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.
Since Satan can't destroy the gospel, he has too often neutralized its usefulness by addition, subtraction or substitution.
The point of mythology or myth is to point to the horizon and to point back to ourselves: This is who we are; this is where we came from; and this is where we're going. And a lot of Western society over the last hundred years - the last 50 years really - has lost that. We have become rather aimless and wandering.
We have so exalted a notion of the human soul that we cannot bear to be despised, or even not to be esteemed by it. Man, in fact, places all his happiness in this esteem.
The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.
Very few established institutions, governments and constitutions ...are ever destroyed by their enemies until they have been corrupted and weakened by their friends.
Our physiological constitution is obviously a product of Darwinian processes, insofar as you buy the evolutional theory as a generative, as an account of the mechanism that generated us. Our physiology evolved, our behaviors evolved, and our accounts of those behaviors, both successful and unsuccessful, evolved.
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