Beyond Motivation: The Difference Between Inspiring and Manipulating
By WJ de Kock, ThD Professor of Practical Theology | Educational Consultant, Partners in Ministry
12—minute read
It is the forty days between resurrection and ascension, and Jesus is doing something deeply strange for someone who has just conquered death.
He is not holding press conferences. He is not leveraging the empty tomb for institutional advantage. He is not appearing to Caesar, or to the Sanhedrin, or to the crowds who once filled Jerusalem with palm branches and expectation. He is walking, unrecognised, alongside two devastated friends on a country road to Emmaus. He is cooking fish on a beach at dawn for a group of exhausted disciples who went back to the only thing they could think to do, which was fish. He is standing in locked rooms, breathing quietly, showing his scars.
And on one particular morning, he is asking a broken fisherman the same question three times.
Do you love me?
Not: after what you did, you owe me. Not: if you really believed, you would. Not: I need you to commit to this right now or we're moving on without you.
Just: do you love me?
That question, gentle, repeated, unarmed, is the forty-day season's central leadership curriculum. And it puts a fairly sharp edge to the question I want to ask you this week.
When you move people, what are you using to do it?
Every leader wants to inspire. Almost no leader wakes up thinking: today I will gently manipulate the people I love in the name of Jesus. Yet the line between inspiration and manipulation is thinner than it looks, and more dangerous in ministry than almost anywhere else, precisely because sacred language carries sacred power. When you speak in God's name, the how of leadership is not a stylistic question. It is a theological one.
Simon Sinek draws the distinction with useful precision. Manipulation uses fear, urgency, guilt, scarcity, and social pressure to secure short-term compliance. The ever-reliable "if you really loved Jesus, you would..." The roster guilt-trip disguised as a vision-cast. The budget conversation that subtly implies that God's work will fail if you don't give more, now, today. Inspiration, by contrast, calls something deeper to life, shared purpose, genuine meaning, the sense that this is who we are rather than this is what you owe me.[i]
On the surface, both approaches can fill rosters and fund projects. Over time, one builds trust. The other hollows it out like a termite in a beautifully painted wall.
Pastor and author Richard Blackaby once told the story of how he used what he called "guile" to recruit volunteers, flattering and nudging and cornering until his wife finally looked at him and said: "You're not the Holy Spirit."[ii]
That sentence is a complete seminary course in spiritual ethics.
The moment we start doing the Spirit's job for the Spirit, we are already halfway down the slope.
I keep returning to the post-resurrection appears of Jesus on the road to Emmaus, because it is the one that carries this argument most precisely.Two disciples are walking and processing the wreckage of their hopes, when a stranger falls into step beside them. He asks questions.[iii] He listens. He does not immediately announce who he is. He walks with them for miles, opening the Scriptures, and then—this is the detail that stops me every time, he makes as if to go further.[iv]
He would have kept walking.
If they had not said "stay with us," he would have continued down the road and let them go home none the wiser. The risen Christ, the one who has defeated death, who holds all authority in heaven and earth, will not force himself on people who have not yet invited him in.
That is the most anti-manipulative act in the Gospel, and it barely gets mentioned.
Notice what he does not do. He does not reveal himself dramatically to accelerate their belief. He does not leverage their despair to manufacture a breakthrough. He does not say: "I have compelling information you need right now and you are running out of time to receive it." He walks alongside, asks questions, opens the text—and then, with magnificent restraint, he begins to leave them. Their hearts are burning before they know why.[v] The inspiration is already happening. He doesn't need to force the moment.
He gives them space to discover.
This is also what happens in the question that Jesus asked Peter.[vi]
Do you love me?
Peter had denied Jesus three times. Jesus had every legitimate claim to leverage that debt—to commission Peter from guilt, to frame the call around what Peter owed rather than what Peter loved. It would have worked, probably. Guilt is highly effective in the short term. The pastoral literature is full of leaders who know this and use it, mostly without quite admitting that is what they are doing.
Jesus does not do it.
He goes to the root. Not the debt, but the love. And the commission—feed my lambs, tend my sheep, follow me—flows from the love, not the ledger. Paul puts the same logic to the Thessalonians: "your work produced by faith, your labour prompted by love, your endurance inspired by hope." Faith, love, hope. Not anxiety, image management, or fear of missing out.[vii]
The risen Christ, in these forty days, is modelling with his entire manner of appearing and withdrawing and asking and waiting the exact kind of leadership he is about to commission his followers to practise. As the Father sent me, I am sending you.[viii]
The Father sent the Son through incarnation, service, and a cross freely chosen. Not through coercion. Not through spiritual blackmail. Through love that absorbed the worst that fear-driven power could do, and refused, even then, to retaliate in kind.
That is the commission. That is the method. That is the only kind of leadership that belongs in the same sentence as the resurrection.
So here, in these forty days between resurrection and ascension, with Pentecost not yet come and the commission already given—you are in exactly the same suspended space the disciples inhabited.
You have seen something real. You have been sent. You do not yet have everything you need.
And you have a choice about how you will move people in the meantime.
You can use the tools the world uses, urgency, guilt, scarcity, social pressure, the carefully engineered moment. They work. For a while. On the surface.
Or you can do what Jesus did on the road to Emmaus: walk alongside, ask honest questions, open the text, let the heart burn at its own pace—and then make as if to go further, trusting that genuine encounter will issue in genuine invitation.
You don't need tricks.
You are not the Holy Spirit.
And in a world drowning in manipulation, the simple miracle of a community led by love, truth, and the freedom to say no, is more radical, more subversive, and considerably more resurrection-shaped than it looks.
Lead from there.
[i] Simon Sinek, Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2009), 50–55. Sinek distinguishes manipulation (short-term compliance through external motivators) from inspiration (long-term alignment through shared purpose and values).
[ii] Richard Blackaby, "Leadership or Manipulation?," Richard Blackaby (blog), May 7, 2025, https://richardblackaby.com/leadership-or-manipulation/. Blackaby's account of using relational leverage to recruit volunteers—and his wife's corrective—serves as a defining illustration of the fine line between pastoral persuasion and manipulation.
[iii] Luke 24:13–35. The Road to Emmaus narrative is among the most theologically layered of the post-resurrection appearances.
[iv] Luke 24:28. The Greek prosetpoiēsato porrōteron poreuesthai—literally "he made as though he would go further"—indicates deliberate restraint. Jesus withholds himself rather than forcing recognition.
[v] Luke 24:32. "Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?" The burning precedes the recognition. Inspiration operates before the conscious mind has caught up.
[vi] John 21:15–19. The threefold "Do you love me?" echoes Peter's threefold denial (John 18:17, 25, 27), transforming the site of failure into the site of recommissioning—through love, not leverage.
[vii] 1 Thess. 1:3 (NIV).
[viii] John 20:21.