Quotes about Love

Hear O Israel, the Lord our God. The Lord is One. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.

Jesus reduced the Torah to two points — loving God, loving others (the Jesus Creed) — not to abolish the many laws but to comprehend them and to see them in their innermost essence

There's a difference between focusing on being right and focusing on being a follower of Jesus.

At the judgment Jesus will not ask us about our gifts. He will ask if our cheeks have touched the cheeks of those who suffer, if our hands have held the hands of those who endure pain, and if our gifts are directed at those who most need them.

God's idea of redemption is community-shaped.

Pinchas Lapide, toward the end of his book that develops what he calls a theo-politics of loving small steps, finds in these words of Jesus six pillars that can help each of us reshape our culture from hate toward love: (1) Jesus is a realist who knows a world of evil; (2) Jesus has a faith that humans can change; (3) Jesus humanizes haters and their hatred; (4) Jesus calls us to imitate God; (5) Jesus knows this is a battle to fight; and (6) this theo-politics moves in small steps:

The church is the place to get the kind of help you need" and to "love you to wholeness.

This idea, that we are to live in a way that reflects who God is, fills the pages of the New Testament (see 1 John 4:7—12). God's love—seen in sun and rain—is showered on all humans, both "the evil and the good" or "the righteous and the unrighteous," which stands for the "observant" and "nonobservant.

To love enemies breaks through the self barrier into divine space.

I love my wife, Kris; I do not love Kris's words. I encounter Kris through her words, but I am summoned to love her, not her words. Sometimes I say to her, "I love what you say to me," but that is a form of expression. What I'm really saying is, "I love you, and your words communicate your love for me.

This has to be emphasized, because today too many of us emphasize kingdom but ignore the Holy Spirit and Pentecost and church—as if kingdom meant nothing more than justice and peace and love in the world (or in their country or in their state or in their local village).

In his incarnate life, when he becomes one with us, Jesus recapitulates, or relives, Israel's (our) history. He becomes one of us. In fact, he becomes all of us in one divine-human being. Jesus is all Adam and Eve were designed to be, and more; he loves the Father absolutely and he loves himself absolutely and he loves others absolutely and he loves the world absolutely. He is the Oneness Story in one person.