“Merely trying to act lovingly will lead to despair and to the defeat of love.”

A thought by Dallas Willard (2014-02-01) from his book, Renovation of the Heart: Putting On the Character of Christ (p. 24). NavPress. Kindle Edition. (Click on the title to go to Amazon.com to buy the book.)

Wow, that doesn’t seem to make sense does it? But Dallas says, “It is love itself —not loving behavior, or even the wish or intent to love— that has the power to ‘always protect, always trust, always hope, put up with anything, and never quit’” (1 Corinthians 13: 7-8, PAR).

He goes on to say, “But taking love itself— God’s kind of love— into the depths of our being through spiritual formation will, by contrast, enable us to act lovingly to an extent that will be surprising even to ourselves, at first. And this love will then become a constant source of joy and refreshment to ourselves and others. Indeed it will be, according to the promise, ‘a well of water springing up to eternal life’ (John 4: 14) — not an additional burden to carry through life, as ‘acting lovingly’ surely would be.”

This is not a self-will thing but a self-need thing. We need love to really love and that love only comes from God’s Spirit living in us and transforming us. God is love and we need Him to transform us into loving people. And that comes from coming to Him asking Him to come into our lives and to begin to transform us from the inside out. The transformation starts by asking and then by cultivating the love that wants to live through us.

So are you acting or living?

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