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From my reading, my conversations with other Christians, and my own experience, I’ve observed something about sanctification, our growth in personal holiness. It is that the longer someone has been walking as a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ, the more he thinks about the motivation for his actions. It seems that as we grow in our love for God and for others over the course of our Christian lives, we become more sensitive to the intentions of our hearts, more aware that at times we have a noble motive that does not come across to others in our acts, more cognizant that we often do not understand our own hearts and cannot always be sure why we do what we do, more aware that our thoughts and affections are not nearly as holy and selfless as they should be.
In turn, this awareness leads us to think more about what God wants our motives to be. We more and more understand that a God-pleasing action is one motivated by love for God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and love for our neighbor as ourselves (Matt. 22:34–40). This is a very good thing.
Yet sometimes we can start thinking that because the motives of our hearts are so determinative in making something pleasing to God, doing things out of duty or at least a sense of duty is completely out of the equation. Those who have experienced a good deal of legalism can especially become prone to believing that we act according to love or law, not both, or that we operate out of duty to the exclusion of delight or vice versa.
As we look to the Scriptures, however, we discover that we need both love and law, delight and duty. God made us for the specific end of taking dominion, to His glory (Gen. 1:28). This is the purpose for which we exist, established by divine law and given as our duty. If we did not have this law or duty, if we did not understand it as our obligation meant to drive our behavior, we could not be what God made us to be.
Yet God created us to delight in doing our duty, to love keeping His law. This becomes clear when we look to the Lord Jesus Christ, the only perfect human being who has ever lived and thus the model for what humanity is to be. Jesus, we read in Hebrews 10:5–7, delighted to do the will of God. He acted because the Father gave Him a specific work to accomplish, and He delighted to do it. He found life in doing His duty and delighted in His Father’s wisdom as He did it.
Our sin makes it difficult to understand how we can do things out of delight and duty, from love and the law. We need both. Law without love is legalism, and love without law is lawlessness. Duty without delight can destroy our spirits, and delight without duty can devolve into the selfish pursuit of pleasure at others’ expense. By God’s grace, may we seek delight in doing our duty and lawfulness in exercising our love.