Human motivation is all about the vertical dimension, the verbs used in the Bible to relate people to God.
The Bible tells us to love God with all our heart mind and soul, what do you love instead?
The Bible teaches us to fear God, what do you fear?
God tells us to trust in Him and lean not on your own understanding, what are you trusting in?
God tells us to seek our refuge in Him, where or in what do you seek refuge?
Ecclesiastes 9:3
This is an evil in all that is done under the sun: that one thing happens to all.
Truly the hearts of the sons of men are full of evil; madness is in their hearts while they live, and after that they go to the dead.
"Isn’t it always true that our idolatries or ‘felt needs’ are typically blessings of God that we exult? Like the old saying we exalt the gift over the giver.
It is not as though it is bad to be loved by someone, it is not bad to have good health or a pile of money but it is real bad to have it on the top of the heap.
If you love the gift not the giver then you’re an idolater." (Powlison)
Man's deepest problem is sin.
Not just in a general sense or in theory, as way back there in Adam, and not just as a matter of his conscious will to act and bad behavior.
But as a matter of who he is,
a fundamental perversion of his essential nature that takes a very specific form in his fears and his desires etc..
And what is wrong with you is so wrong there is only one hope.
What is wrong with you is so wrong that it takes the one good man that ever lived to die for you and to completely master you, to change you.
Romans 7
8 For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good I do not find. 19 For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice. 20 Now if I do what I will not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.
21 I find then a law, that evil is present with me, the one who wills to do good.
"The sin, the evil in our desires are often not what we want (natural affections) but that we want it too much. It rules our lives, seizes the throne, and becomes idolatrous. Natural affections becomes inordinate lusts." Calvin
Jeremiah 17:9
The heart is deceitful above all things,
And desperately wicked;
Who can know it?
Proverbs 14:12
There is a way which seems right to a man,
But its end is the way of death.
Hebrews 412
For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow,
and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.
Knowing God through His Word