Love of God cannot be constituted without love of neighbor, but neither can it be reduced to it.

“Stop asking God to do what God has asked us to do” (person quoted in Jeremy Richards’ sermon today).

How long can I continue to fellowship with a people who see the Bible as a lesser claimant to the knowledge of God than themselves? NB: I’m not speaking only of the many good people of University Baptist & Brethren Church of whom this is true.

“Be yourself,” they say. “Stop trying to be someone else.” But what if who you are is wicked? But then again, who am I to judge myself? In any case, it seems to me the danger with “do the next right thing” is that “there is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death” (Proverbs 14:12, 16:25). If I went with “do the next right thing” unchecked, I’d be lonely, because I’d always choose things I can control. “Do the next right thing” must be defined. And its definition is this: “Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” and “love your neighbor as yourself.”

C’mon, Enneagram 8! Use your drive for power and control on your own thinking—namely, correct yourself when you are wringing your hands in the face of circumstances you can’t control or people who are speaking or acting in ways you don’t expect. It’s just a variation of the partially reformed perfectionist’s hack: I am not exhibiting self-control if I cannot maintain love and joy when people and things are out of my control. (PSA: People are—justly—always out of my control.)

In recent years, Jesus’ frequent use of the future tense in the causal clauses of the Beatitudes (among a few other, subtler evidences) has inclined me to think of them not as a set of timeless aphorisms (e.g., if-this-then-that precepts or visions of human flourishing), but instead more as an historical announcement in direct relation to Jesus’ advent—a sibling to Jesus’ claim in Luke 4:16-21 to being Himself the messianic fulfillment of Isaiah 61:1-2, and a cousin to the Songs of Mary, Zechariah, and Simeon slightly earlier in Luke.

Hence, when I’m translating or paraphrasing Matthew 5:3-11, I’m now given to rendering μακάριος, traditionally translated “blessed,” as “fortunate,” “lucky,” or most colloquially, “in for a treat” instead and to making explicit the Jesus-specific, redemptive-historical subtext I sense. Like this:

• [Now that I, Jesus, am here,] the poor in spirit are in for a treat, because the kingdom of heaven is theirs.
• Those who mourn are fortunate, because now they’ll receive comfort.
• [In light of what I’m up to,] gentle people are the lucky ones, because they’ll inherit the earth.
• Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness/justice are in for a treat, because [with what I’m doing] that hunger will be satisfied.
• The merciful are lucky, because they’re gonna receive mercy.
• The pure in heart are in for a treat, because [in Me] they’re gonna see God.
• People who make peace are the lucky ones now, because they’ll be dubbed God’s children.

[The above was in response to Richard Beck’s recent post recapping part of Jonathan Pennington’s argument about how to view and translate the Beatitudes.]

Lord, may everything I do today be done out of a deep-seated, automatic regard for You and those around me as important, desiring Your joy and their prosperity.

God’s love is so all-encompassing it’s four-dimensional.

When Jesus says things like “to the extent that you did it for one of the least of these my brothers or sisters of Mine, you did it for Me” and “whoever receives one child like this in My name receives Me; and whoever receives Me does not receive Me, but Him who sent Me” and when John writes things like “the one who does not love his brother and sister whom he has seen cannot love God, whom he has not seen,” they are certainly using rhetorical devices to create moral instruction. But they might also be pointing to a metaphysical fact: If in God we live and move and exist, then loving people is literally loving God—and not just because we’re doing what He told us to (although very much that), but because other people are literally part of God (and some of us, at least, part of Christ).

Lord, Your command is eternal life (John 12:50).

Noel made a distinction I’d never thought to make before: extraverted is not the same outgoing. He defined the former as something like “given to gaining energy from social interaction” and the latter as something like “fully at ease making new friends, as if by reflexive desire rather than by effort.” This was to help me understand the difference between me, an extravert who isn’t outgoing, and him and Mary, who are extraverts and outgoing.

Now, the APA doesn’t make quite as clean a distinction. Nevertheless, I find the distinction illuminating.

The fact is, Noel and Mary are inspiringly friendly. They show enthusiastic, obviously sincere interest in other people, regardless of their initial familiarity, in the same way that I show enthusiastic interest in virtue, reflective conversation, expressiveness, and good music. I want to be like them.

I do usually find it energizing to interact with new people. But I just don’t seek out such interaction quite as liberally or reflexively. And I’m certainly not as skilled as Noel and Mary at the talk required to make such interaction smooth. Frankly, and to my shame, I’m also not as naturally, actually, intrinsically interested in other people.

But all this may be a matter of exposure and practice. The first step will be to build a new habit: I’ll try to change my behavioral bias such that if I see a neighbor, I’m more likely to approach than to avoid. (I think an overzealous commitment to my own agenda is to blame for the avoidance.)

When love says do, you do
When love says go, you go
Damn your fears
And listen here:
When love says do, you do ✏️ 🎤 🎵

After this He then says to the disciples, “Let us go into Judaea again.” The disciples say, “Rabbi, the Judaeans were lately seeking to stone you, and you are going there again?” Jesus answered, “Are there not twelve hours in the day? If one walks by day, he will not stumble, because he sees the light of this cosmos, But if one walks by night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him” (John 11:7-10).

If love is calling, damn the fear of death. Full speed ahead. Do what is right.

Walking and talking with You yesterday afternoon up to West Falls reminded me of two things:

1. I feel most alive when I am expressing myself with intensity, and
2. it would be best if I arranged my prayer-walk time to allow for freedom to pray expressively, intently, fervently.

*Correction, 7:19 PM same day: I feel most alive when I am expressing myself with intensity because of love. The point is not the intensity but rather the love—the purposeful regarding of others as at least as important as myself and wanting their good—that sets off the intensity. When I am praying fervently because I have set my face toward love, I feel very alive. And I think it’s the kind of praying that leads to action.

It occurred to me the other day that my days of religious doubt in 2014 and 2015 may mark the beginning of my having become a more sensitive sleeper.

“Why does my heart feel so bad? Why does my soul feed so bad?” All year, You’ve had the strangle moral imperative to joy buzzing around my ears. It could be that I’m putting too much stock in a single command of Paul’s. But with:

• “get to” being the word of the year,
• Travis having made such an impression on me with the primacy he assigns to joy, and
• all the specific words that have come to me on the subject this year,

it has been hard to avoid. And more than ever, the role of joy as an anchor for the words I say to others remaining words of life and not words of death has become apparent. I may not need to dig the well of self-love in order to love others, as so many folks extrabiblically claim, but I do apparently need to dig the well of joy: I have spoken brusquely again and again in recent weeks—this despite all the recent emphasis I have placed in my mind on letting “all my words be full of grace.” Why? Because it’s “out of the overflow of the heart” that “the mouth speaks.” If I feel despair, resentment, embarrassment, or any of joy’s other foils, I will not be able to keep those feelings off my tongue. Hence my alienating Carla yesterday evening after ending the workday feeling embarrassed and guilty that I had wasted an hour (at least) trying to coax ChatGPT and Gemini into providing me with business-hours difference formula I could use in a Salesforce report for Mike when a simple, classic Google search would have led me straight to the answer I sought. Hence my boorishly declaring my annoyance to Carla midmorning today after I spent two-and-a-half hours reviewing the College Township timeline into which she herself has put uncounted hours, a double layer of resentment (her absence and my feeling dragged into it). If I am unhappy, I am more likely—far more likely—to inflict my unhappiness on those around me. As such, digging and tending the well of joy—guarding my heart, as it were—is a moral prophylactic. Joy waters love. If any sentiments might be blocking or contaminating that well, I must spend the time and thought necessary to clear those sentiments out.

I deal with interruptions and pop-up requests at work much more gracefully than I do at home. I haven’t yet internalized and automatized “doing everything without grumbling or arguing” (Philippians 2:14). This despite the facilitation that my realizing that the Prime Desire is always fulfillable should bring. I must be missing a piece at home, something I have at work but don’t have at home. What is it?

At work, I’m glad when work piles up. At home, that stresses me out. At work, when someone approaches me about something they want done, I smile and sometimes even thank them for the cool thing to work on. (Naturally, this is not true when the thing they’re approaching me about is something I built that has broken.) But when someone approaches me about something they want done at home, I grumble and resent.

What are the contextual differences that might account for the differences in my response?

Edit 11/21/25: I was writing about this same stuff almost exactly a year ago.

There’s no such thing as self-reliance.

“Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks; for this is the will of God for you in Christ Jesus” (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18). There’s a synergy between these three commands. It’s easier to rejoice when you’re praying continually and giving thanks in everything; it’s easier to pray continually when you’re rejoicing always and giving thanks in everything (after all, to whom are we to give thanks for things like existence?); it’s easier to give thanks in everything when you’re rejoicing always and praying continually.

But all these require that you be here now and do what you’re doing, thinking not of other things.

“That man was a lamp.”

– Jesus, John 6:35a, of the John the Baptist

Just listened to: Yesterday’s Wine (1971) by Willie Nelson. More Christian moral instruction in a single, ten-line song than in whole catalogs of Christian devotional music. What a dirty, liberal, redneck hippie. And what an understated, if occasionally soporific, country mini-masterpiece the whole album.

George Herbert speaks to me again:

…Get to live; Then live and use it: else it is not true That thou hast gotten. Surely use alone Makes money not a contemptible stone

— The Church-Porch, “Perirrhanterium” (25)

He is saying what I am saying: Money is for doing. Keep it moving. Don’t store it up.

The Bible says nothing about the importance of setting or achieving goals per se. If you set no goals, yet you love—that is, if you act as though God and those around you are important and their good matters to you—you’re doing alright. If you achieve no goals, yet you love, you’re doing alright.

friend:

That’s it! I think that for me, although I know in my head that this is what I should want, I actually really want other things. If I truly only wanted to love Him and others, to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly, to rejoice, pray, give thanks and make peace, then I would have opportunity to do what I want, every moment of every day. But I find in myself anger at setbacks, annoyance at disruptions, fear of failure to accomplish something, longing to be understood and liked, and desire to “feel good” through a panoply of means which I have discovered over years of living. So my prayer lately has been: “God, I am powerless even to want what I know I should want!”

me:

I hear you! “I am powerless even to want what I know I should want.” True.

Some disjointed follow-up thoughts:

1. For my part, l am so motivated by a desire to steer clear of feeling bad (angry, disgruntled, disappointed, frustrated, resentful, petulant, argumentative) that I’m thrilled to have found a Desire that is always fulfillable.
2. That this Desire is so prosocial and thus means that I can apply my dopaminergic drive toward the production of the more durably happyifying serotonin is a major bonus.
3. I think ridding ourselves of our secondary desires is neither advisable nor possible. John doesn’t write that we should shed the yearnings of the flesh and the yearnings of the eyes and the pride of our estate—he writes that we shouldn’t love those yearnings and pride. The trick is to subject those desires for other things—even if those things are plainly altruistic—to the absolute lordship of Jesus the Messiah and His Father, who usually do not require specific action but rather only the fulfillment of The Royal Law.

friend:

Hence discerning the “will of God” is kind of a fool’s errand since we know His will and we have secondary desires. Where I used to work, we used to say “love God and do what you want.” I always hated this because the some people took that as, “Sweet! I love God—and I’m going surfing. Screw those hard missions.” Yet I think your point remains.

In any event, we could also say “If you acquire and achieve all the most kingdom-focused secondary desires you could think of, but you don’t love, you lost the plot!”

me:

I think there are two kinds of people in the world: those who need to ask “What do I want?” and those who need to ask “What’s the right thing to do?”

As for “love God and go surfing,” I talked with another friend about that this morning. We agreed that there there’s nothing wrong with going surfing, and that if you surf in joyful thanksgiving to the Lord, it is worship. However, we also agreed that if all you do is eat, drink, and surf, showing no concern for the things that concern God, it can hardly be said that you love God. That’s the corrective.

“Critics of penal substitutionary atonement, and I find this a bit of a head-scratcher, routinely fail to appreciate how mercy, grace, pardon, and forgiveness are integral to the gospel” (Richard Beck). Amen to that!—and remember that I happen to think penal substitutionary atonement is bunkus.

What should I want? I should want the kingdom of God.

What is the kingdom of God? It is where His will is done.

What, then, is His will for me? That I love Him and love those around me, that I act justly, be kind, and be humble, that I rejoice, pray, give thanks, that I make peace. In other words: nothing context-specific.

Thus, all my context-specific desires, unless they bear the imprimatur of the Holy Spirit (e.g, “tend my sheep,” “strike the rock,” “buy your uncle’s field,” “stop, leave the road, and go left,” “separate the peanut”), are secondary. They are desires for other things that will choke the word of God if I let them. Even if they themselves have the potential for good.

I have many such desires. This world is overstuffed with opportunities to do and enjoy good. But it doesn’t often matter which I choose to fulfill, or even that I fulfill any of them at all. What’s important is that I fulfill the Prime Desire to do the will of God—even, I should emphasize, when that Desire runs counter to my secondary desires.

This frees me to accept interference, interruptions, and redirects (most of which come in the form of other people’s secondary desires), or to at least field them gracefully, without grumbling or arguing.

The Prime Desire is always fulfillable.