Love, as Paul and the New Testament presents it, is not action—not even action with a special intention—but a source of action.

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.

Thomas Oord, in his Science of Love and elsewhere, defines or describes love as acting intentionally, in sympathetic response to others (including God), to promote overall well-being. I believe this to be one of the better efforts toward articulating agape love. Most importantly, it distinguishes love from desire, and locates it in the will, leaving room for desire and feeling to play an appropriate role in love without making them the heart of the matter. 

Love is something that has three essential characteristics: 1.) 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. 2.) Love involves an orientation of the whole self toward what is good and right. 3.) Love has amazing, supernatural power for good as it indwells the individual.

Mark 12 lists every dimension under the governance of Jesus' love.

He is going to create a community of loving, creative, intelligent, loyal, faithful, and powerful human beings, and they are going to rule the earth. It is going to come to pass. If you want to be a part of that, just get on board.

Robbed of its reference to a transcendent spiritual being or substance that nonetheless personally engages with humanity while holding them responsible to its specific directives on how to live, this "love" ("God") has no recourse but to become whatever the current ideology says it is. Currently that means not treating people as different, while liberating them and enabling them to do what they want.

He calls us to him to impart himself to us. He does not call us to do what he did, but to be as he was, permeated with love. Then the doing of what he did and said becomes the natural expression of who we are in him.

We have a terrible time understanding love, because we confuse it with desire. Desire and love are two utterly different kinds of things. Not only is desire not love; it is often opposed to love. Right action is the act of love, regardless of the desires of anyone involved.

We are not machines that can be repaired through a series of steps—we are relational beings who are transformed by the mystery of relationship.

My family values are really, really important.

You have Facebook? Yup. You have Whatsapp? Yup. You have love? Forgot to install it.