Well, face it. Jesus did warn us about the result of not believing.
In that respect everyone believes to avoid hell and gain heaven.
Ideally we should come to God out of gratitude and love for all the good things He’s done for us and given us. Reality is, I doubt there’s a person on this planet with pure enough motive. We are all so corrupted by sin that nothing we do is uncorrupted by it.
The great thing about God is that He meets us where we are. Even though we may initially come to Him out of fear, when we see what He’s done for us then we love all the more out of gratitude and thanksgiving.
Matter of fact, I don’t think there’s a place in Scripture where the motive of why we come to him is addressed. We come to Him and believe for different reasons. Loving Him is a separate issue.
I pretty much agree. We can hide our motives, and the ideal is compassion and self sacrifice as our Lord taught.
We can vary from this in degree, both in doing good works or intellectual assent in believing.
Still we are good at fooling ourselves in both categories. I think we might agree that on the selfish extreme end it is a matter of the heart and matters of the heart do matter in salvation.