JESUS IS THE CRUCIFIED KING, PART II (19 OF 32)
Scripture: John 12:26-28, John 12:30-50
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Jesus is The Crucified King, part II (19 of 32)
Series: John
Patrick Edwards
John 12:27-50
Introduction
What drives human behavior? I mean, why do people do what they do? What is it that motivates us in our thoughts and actions day in and day out? Why do we hold the opinions we do, both as individuals and a society at large? Well in his brilliant acceptance speech in 1950 after being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Bertrand Russell argued that desire is the central motive driving human behavior. He says,
All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only, or principally, their material circumstances, but rather the whole system of their desires with their relative strengths. ... Man differs from other animals in one very important respect, and that is that he has some desires which are, so to speak, infinite, which can never be fully gratified, and which would keep him restless even in Paradise. The boa constrictor, when he has had an adequate meal, goes to sleep, and does not wake until he needs another meal. Human beings, for the most part, are not like this. (Bertrand Russell)
In other words, what motivates a person is not doing the right thing, neither is it satisfaction, but desire. There is nothing noble about the human heart; we are not altruistic beings, nor are we ever fully content. Our hearts are constantly and incessantly restless. Russell breaks human desire into four parts: acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power. Acquisitiveness, he writes, is ''... the wish to possess as much as possible of goods, or the title to goods,'' and is a motive which, ''... ...
Series: John
Patrick Edwards
John 12:27-50
Introduction
What drives human behavior? I mean, why do people do what they do? What is it that motivates us in our thoughts and actions day in and day out? Why do we hold the opinions we do, both as individuals and a society at large? Well in his brilliant acceptance speech in 1950 after being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Bertrand Russell argued that desire is the central motive driving human behavior. He says,
All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only, or principally, their material circumstances, but rather the whole system of their desires with their relative strengths. ... Man differs from other animals in one very important respect, and that is that he has some desires which are, so to speak, infinite, which can never be fully gratified, and which would keep him restless even in Paradise. The boa constrictor, when he has had an adequate meal, goes to sleep, and does not wake until he needs another meal. Human beings, for the most part, are not like this. (Bertrand Russell)
In other words, what motivates a person is not doing the right thing, neither is it satisfaction, but desire. There is nothing noble about the human heart; we are not altruistic beings, nor are we ever fully content. Our hearts are constantly and incessantly restless. Russell breaks human desire into four parts: acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power. Acquisitiveness, he writes, is ''... the wish to possess as much as possible of goods, or the title to goods,'' and is a motive which, ''... ...
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