Leading the League in Love: A New Competition

"and they have a really cool goal this year that len is leading them in and that is to lead the league in love and i thought for a professional football team uh folks whom we think of as being very very large that often are trying to smash each other into the ground for them to say our goal is actually to be humble and to see how we can serve other people and to see could we lead the league not in yards gained not in wins those are all fine things but actually try to lead the league in love that would be a really cool thing" [00:41:20]

"he says to them be devoted to brotherly love and in one version it puts it like this outdo one another in honoring each other above yourselves and the idea is that we ought to engage in a kind of competition but it's not a competition to be better than or excel over or dominate others it's like you're going to try to honor me you want to encourage me you want to build into me you want to create value for me i want to do that for you i want to do that even more for you so today outdo the people in your life in love" [00:84:72]

"you might think about two different kinds of competition there is a negative form of competition that seeks to establish my value at the expense of yours tries to compare me to yours but then there is a wonderful form of competition where when i compete against you it spurs me on to give the best that i can give" [00:123:43]

"i was very struck years ago by the philosophy of john wooden you might know john wooden was for many many years the coach of the ucla bruins and was also a very devoted follower of jesus and there's a book that interviews a number of his players and they say the strangest thing about john wooden they say he never once said to us you've got to go and win this game and they said later on playing basketball in the nba at the highest of levels often coaches would scream you have to win this game and be quite obsessed with the burden of it but wouldn't always insist that actually the real contest is with yourself" [00:146:48]

"the real challenge is to see can i devote myself can i give the finest that i am able to give because we all have different levels of innate abilities well i focus myself and try the very best that i can and if you do that whatever the final score is then you leave the court with your head held high and if you don't no matter how much the score says that you win you have not actually won" [00:188:15]

"the whole philosophy of hell rests on the recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing and especially that oneself is not another self my goodness my good and your good is yours what one gains another loses life is a zero-sum game even an inanimate object is what it is by excluding all other objects from the space it occupies if it expands it does so by thrusting other objects aside or by absorbing them a self does the same with beasts the absorption takes the form of eating for us it means the sucking of will and freedom out of a weaker self into a stronger to be means to be in competition" [00:226:08]

"and screwtape here i think is giving a profound picture of how evil works and about the nature of hell that hell is not so much a torture chamber the way that we often caricature it but it is a view of existence that seeks to dominate and seeks to absorb and views one against the other and i think it's very striking that when the idea of all of reality is that the core rule of life is the survival of the fittest that we are at root somehow finding ourselves in an existence that is focused on making sure that i or my genes or my species or my tribe or my whoever survives at the expense of yours if necessary" [00:286:00]

"it is a fundamentally different and warped understanding of what it means to be human and so screwtape goes on now the enemy's philosophy is nothing more nor less than one continued attempt to evade this very obvious truth he aims at a contradiction things are to be many yet somehow also one and that little word one is maybe god's favorite word jesus as we've talked about before praise in john 17 may they be one father as you and i are one the good of oneself is to be the good of another now" [00:343:03]

"this is a claim that the notion that the survival of the fittest that we are all in competition against one another does not actually lie at the core of reality is not the fundamental rule of existence we are actually created for love not for the propagation of the species the good of oneself is to be the good of another this impossibility he calls love" [00:384:40]