy and strife, he says, out of selfish ambition rather than from pure motives, and not even to advance the gospel but to make his own imprisonment harder to bear (Phil. 1:15–17, NASB). These are men proclaiming Christ in order to wound an apostle in chains. If ever a mixed motive deserved to be called rotten and have the whole work thrown out with it, this is the case. And what does Paul conclude? Does he say the gospel preached from such motives is worthless, a tower dressed as a sermon? He does not. What then? he writes. Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed; and in this I rejoice (Phil. 1:18, NASB).
Paul rejoiced. Over the gospel going out through impure motives, in men far less troubled about their own hearts than the man this chapter is written for, Paul rejoiced. I do not think he was being careless about motive; the same Paul searched his own heart as hard as any man who ever lived. He simply knew a thing the fear does not want a man to know: that God’s willingness to use and to receive a work has never once hung on the purity of the motive behind it being total. If it did, no work of any man would ever have been received, because no man but One has ever brought a wholly unmixed heart to anything.
That is the thing to hold against the fear when it comes. Not a denial of the mixture — the mixture is real, and pretending it away would be its own dishonesty. But the mixture was never the disqualification the fear claims it is. Your motives are mixed. Mine are mixed. There has never been a redeemed person on this earth, the Lord Himself excepted, whose motives were single and pure and unmixed, and that is not a special failing in you. It is the ordinary condition of a saved sinner who has not yet been brought home. The mixture is not the proof that you have failed. The mixture is the raw material God is still working on.
For that is what sanctification actually is, when you strip the long word down to what it means: the slow, lifelong crowding-out of the lesser motive by the greater. Not a switch thrown once that leaves the heart clean ever after, but a long contest in which the love of God, fed and exercised over years, gradually takes up more of the room that self-interest used to hold. If a man were already pure, he would have no need of the process; the very fact of the mixture is the evidence that the work is still going on, which is to say the evidence that there is a work, and a Workman. The day a man has no mixed motives left to contend with is the day he is standing finished before the face of God — and not one hour before. To demand of yourself that purity now, in this life, on this side of that face, is to demand to be done before the work is done.
So hold this much, and let it be enough, because it is enough.
The fear that your good was secretly pride is not the verdict it pretends to be. It is, read rightly, almost the opposite. The man building a name for himself never asks the question; you cannot stop asking it, and the difference between those two is not a small thing but very nearly everything. The mixture in your motives is real and you will not scrub it clean by looking at it harder, because you are not the one who can reach the bottom of it and you were never asked to be. The searching belongs to God. Your part is the part David kept: to bring the heart as it is, divided and anxious and not yet clean, and to ask the One who made it to search it and to lead, and then to get up and keep walking in the work, mixed motives and all, trusting that the One who began the slow crowding-out will be faithful to finish what no amount of self-inspection ever could.
A broken and a contrite heart, the Scripture says, God will not despise (Ps. 51:17, NASB). Not a pure one. A broken one. The trembling man, afraid his good is rotten at the root, is closer to the heart of the matter than he knows, and the fear he has been carrying as evidence against himself turns out, when it is held up to the light, to be carrying him the other way the whole time.
That is the mixed heart, and the peace a man can have with it that is not the false peace of pretending it is clean. There remains the harder question of what to do with the long reach this book has been describing, now that a man knows he cannot wait for a clean heart to use it from. The fear is answered. The work is still in front of us. We turn to it next.
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Made, Not Written •