Life Without Lack: Living in the Fullness of Psalm 23

by Dallas Willard

If they have been loved rightly by their family, they have a treasure.

All these things direct us to the truth that perfect love is only found in God. Love is a gift from God, who is love. We can seek a gift and we can receive a gift, but we do not perform for a gift.

So, when we read passages of Scripture like those above, we must remember that the call to us is not to do as much as it is to receive. We love him because he first loved us.

Most people know that love is not just about the things we do. Love is an attitude of the heart. We know we can act in a loving way without really loving. (Obligation, obedience, reputation, or personal benefit may be our motive.)

We should not try to love that person; we should train to become the kind of person who would love them. Only then can the ideal of love pass into a real possibility and practice.

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.

Our responses to the specific occasions when we are to act flow out of our overall character. I do not come to my enemies and then try to love them; I come to them as a l...

In our cultural context, it is necessary to emphasize that love and emotion are not identical. We can act in loving ways even when we do not “feel loving.”

Desire and feelings are more matters of impulse than of considering and choosing the best alternative. They are concerned with their own satisfaction, not with what is better and possibly best.

If choice is surrendered to God, united with his will, it will be able to do what is best.

Love arises in people whose lives are already marked by certain qualities of the whole self, chief of which are faith in our all-sufficient God and joyful embracing of death to self.

Love involves an orientation of the whole self toward what is good and right.

Love has amazing, supernatural power for good as it indwells the individual.

Notice here that love is not action; it is a source of action. Love is a condition out of which actions of a certain type emerge.

But again, love is not an action or a feeling or an emotion or an intention, even though it gives rise to intentions and to actions and is associated with some “feelings” and resistant to others.

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 by the good and the right and the beautiful.

Remember, deeper than the fact that God loves us is this: he is love. He wills nothing but what is good. That is his identity, and it explains why he loves individuals even when he is not pleased with them or loved by them in return.

We do not achieve the disposition of agape love by direct effort, but by training: attending to and putting into place the conditions out of which it arises.

Once again, the goal is not to be people who do loving things but to become the kind of people who naturally, joyfully, and easily love.

The law is not the source of righteousness, but it is always the way of the righteous.

When we read 1 Corinthians 13, it is important to understand that Paul is not issuing commands; he is not saying that we ought to be patient, kind, humble, and so forth. He is describing love itself as having these characteristics.

So we “pursue love” by advancing our faith and dying to self through appropriate training and practice, and the love we receive from God takes care of the rest. These virtues arise from the overall disposition of love, because love, by its very nature, seeks what is good and right before God.