Quotes about Love

The church is to be set apart (sanctified) not by possessing a special religious piety but by participating in and manifesting the perfect eternal love of God. As Bonhoeffer said, "Jesus calls men, not to a new religion, but to life.

It is the most fundamental reason why each of us exists. Scripture calls it "abiding in Christ" (John 15:4; cf. 1 John 4:16). God's desire is for us to participate in his own eternal love and life and therefore in his own eternal joy and peace by dwelling in the Son.

Many people have trouble passionately loving and living for God because they have a mental picture of him that inspires anything but passion.

The love demonstrated on Calvary is the center of the gospel, for it reveals the beauty of God himself.

Love must be chosen. It must be free, and it must be from the heart, without external motivations. But, quite frankly, it's very difficult for an all-powerful God to behave in such a way that love can occur with these qualities.

This is what we are called to be: a community characterized by radical, revolutionary, Calvary-quality love; a community that manifests the love of the triune God (John 17:21—26); a community that strives for justice not by conquering but by being willing to suffer; a community that God uses to transform the world by providing it with an alternative to its own self-centered, violent way of existing.

As the New Testament and the church tradition teach, the life of God is nothing other than the perfect love that eternally unites the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and this Triune God spoke creation into being with the ultimate goal of inviting humans to share in this life. This is what God created us to long for!

It is important that we never separate our love for God from our love for others. For loving our neighbors as ourselves is one central way we love God.

To a large degree we have preached our own version of the knowledge of good and evil as though it were the message of salvation. We need to confess that we have sinned in the gravest fashion by frequently loving our version of truth and ethics more than people, and even God himself. For one cannot genuinely love God while refusing to love one's neighbor (1 John 4:20).

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.

The central mark of a maturing Christian, and of a maturing congregation, is that they increasingly love others as Christ loves them.

What the fear of hell could not do, my discovery of the love of God could do: it began to permanently break the stronghold