God doesn't depend primarily on the words of his disciples, nor on their clever apologetic arguments, nor on their ability to concoct ingenious marketing techniques. God relies on his disciples participating in the love that he is and thus replicating it toward each other within the body and toward all others outside the body.

We are to derive worth from God alone and to love without judgment and without conditions on the basis of the unsurpassable fullness of life we get from God. Our only job is to love, not judge.

Our fundamental job is to love like God loves, not to pretend that we know what only God knows.

Conspicuously absent from the Ten Commandments is any obligation of parent to child. We must suppose that God felt it unnecessary to command by law what He had ensured by love.

Thou knowest our hearts, thou knowest our inmost beings, and we thank thee that thou lovest us anyway, for we are thy children and the sheep of thy pasture. Keep us in thy will that we may bring glory and honor to thy name. In Jesus' blessed name we pray. Amen.

The greatest science in the world; in heaven and on earth; is love.

The purpose of God for the Christian is the consistent expression of divine love.

As you gave the ring to one another and have now received it a 2nd time from the hand of the pastor, so love comes from you, but marriage from above, from God. As high as God is above man, so high are the sanctity, the rights, and the promise of love. It is not your love tht sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.

We have become so accustomed to the idea of divine love and of God's coming at Christmas that we no longer feel the shiver of fear that God's coming should arouse in us. We are indifferent to the message, taking only the pleasant and agreeable out of it and forgetting the serious aspect, that the God of the world draws near to the people of our little earth and lays claim to us.4 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "The Coming of Jesus in Our Midst

And that is the wonder of all wonders, that God loves the lowly…. God is not ashamed of the lowliness of human beings. God marches right in. He chooses people as his instruments and performs his wonders where one would least expect them. God is near to lowliness; he loves the lost, the neglected, the unseemly, the excluded, the weak and broken.

The more I begin to love the commandments of God in creation and word, the more present they will be for me in every hour.

Not the way to God but the way of God to humanity: that is the sum of Christianity.