Quotes about Intention

if you will here stop and ask yourself why you are not as pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it.

Love, as Paul and the New Testament presents it, is not action—not even action with a special intention—but a source of action.

Thomas Oord, in his Science of Love and elsewhere, defines or describes love as acting intentionally, in sympathetic response to others (including God), to promote overall well-being. I believe this to be one of the better efforts toward articulating agape love. Most importantly, it distinguishes love from desire, and locates it in the will, leaving room for desire and feeling to play an appropriate role in love without making them the heart of the matter. 

The God-intended function of the will is to reach out to God in trust. By standing in the correct relation to God through our will we can receive grace that will properly reorder the soul along with the other five components of the self.

if you sufficiently dismember yourself, you will not be able to do any wrong action. This is the logic by which Jesus reduces the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees to the absurd.

The intention points the way, and then habituated thought and desire must be redirected to support the intention in the moments of action.

In every concrete situation we have to ask ourselves, not "Did I do the specific things in Jesus' illustrations?" but "Am I being the kind of person Jesus' illustrations are illustrations of?

Faith has two main parts: one is vision and one is desire, or will. Vision is seeing reality as it is, or in the case of the future, as it could be for us. Desire is wanting reality to be as it is, or as we hope it could be.

Brother Lawrence, who was a kitchen worker and cook, remarks. Our sanctification does not depend upon changing our works, but in doing that for God's sake which we commonly do for our own…. It is a great delusion to think that the times of prayer ought to differ from other times. We are as strictly obliged to adhere to God by action in the time of action as by prayer in the season of prayer.

God is great enough that he can conduct his affairs in this way. His nature, identity, and overarching purposes are no doubt unchanging. But his intentions with regard to many particular matters that concern individual human beings are not. This does not diminish him. Far from it. He would be a lesser God if he could not change his intentions when he thinks it is appropriate. And if he chooses to deal with humanity in such a way that he will occasionally think it appropriate, that is just fine.

Practice in not speaking can at least give us enough control over what we say that our tongues do not "go off" automatically. This discipline provides us with a certain inner distance that gives us time to consider our words fully and the presence of mind to control what we say and when we say it.

He teaches us how to be in prayer what we are in life and how to be in life what we are in prayer.