Motivation

I was listening to a sermon last night on the way home from Wisconsin in our van about motivation. The preacher was talking about two different kinds of people, those who are internally motivated and those who are externally motivated. The internally motivated people have the purpose and vision and motivation inside of themselves from God to get up each day and press towards the goals that God has for them while the externally motivated people only move when a negative external circumstance forces them to action. For example, lets say that a dad of five kids is faced with losing his job. The internally motivated person would look at the situation and believe that God will take care of their needs and provide another job for them and he would press on. The externally motivated person would doubt God's love for them based on negative circumstances and would only be moved to find another job when something negative forces his action, like the inablility to pay a mortgage payment or bills. I was thinking about this and God was speaking to me about training kids! He was telling me that our ultimate goal in the training of our kids is to get them to be internally motivated to live for him each day. In the begining their training comes by our externally motivating them to do the right thing, basically training them and praying for them while instructing them in what is right until they catch the vision and internalize that inside their hearts and then they behave the right way out of an internally motivated right heart. When kids grow up, I believe that they abandon Chrisitianity because they were only externally prodded and forced to be Christians, and they never internalized a love for God and a vision to live for him in their own hearts. So when the parents watchful hands come off of their life when they turn 18 and they have to begin a life of their own, the external motivation to do what is right is gone, and they jump ship to the world. If through the process of their training as children they begin to become internally motivated in their own hearts towards a life of faith and intimacy with God, they will grow and grow in that faith when they are released into adult life, because their faith is their own, it is not just a product of outside circumstances.