TRANSCRIPT:

Hey guys, welcome to the man talk podcast. I'm Vince Miller. You'rethe founder and host a good to be with you today.

We are still continuing in our book called 30 virtues that build a man, and it's exciting to be in this book. I hope you'll pick up a copy of it@beresolute.org. Forward slash 30. That's t h I r t y, uh, today we're in the topic on page 50, which is motive motives. And I'm joined today by Tyler van Epps. Thanks for being with us, man. For sure. Going to be here. So, uh, motives. Interesting. You know, I, you know, I think the way to really dig after kind of a heavy topic like this is to ask kind of a light hearted one to kind of get us going because I tell you we don't like sometimes the motors that we see even in our own selves, but we do have motives. We have desires deep down. So Tyler, I want to know this. What is your absolute favorite mill? Absolute favorite meal. Yeah, if you could have a meal right now, like right now, at this moment, what would be your favorite meal sell? Middle of July. Just coming off a whole week of the fourth. I just love a good burger on the grill. Um, for side, I would take some asparagus. Really lightly salted. Yep. Uh, and then fourth of July just I always think of watermelon, just nice ripe watermelon. So that's what's on my mind, right.

Ask me again an hour, I might say something different. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Who doesn't like a juicy burger, you know, so on the grill. So there you got it. So, you know, I have my own favorite meal and I think my own favorite meal is like that, that perfectly cured Philemon Yoan that it has been, like really, like, like marinate that thing for 28 days quick, fire it on a grill, throw in another and keep it warm and then throw it on a plate. And if I can cut it with a fork, man I'm, my glands are salivating like a. and there's something about that, like if, if you know what I'm talking about, like there's certain kinds of things that draw out desire out of us that's pretty powerful and I think that men fail to remember that it's okay to have desires, right? It's okay to have motives, they can be comfortable, there's good and bad ones of course. And there are certain things that we desire that draw out bad motives and there are certain things we desire that draw good motives and it's okay to desire a great steak or a hamburger. Right? So, so, uh, you know, when you think about your motives, do you think, and this is a pretty heavy jump in question, right, other than the hamburger question, right? But is it a pretty heavy jumping question? My second favorite me. Okay, go it. Go for it. I was going to go with the flame and yeah.

So I think it's heavy just to jump into this, but, uh, I think it's, it's a little easier for us to see the kind of, the motives and the desires of other people unfortunately isn't than it is to see our own right. Or assume the motives or assume the motives. There we go. Assume the motives and another person. Let me just jump in and ask you this then. Is it okay for us to judge the motives of another human being? What do you think,

judge? No. Um, assess or observe. Yes. I think, uh, yeah. Even this morning as I'm leaving the house, just trying to understand as I'm communicating with my wife what are, what are her motives here? Um, I think once I begin to make a judgment, that's what I'd be into separates, uh, you know, the context that we're having the conversation in and I can go down a route of communication completely that could be completely biased based on that judgment. So that, that's probably the direction I would lean a lot. I'd love to

Columbia opinion. I think that's pretty good. I think, you know, it's interesting like to make, make a judgment about a whole person based upon a single interaction is really hard, isn't it? Like, you know, I think like in today's world right now, of course some people are hearing about this, but we have a little bit of an issue at Willow Creek where bill hybels, who's, or founding pastor step steps aside, there's kind of a lot circling around his stepping down. There's some alleged things that have supposedly happened, right? And it's easy for me way over here, not in South Barrington, Illinois to make judgments about bill. Right, right. Which may not be true, uh, but it does cause me when I see kind of some of these things happened to assess like you used the word right, to assess my own lifestyle and to assess what parameters maybe I need to have in place in life.

And so those are two very different things. It's one thing to make an eternal judgment about somebody, right? And it's another thing to actually assess or judge in a very different way, even in my own heart. So yes, I think in some sense in some situations we are called to both a judge but maybe not make eternal judgments about other people and distinction. Right? Right. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So, and this brings up a great point though, and I think you've already made it and it's that man, it's a lot easier to do this with other people and really difficult to do with ourselves, right? Like why do you think we have such a hard time with, with judging our own motives? Why do you. I mean, because I think you're kind of confessing that, right? Why? Why is it hard for you to judge your own motives?

I think to some extent there's always a level of just internal tension of wanting pure motives and really trying to be in tune with a certain of self awareness of why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? And I think that that comes a little bit naturally. Um, when you see other people, it's easier to kind of, I guess create a more linear situation or static situation for perhaps what they're thinking and what their motives are when you're inside your own head a hundred percent of the time. There's just a whole wide world of what those motives might be. So I think that's one of the things that I wrestle with in terms of my motives is as I step into a decision or as I step into a relationship or something like that, it really is, what are my motives. Let's start on this side. Let's start on this side and let's measure everything in between.

Right? Right. And I think, do you think that let's just take men in general. Okay. Because we're talking to men, right? So let's just take men in general. I think it's interesting that, uh, sometimes I just don't take the time to reflect really on what my motives are. I really don't think about why I'm doing the things that I'm doing. I just do them, right? I don't, I don't do them with the conscious effort of kind of going like, yeah, I want to get it. I want to get ahead in this moment right now. And now there's something subconsciously where this behavior comes out. I'm not really thinking about my motives necessarily. So like for example, let's just take a relationship with our wife. You know, something happens in relationship to my wife. I attack right back because there's some motive to self-preserve, right?

Or I'm hurt by kind of a dynamic at work so I to self-preserve, I juxtaposition my behavior, my work patterns around a motive that I might not even be conscious about. I'm trying to self preserve in that motive. We do this right? Oh yeah, absolutely. I. You've probably seen it happen in other people for sure, and were easy to. It's easy to judge them in the moment, but I just don't think we take the time to reflect like you're saying, like we don't. We don't really think about why we're doing the things that we're doing all the time and you know this. This brings into , perspective of the fact that that I believe Christ does call us to be conscious of these things. Here's the funny thing is I think, and you tell me if I'm wrong, but I think that we become most conscious of our motives when we really screw something up because I think it forces us to reflect on why ever screwed something up and relationship with your wife and think, how did I get myself here? And then you reverse engineer it only to realize that, oops, is my own fault. Ever done that all the time. It kept telling us one situation where that's happened. Oh my God. Just give me one

this morning. Oh my goodness. I'm coming from uh, so, uh, amazing life of seven years. Shelly, you got three little girls and we have got a fourth on the way. Wow. So you're really good at intimacy here. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. A very conscious of my motives.

Preparation.

Yeah. So we're getting ready to leave the house this morning and um, you know, we've had a, we've had a busy few weeks. We had around the fourth of July. I keep talking about the fourth. It's a, it's a big deal around our family with cabins and lakes and stuff like that. But the, uh, over the past few weeks, it's just gotten so busy, we're out of our own house for like 10 days in a row, just stay in that cabin, stand lakes and stuff like that. We finally get back. We just celebrated a, our oldest birthday on Saturday, and then we did something again on Sunday. So we're just in this, in this midst error, this streak of really, really busy, really chaotic and, um, hadn't taken the time to really just slow down over the past few days. We've just been mentioning, oh, we need a date night. Oh, we need a date night.

Oh, we got to take some time apart. Um, we gotta we got to take some time away from the girls and stuff like that. And a man, all I got in my mind this morning is, okay, I got to go to this. I know this podcast with Vince. I'm like, Hey, this is cool. I'm excited. This is something I absolutely love. I love the goal of really reaching man. I think every, every pain point in my life that I've experienced as a man, whether it's going into your book or reading in the Podcast, I get impacted by it. And so that's what's on my mind this morning. Um, I'm thinking external. I'm thinking, all right, I got to start the week off, right? I've got some of these things to do. The girls woke up a little early, cut my quiet time short. I'm just recognizing the further and further I get into my morning and the more and more I'm getting ready to leave the house.

Inpatients inside of me is just, it. It's nine. And so I, you know, I lose my cool. I'm like, I got to go. Like I got things to do. I got places to be. I like, we're starting the week, the weekends over and man my, my wife just just sunk. I mean, you could just tell that the thing that she wanted more than anything was just connection. And so for me, I, I realized really quickly like, alright, I gotta slow down as much as I want to kind of have my own time over here to, to prepare for the day. It's a spending some quiet time to do this. My wife needs me right now and she is, you know, obviously going through all the hormones of pregnancy and stuff like that. And so yeah, we had a, we had a crazy morning even even as we were leaving the house. It's funny,

isn't it? It's just interesting how God is teaching us along the way. And usually for most blowing stuff, he draws attention to the need, the need to reflect on what really is driving us is, uh, is an us driving us, is it him driving us? Is it's situations that are driving us. What are the motives behind it? I just don't think we as guys slow down enough to really think about this, to purifier motives for the day and in each moment, throughout the day. This is what I love about the texts this week in this chapter. So it's matthew six is the sermon on the mount. Jesus is Jesus is, goes for the Jaguar, right? Sometimes. Here's what he says, he says, beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for you will have no reward from your father who's in heaven.

So he just, he goes right after it. The sermon on the mount is just some hardcore good old fashioned preaching, right? And he says, thus as you've just heard this, when you give to the needy sound, no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you that they have received their reward. Man, I love this text and here's why I love this text is I think Jesus is teaching us that there's actions, behaviors that people will see, right? Because he talking about these people who come to the temple to give their their stuff into the trumpets. So people in their day when they came to the temple, would actually throw their coinage into what looked like kind of a trumpet kind of thing, and it would make a clingy kind of noise, right?

You see where I'm getting agitated? That toll booths. Yeah, exactly. Exactly like those. Yeah, like a Chicago doable. I have gotten a few tickets there man, because he ain't like, I ain't got no change, you know, so different. That's a different kind of trumpet. It's very costly by the way. So anyway, you're, they're throwing stuff into these trumpets, right? And uh, it would make a clanging noise, but they're also talking about hypocrites, right? That would come on a stage when a, when a hypocrite that's an actor would come on a stage, they would blow trumpets to sound his like coming onto a stage to draw attention to this prima donna, you know, and uh, I think that Jesus is going like, look, like you can do things so that other people can see them, but you're only reward is other people see it. He's like, when you give, give so God could see it.

And what he's saying is there's something deeper that God sees that man can't, mankind cannot see. And that's the motive for why you're doing it. You know, a lot of people I think give completely for the wrong reason. So in of course Jesus is relating this to money and giving and a church, and he was like, some people give just reluctantly, some people give so they can put their name on a building. Some people give so that they can absolve and. But then some people give for just pure motives because they love God and there's different delineations of that mode of different levels of maturity. I think at that motive, and I think this is the struggle because I'm going to dare to say something pretty bold, but I actually believe when we get to heaven, God is not going to hold us accountable based upon our action.

I don't believe that. I don't believe he's going to hold us accountable based upon our action. He's going to hold us accountable based upon Christ action on the Cross, which is pretty profound and pretty life giving, but I do think what he's going to look at when he gets to heaven is the purity of our motor. He's going to go, did you do it for the reason, the right reason, not the wrong reason, and this is where desire is this. This very internal thing, it's very spiritual to supernatural thing and I think as men of God, we need to take more time to think about why we do the things that we do because that directs the path of our life. You know, I don't know Simon Sineck, right? He talks about the power of why as a great talk, but I mean, come on like the power of why is something we can apply to every part of our life. Like, you know, why do you start the day the way you do? Why did you start today the way you did, uh, did you do it to bring honor to God or to bring glory to yourself? And there's, it's very different for each and every one of us, but we really got to evaluate those motives. So how, how do you evaluate your motives? Like what, what is, what is at least one thing you do? I'm on a semi regular basis. Tyler, to just evaluate your motives.

Yeah. Um, it, it's crazy that you talk about just, I think pace is such a challenging thing for really, really assessing our motives, really diving into self awareness for me, uh, for me morning is kind of my time and uh, so when my little girls wake up a little early and kind of interrupt that, that's tough, but for me I really, I try and I try to journal a good bit. I tend to be more of a thinker and processor than a feeler. And so for me to really to really access that and allow that I've found to be a pretty powerful tool to actually help expose some of my motives because when I just apply a logical, rational machine gun like test or Lens, so my motives, um, I usually end up kind of just chopping it up, dissecting it, and then I can look at it in certain ways, but being able to sit down and just be a, being kind of a contemplative state, pray. And then I just start to journal. I write one word in the middle. I kind of do the the mind web thing except just based on my emotions, so I write one word in the middle and then I let that kind of expand out to just start to give this visual of where God's leading me, what God's will is, the Holy Spirit's highlighting in terms of my heart, my emotions and my moto. So that's one thing I try to practice pretty regularly.

Yeah, that was pretty good. And I think for the thinkers out there, that idea of like journaling is a fantastic idea. It probably gets their mind to kind of slow down, reflect, etc. Etc. So I don't know. I think it'd bE a great activity for some guys and for other guys who were hyper relational, maybe they need some accountability in their life to someone to speak back to them. Right? So maybe it's not journaling for the hyper relational guy. For him, it'S, I need brotherhood lIke this, right? I need someone speaking into me. He can. I run this idea by, you know, and someone asked him to the hard question, why did you do the thing that you did? Might not, might be enough to stir the motive. So yeah. Yeah.

How do you do it? I'm kidding. I'm curious. So I get my thing. I want to hear. I hear

you. You know, I. One of the ways that I definitively do it is I've got some guys in my life to be quite honest that, that I can be a little bit open with that I can run thoughts by, uh, I got two or three people. I was just sitting with one this morning that I could sit down with and I could say, what do you think about this? And then they can say back to me, here's what I would do, here's what I would not do. And for me it's hard, you know, to kind of sometimes figure out my motives. I think sometimes we're perplexed by them. We don't quite understand them, we're not comfortable with them and we may not even know where we stand with certain things. Like for example, let's say if I'm facing a little bit of a crisis in my life, I may feel like I'm walking through a cloud is very, very foggy.

it's very deep, I can't even see the steps in front of me and so I'm going to turn to another brother and say to me, have you been in this situation before? It helped me to understand how I feel right now because I'm not even sure what, what, how I feel about the situation right now or what to do with it, and I'm looking for them to help me to take that next step so that I can discern my motives along the way because I'm sure there's a motive path. Then I'm going to take through a particular struggle, so that's one of the things that I do. The other thing that I think is very important to do is to be quite honest, to get into god's word all the time. Yeah. You know these, these little daily devotionals that I write for these guys.

Yeah. The men's daily devo, which by the way, you guys should sign up or if you don't get it. I wrote one today based upon my motives. Seriously, I was talking about work and why I do the things that I do and how to find passion in life today. That's what I wrote about and I found that it's a great way for me to process in front of god's word. Just take a single verse stew on that verse and allow that burst to be the theme for my day and allow that truth to just ooze into me and then believed that truth over my own like passions and desires, and I'm talking about bad human passions and desires and I think men really should do more of that. You know, it'd be quite honest. So there's two things I did, right, brotherhood and bible, brotherhood and bible, which brings us right back to 30 virtues that build a man.

That's what I designed this book for tyler. So mine. Yeah. See, you got yours. And I think these would be great for other men and other groups. So anyway, with that guys, I want to really encourage you to pick up a copy of this book, 30 virtues that build a man and build those two things in your life, bible and brotherhood, and I promise you if you do it, it'll reorient your motives. If you just really place yourself in front of a relationship with god along the way in other men. So guys picked us up today, it'd be resolute.org, forward slash 30 is d h a r t y tyler, thanks for being with us. Thanks for happening and we'll see you right back here next time on another edition of talk.