Quotes about Love

He now began to think of the church as called by God to "stand with those who suffer".

Luther was trying to call the church back to its true roots, to a biblical idea of a merciful God who did not demand that we obey but who first loved us and first made us righteous before he expected us to live righteously.

Christianity—and that is its greatest merit—has somewhat mitigated that brutal German love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame.

God wants more than anything to let us know he is with us. He sees what we are going through and he cares. Furthermore, he is such a big God that he can afford to deal with us on an intimate level, to encourage us and to wink at us and to hold our hands when we need him to do that.

Luther used this as an illustration of how even when God reached out to us in love and grace, we are often so suffused with the idea of him as a stern judge bent on punishing us that we tragically shrink from his loving grasp, thus to our own sad detriment denying ourselves the very thing for which we long.

Indeed, when Luther's school-yard chum Hans Reinecke wrote to him of his father's death, Luther wrote, "Seldom if ever have I despised death as much as I do now." He said that it "has plunged me into deep sadness not only because he was my father but also because he loved me very much." Even more, he says, "through him my creator has given me all that I am and have.

He's already done that for us. We need only accept his free gift. And if we see the magnitude of that gift, we are moved to do good things. But it is as gratitude for what God has already done in saving us, not as a way of earning our own salvation. Once we receive God's free gift of love in Jesus, we are properly moved to want to love him back and to love our fellow man.

What he needed desperately was someone to whom he might unburden himself, someone who would understand and know what to do, someone with the wisdom to remind him of what he needed to be reminded of just now—of God's grace—of the upside of God's love.

But this other side of God's love—the good news, as it were—he seems not to have heard at all. At least not yet.

We may only imagine the scene, the old man, the rough ex—sea captain who had so loved little Wilberforce as a boy, and who had entertained such hopes for him, only to see them dashed.

Surely this sabbath, of all others, calls forth these feelings in a supreme degree; a frame of united love and triumph well becomes it, and holy confidence and unrestrained affection.

If we think of the fatherhood of God, we get a picture of someone who is strong and loving and who sacrifices himself for those he loves. That's a picture of real fatherhood and real manhood.