In his 1956 book, Your God is Too Small, theologian J. B. Phillips expressed this idea regarding good intentions: “To Christ the most serious sin was not the misdirection of the love-energy, which might be due to ignorance or mere carelessness, but the deliberate refusal to allow it to flow out either to God or to other people…Christ’s time, in the circumstances, was short and He wasted none of it in dealing with mere symptoms. It was with motive and attitude of the heart, i.e. the emotional centre, that He was concerned. It was this that He called on men to change, for it is plain that once the inner affections are aligned with God the outward expression of the life will look after itself.”
I see how that can work…but I think motivations are too easily manipulated by our own ego, where then inappropriate actions are self-justified.
