It seems the more I think about not sinning, the more I sin, but the more I think about just loving Jesus, the less I seem to sin. Falling in love seems to be the key.
Interpretation
Focusing on love rather than avoiding sin changes behavior positively.
John Wimber's quote implies that preoccupation with sinning can lead to more of that behavior, while focusing on love—specifically, a deep love for Jesus—can transform one's actions and reduce sinful behaviors. This suggests that love and positive thinking can be more powerful than fear or guilt in guiding one's moral choices.
In practice
During a sermon, the pastor quoted John Wimber to emphasize the importance of love in overcoming personal struggles.
Our passion is to imitate the ministry of Jesus in the power of the Spirit. This requires we must follow Jesus out of baptismal waters, through our personal deserts, and into the harvest. We want to take the ammunition of the balanced evangelical theology with the fire power of Pentecostal practice, loading & readying the best of both worlds to hit the target of making & nurturing disciples.
Many Christians and Christian leaders have been neutralized by the love of money and materialism. The homage paid to affluence becomes a burden that saps our energy as well as our love for God and other people...Like Jesus and Paul, we can learn to be content with what we have, living modestly in order that we may give liberally to the work of the kingdom and to meet the needs of others.
Instead of focusing on the great men of God, I prefer to focus on the Great God of men.
We learned that what happens when we are alone with the Lord determines how intimate and deep the worship will be when we come together.
Waves of thought are stirring. In a twilight corner of her consciousness, one tiny fragment and another tiny fragment call out wordlessly to eachother, their spreading ripples intermingling.
Whether talking about addiction, taxation [on cigarettes] or education [about smoking], there is always at the center of the conversation an essential conundrum: How come we're selling this deadly stuff anyway?
For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.
An idea's birth is legitimate if one has the feeling that one is catching oneself plagiarizing oneself.
When a legislature decides to steal some of our rights and plans to use police force to accomplish it, what's the real difference between them and the thief? Darn little! They hide behind the excuse that they're legislating democratically. The fact they do it by a majority vote has no moral significance whatsoever. Numerical might does not constitute right, no more than a lynch mob can justify its act because a majority participated.
My idea of freedom is that we should protect the rights of people to believe what their conscience dictates, but fight equally hard to protect people from having the beliefs of others imposed upon them.
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