Guarding Against Ulterior Motives

Mike Hosey, An Elder

We live in a world of invisible things. You can't see the atoms that make up the air you breath, nor the molecules that comprise the skin on the back of your hand. Every second of the day, you are bathed in radiation falling down from space, or are pelted by microbes, viruses, or other ickys from a thousand unknown places. And you can't see any of it. Obviously, some of that stuff is beneficial, while some of it is downright deadly.

But perhaps the most deadly things are not those things that are invisible to us, but those things that are hidden from us with ulterior motives. Ulterior means “existing beyond what is obvious or admitted; intentionally hidden.” So a person who approaches you with an ulterior motive is someone who is projecting a false motive in order to fulfill a secret motive. With that person, what you see is NOT what you get.

This is the case with the hypocrites that Jesus admonishes in Matthew 6:1-2. He tells his disciples that when they practice their righteousness by giving to the needy, not to be like those hypocrites and do it before men, or draw attention to it. Instead, he tells them to do it in private. His reasoning is found one chapter prior. In Matthew 5:20, he tells them that if they want to get into Heaven, then their righteousness must exceed the righteousness of the hypocritical pharisees. In other words, he wanted his disciples to practice their righteousness, and their giving to the needy, from a genuine heart to serve, and not out of an ulterior motive to raise their status with other men. If we practice our righteousness in secret, then our motive to gain the praises of men is quashed because there is no possibility of payoff; our heart is more likely to be genuine, God-centered, and not the fake righteousness of the hypocrites.

Jesus teaches us something else in that passage. He teaches us that the reward the hypocrites get for their fake righteousness is the paltry, temporary praise of men, and that the reward that the disciples will get for a genuine heart is a reward from the invisible ruler of all the universe who has the ability to test the hearts of all men (Matthew 6:4, Jeremiah 17:10, Hebrews 4:13).