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- Author: Dallas Willard
- Full Title: Getting Love Right
- Category: #books
- But love does not do very well in actuality, in the grimy grind of daily life. Perhaps because of the way it is exalted around us, it proves to be a considerable disappointment to most people and something one can’t really count on.
- It is remarkable how little doctrine relates to love. I read a lot of doctrinal statements by this or that organization. They rarely say anything about love. It would seem that love has nothing essentially to do with doctrine or correct teachings, nor doctrine with love.
- one also notes how little is done in practice to help professors of Christianity, even faithful Church members, become genuinely loving persons.
- And we and the public are constantly confronted with professing Christians who, to say the least, do not love one another, but may clearly hate and despise or be indifferent to those around them.
- Rom. 13:19—“He who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law… And if there is any other commandment, it is summed up in this saying, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love works no evil to a neighbor; love therefore is the fulfillment of the law.”
- conformity to moral law: not as an objective but as a by-product or side effect of love.
- Note: We aren’t righteous as a result of our good behavior (though that may help us become righteous) --- we exhibit good behavior because we are righteous.
- that love of which they spoke is something (whatever it is, exactly) which arises out of certain prior conditions of the whole self, something which involves an orientation of the whole self toward what is good and right, and something which has amazing, supernatural power for good as it indwells the individual.
- Love, as Paul and the New Testament presents it, is not action—not even action with a special intention—but a source of action. It is a condition out of which actions of a certain type emerge. It is a condition that explains how our three guidelines could be true and must be true.
- It is, then, a disposition or character (a second-level potentiality or potency, in Aristotelian terminology): a readiness to act in a certain way under certain conditions.
- agape love as an overall disposition of the human self
- Such love is holistic, not something one turns on or off for this or that person or thing. Its orientation is toward life as a whole. It dwells on good wherever it may be found, and supports it in action. Love is nourished upon the good and the right and the beautiful.
- They should not try to love that person but try to become the kind of person who would love them.
- Our aim under love is not to be loving to this or that person, or in this or that kind of situation, but to be a person possessed by love as an overall character of life, whatever is or is not going on.
- do not come to my enemy and then try to love them, I come to them as a loving person.
- We do not achieve the disposition of agape love by direct effort, but by attending to and putting into place the conditions out of which it arises.
- Thus it is important to understand that in this passage Paul is not saying that we are to be patient, kind, humble and so forth, but that love itself is patient, kind, humble, etc. That, after all, is what the passage actually says. So we “pursue love” and the rest takes care of itself.
- Choice considers alternatives and weighs what is best. If its vision is broad enough, it will find what is good and right. If it is surrendered to God, united with his will, it will be able to do what is best. That of course is the nature of love. It seeks what is best.
- Love, then, is a condition of the will embedded in all fundamental dimensions of the human personality. It is not something you choose to do, but what you choose to be.
- Love ceases to be an intimidating and impractical ideal and becomes something we can see progress in day by day, week by week.
- The bodily habits and social patterns which are shaped to curse when you are cursed and strike when you are struck will have to be reformed by consciously practicing contrary, loving responses until they become habitual.
- We then can develop to the place where, when we are rejected, abused or mistreated, our mind and body responds, not with an automatic “Here is a person to curse, reject and harm,” but with “Here is a person in need of blessings.”
- My concern is to emphasize that once you get it right as to what that love is, you can begin to move into it as a practical and realistic option for living and can lead others into it. Love ceases to be the hopeless task of doing loving things: the things that love, if you had it and it had you, would do. It rests in the love of God for us and casts all care upon him because he cares for us.
- That, in turn, means that we, as the people of Jesus and of God now on earth, can teach those who come to him how to live in love.
- this way—the way of cleaning the inside of the cup—we teach them to do all things that Jesus commanded. They do not so much try to do those things, however, as they grow into the kind of person who routinely and easily does them. We do not aim at perfection, but at steady improvement.
- Note: Directions, not goals.