I have to admit...sometimes I'm a Pharisees

A. W. Tozer writes in his book The Root of Righteousness-

"The test by which all conduct must finally be judged is motive.

As water cannot rise higher than its source, so the moral quality in an act can never be higher than the motive that inspires it. For this reason, no act that arises from an evil motive can be good, even though some good may appear to come out of it. For this reason no act that arises from an evil motive can be good, even though some good may appear to come out of it. Every deed done out of anger or spite, for instance, will be found at last to have been done for the enemy and against the Kingdom of God!

Unfortunately, the nature of religious activity is such that much of it can be carried on for reasons that are not goo, such as anger, jealousy, ambition, vanity and avarice. All such activity is essentially evil, and will be counted as such at the judgement.

In this matter of motive, as in so many other things, the Pharisees afford us clear examples.
They remain the world's most dismal religious failures, not because of doctrinal error nor because they were careless or lukewarm, nor because they were outwardly persons of dissolute life.
Their whole trouble lay in the quality of their religious motives. They prayed, but they prayed to be heard of men, and thus their motives ruined their prayers and rendered them not only useless, but actually evil. They gave generously to the service of the temple, but they sometimes did it to escape their duty toward their parents, and this was an evil. They judged sin and stood against it when found in others, but this they did from self-righteousness and hardness of heart.

So with almost everything they did. Their activities had about them an outward appearance of holiness, and those same activities, if carried on out of pure motives, would have been good and praiseworthy. The whole weakness of the pharisees lay in the quality of their motives.

That this is not a small matter may be gathered from the fact that those orthodox and proper religionists went on in their blindness, until at last they crucified the Lord of glory, with no inkling of the gravity of their crime!"

Sometimes the blackness of my own heart propels me far from any pure motive and into only self-glorification and pride. Thus, my nature as a Pharisee comes to life again. Of course God know what we are made of and how the flesh desperately fights against the spiritual. But today if you read this post, please examine your motives. God knows your heart do you?