Hey, this is John Ortberg, passage to wisdom, and I’m gonna get a new, uh, clip for my microphone. I promise you, I’m also standing a little bit too far away from the phone right now, but I’m doing that for a reason. I wanted you to see this very cool jacket that I have with a picture of a Buffalo on it, because it’s a gift from my friend Lynn van Deboss, Hey Lynn, who is chaplain of an NFL team, the Buffalo bills. 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. And it made me think about, uh, passage in the Bible. When Paul was writing to the church at Rome in the 12th chapter of his letter to the Romans, 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 gonna try to honor me. You wanna encourage me? You wanna build into me. You wanna create value for me. I wanna do that for you. I’m gonna do that even more for you.
So today outdo the people in your life in love 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. 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 insisted. Actually the real contest is with yourself. The real challenge is to see, can I devote myself? Can I give the finest that I am able to give? Cuz we all have different levels of innate abilities. Um, will 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. Now, this gets us deeply into the screw tape letters that CS Lewis wrote and the notion of hell and what hell is about and what heaven is about. Here’s what screw tape writes. 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.
My good is 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 that 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. And screw tape here, I think is giving a profound picture of how evil works and about the nature of hell. That hell is not so much, uh, 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, uh, making sure that I, or my genes or my species or my tribe or my whoever survives at the expense of yours if necessary, uh, it is a fundamentally different and warped understanding of what it means to be human. And so screw tape 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 and 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, uh, 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 and the same monotonous panacea can be detected under all he does. And even all he is or claims to be thus. He has not content even himself to be a sheer mathematical unity. Uh, he claims to be three as well as one. This is the doctrine of the Trinity in order that this nonsense about love may find a foothole in his own nature. At the other end of the scale, he introduces into matter that obscene invention, the organism in which the parts are perverted from their natural destiny of competition and made to cooperate.
And this a very different view of reality, instead of thinking that the survival of the fittest is at the core of all reality. He notes that actually life comes in the form of organisms. And so our cells are separated and then joined together in a kind of Shalom. And so we have stomachs and kidneys and brains and toes and eyes, and they all actually work together in a beautiful state. And then these form larger networks that find their good in the flourishing of one. Another screw tape goes on here is that is God’s real motive for fixing on sex. As the method of reproduction among humans is only to apparent from the UC has made of it. Sex might have been from our point of view, quite innocent might have been merely one more mode in which a stronger self prayed upon a weaker as it is indeed among the spiders where the bride concludes her nuptials by eating her groom.
What’s up with that. But in the humans, the enemy has gratuitously associated affection between the parties with sexual desire. He has also made the offspring dependent on the parents and given the parents an impulse to support it, thus producing the family, which is like the organism only worse for the members are more distinct father, mother, son, daughter, more separate, more distinct than just stomach, kidney, heart lungs, and yet also United in a more conscious and more responsible way. The whole thing turns out to be simply one more device for dragging in love. We were made to love at the heart of life is not the rule of the survival of the fittest. It is, uh, when you love the least of these, you were loving me. So today lead the league in love. Give love the best you have outdo one another. Here’s the specific application of this today. Tell someone I love you. And don’t use words.
One of the dynamics of being in love is that giving becomes receiving. She let me carry her books to school. People used to say back in the day, when they would walk to school and books were objects that could not be downloaded onto a phone to be in love, means to delight in giving. So today tell someone you love them. Don’t use words, give them a gift, do them an errand. Think about what would bring them, delight, outdo somebody in your life and honoring them and valuing them and listening to them and cheering them on and caring for them today because you were made to love. Let’s lead the league in love. I’ll see you next time.