Choosing Love: Noticing and Blessing Others Daily

Devote yourself today to the task of bringing love to the people and the world around you, and this will involve two primary tasks. One of them is to notice, to notice deeply and carefully, to notice details about people, their faces, and their bodies and their demeanors and their thoughts and their words, and then to notice details about the whole world, about creation, about moments, about what you learned. [00:50:07]

Our great teacher in this, of course, is Jesus, who brilliantly saw this is at the absolute center of human existence because it's the center of reality. And he says this about love: we're walking together in this lengthened season as we move towards the cross, which is the matchless ultimate deepest expression of self-sacrificing love in human history, and then the resurrection which is about the triumph of love and life. [01:41:92]

Dallas says this: we're going to make today about love. What exactly is love? Because we have to start there. And then here's what Dallas says: it is will to good or benevolence. Bene, good, benefactor, benefits, and then vulner's volition, to will to will the good. That is love. We love something or someone when we promote its good for its own sake, that's simply not for my sake or what I can get out of it. [02:19:20]

Love's contrary is malice. Love is to will the good. Malice, male, malformation, malodorous, mal is bad, will to bad. Abraham Lincoln understood precisely this distinction in the second inaugural. He famously said with malice toward none, with charity, that's a New Testament word, Jesus kind of love, agape love toward all. [02:49:12]

It's normal accompaniment is delight. So this is just brilliant, just these four thoughts: what exactly is love? It is to will to good. It's contrary as malice, will to bad. It's simple absence is indifference, and that's a great temptation. It's normal accompaniment is delight, and that's because all of creation is good because God has made it and God experiences that delight. [03:48:59]

What if that's an image of the heart of God because God created everything as an expression of love? My friend Ron says love is work made visible, and we see this supremely in creation. And when God looks at creation, looks at the sea creatures that he blesses, that he forms to frolic in the ocean, what if every time a dolphin leaps up out of the sea anywhere, which is happening every second all around the globe, God is doing a double fist pump saying this is the greatest day ever. [04:41:92]

Desire and love are of course compatible when desire is ruled by love, but most people today would unfortunately not even know the difference between them. Hence in our world, love constantly falls prey to lust. This is a major part of the deep sickness in contemporary life, and if you just pay attention, for example, to movies or to music, you will very often see how we fail to distinguish between love as willing the good, which is for the benefit of the other, and the desire to gratify what it is that I want for myself. [05:42:63]

By contrast, what characterizes the deepest essence of God is love, that is, will to good. One of the most amazing statements in all of literature, Jesus' friend John the beloved says it twice in his first letter, first John in the fourth chapter, God is love. His very creation of the world is an expression of will to good. It is then expected that the world would be found to him to be very good. [06:21:44]

His love and good will towards humans is therefore not an add-on to a nature that is fundamentally careless or even hostile. It is another expression, one of the more important ones of course, of what he always and in every respect is. It is not hard for God to love, but it is impossible given his nature for him not to love. People will sometimes say something like, man, is it what a miracle that God could love somebody like me. No, no, no, no, it would be a miracle for God not to love anybody because God is love. [07:09:20]

Anytime we care about anything, it could be football, could be the stock market, could be our bodies, it could be somebody else, we notice details. That's one of the things that love does. I remember watching my sister Barbie with two of our kids years ago, and it was just remarkable. I sat there for over an hour as all Barbie did was ask them a question and then they would respond, and Barbie would watch them, and depending on their facial expression and their body language, when she saw them being moved, she would ask another question and they both ended up in tears. [08:40:39]

I was talking this last week to a friend of mine I worked with many, many years ago. He's got a very serious diagnosis now, and it turns out he had become known by and deeply impacted by a man named Dallas Willard. He told me he talked about how one day when he was quite dejected, and Dallas invited him, would you come for a walk with me, and then Dallas just said, would you hold my hand. [09:25:68]

Today as you walk through the day, really notice people, look deeply into their eyes, into their faces, and listen to the tone of their voice, and when is their head droop and when are they filled with life. Ask God to give you eyes to see and ears to hear, and then will the good instead of going through life maliciously, you know, this driver, this person at work, I want to give them a piece of my mind like I got one despair, or with simple indifference just on autopilot. Today, will the good for all of God's earth and especially the people that God loves so much. [10:36:00]