Most of us know what it is to mean well. You decide you will stop speaking about a coworker the way you have been. You decide you will finally have the honest conversation you have been avoiding, or give your family your attention in the evening instead of your phone. You mean it. Then an ordinary moment comes, and the old response happens before the new intention has had any say.
Good intentions are a real beginning, and Scripture treats them as one. But an intention is not yet obedience. It is a decision about what you want to do. Change happens as that decision is carried into the particular moments where a different response is needed, again and again, with God at work in you. Wanting to change matters. On its own, it does not take you through those moments.
Wanting to Do Right Is Worth Something
When Paul wrote to the believers in Corinth about a gift they had planned for the believers in Jerusalem, he did not brush their intention aside. He gave them credit for it, and then he asked for more:
“Here is my advice: It would be good for you to finish what you started a year ago. Last year you were the first who wanted to give, and you were the first to begin doing it. Now you should finish what you started. Let the eagerness you showed in the beginning be matched now by your giving. Give in proportion to what you have.”
2 Corinthians 8:10–11, NLT
Paul values their eagerness. He also does not treat it as the finished thing. It was meant to be “matched” by their giving, and a year after they first wanted to give, the giving was still unfinished.
Paul is writing about one gift, but the situation is a familiar one: people who sincerely wanted to do something good, had even begun, and still had not done it.
Saying Yes Is Not the Same as Going
Jesus told a short story that draws the line even more plainly:
“…A man with two sons told the older boy, ‘Son, go out and work in the vineyard today.’ The son answered, ‘No, I won’t go,’ but later he changed his mind and went anyway. Then the father told the other son, ‘You go,’ and he said, ‘Yes, sir, I will.’ But he didn’t go.”
Matthew 21:28–30, NLT
Then He asked, “Which of the two obeyed his father?” (Matthew 21:31, NLT).
Jesus told this to religious leaders who had heard John the Baptist but had not believed him or repented (Matthew 21:32). We are not told whether the second son meant his yes when he said it. The question Jesus asked does not depend on that. Obedience was measured by which son actually went.
What I Learned About My Own Intentions
When God called me to write Renewing Your Mind, I intended to obey. I did not doubt the call, and I wanted to do what He was asking. But I attached a condition. My finances were going the wrong way, and writing would take time I did not think I could spare. So my answer, in effect, was: when You provide what I need, I will write.
For about seven months I prayed for that provision. At the time it seemed reasonable, and I never thought of it as refusing Him. I had my own picture of what obeying Him would require, and I was asking Him to make that picture possible first. It was not what He was actually asking of me.
Later, looking back, I came to understand something I could not see then: delayed obedience is disobedience. Through those seven months my intention to obey was real. What was missing was the obedience itself.
Why Intentions Stall
Sincere intentions can stay intentions in a few common ways.
An intention is usually made in general terms, and usually away from the moment that will test it. “I want to be kinder” is decided on a quiet morning. The test comes in a particular conversation, with a particular person, often quickly and under pressure. An intention that has never been connected to that moment has little to offer when it arrives.
An intention can also point to a later time. When things settle down. After this busy season. Once I understand it better. As with my months of waiting for provision, that kind of waiting can be completely honest and still keep obedience in the future.
And deciding can feel like doing. Making up your mind to change is a real step, but a decision about what you will do is not the same as doing it. It is easy to feel that something has already changed when only the intention has.
Intentions also tend to fade over time when nothing gives them a regular place in life. Why that happens, and what Scripture shows about regular, shared practice, is explained in Why Consistency Requires Structure.
God Gives Both the Desire and the Power
None of this means the answer is simply more willpower. Paul tells the believers in Philippi, “For God is working in you, giving you the desire and the power to do what pleases him” (Philippians 2:13, NLT).
The desire to obey is not something you manufacture. For a believer, wanting to live what God has shown you is part of His work in you. And the doing is not left to your own strength either; God gives the power for it.
That does not make the believer passive. Paul wrote those words to people he had just urged to keep obeying (Philippians 2:12). God supplies the desire and the power, and the believer acts on what He has shown, in the actual moment where it matters. So the “more” that change requires is not a stronger intention. It is the intention carried into an actual response, with God supplying both the desire and the power.
From Intending to Responding
So if your intentions keep stalling, the problem may not be that you want the wrong things or that you don’t want them enough. The intention may never have been connected to the moments where it needs to be lived. It helps to ask where, specifically, this intention will meet real life, and what responding there would actually look like.
The Process is how Renewing Your Mind Discipleship Ministry approaches that step: bringing what you intend, and what you already know from Scripture, into the moments where a different response is needed, while depending on God to do His work.
Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.
