Intentions

Jail is filled with people who had “good intentions.” So are the
streets and the cemeteries. How many times have we actually
stopped to think, am I doing this to glorify God in any way? The
Bible says “There is a pathway that seems right to a man, but in the
end it’s a road to death” Proverbs 14:12. At times we do certain
things to please friends, but is it pleasing to God? We try to justify it
somehow, but there is a bottom line. There have been times I’ve had
to stop myself from doing something or going somewhere, because
I knew my intentions were in the wrong place. I was doing something
out of boredom, or selfishness; I’d stop myself, because those
characteristics are not pleasing to my heavenly father.

Sometime ago, I had a conversation with one of my students. He was
telling me his grand plans after high school, (they were questionable,
coming from a Christian). And my question to him was; how do you
plan to glorify God in all of this? Are your intentions to glorify Him, or
just yourself?

Friends, so many times, we don’t see God’s big picture, we do things
in spur of the moment. We get into relationships we had no business
in starting, and we do things that we as Christians should not even
acknowledge. Where comes a point that we stop to realize that we
had all the wrong intentions to begin with?

And when God doesn’t give us the answer that we wanted, we go
and we do it our way, with the intent that hey–I will glorify God
anyway, and in the end it blows up in our face. James has a great
verse for that “when you ask, you do not receive, because you ask
with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your
pleasures” –James 4:3

I encourage you to ask yourself, what are my intentions? Are they
from God? Am I pleasing him or just myself?

Vita Argirov