Quotes about Love

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 call is to trust that the foolishness of self-sacrificial love will overcome evil in the end. Our call is to manifest the beauty of a Savior who loves indiscriminately while revolting against all hatred and violence. This is the humble mustard seed revolution that will in the end transform the world.

In a creation populated with free agents, God doesn't always get what he wants. Augustine and the church tradition that followed him were simply mistaken when they insisted that the will of the omnipotent is always undefeated. Because God desires a creation in which love is a reality, he allows his will to be defeated to some extent.

Hear Jesus say, "Jill, I will never hurt you or shame you. I told you I will never leave you nor forsake you. Never! I love you with an everlasting and perfect love." Can you hear Jesus say this? JILL: Yes.

This is what the kingdom of God looks like. It looks like humility. It looks like grace. It looks like service. It looks like Jesus.

Throughout the biblical narrative what sets humans apart from all animals is that humans alone possess a soul and therefore live eternally, reason, have moral capabilities, and can love. Unlike humans, nowhere are animals offered eternal life (John 3:15), commanded to think (Luke 10:27), held morally accountable (Ezek. 33:18—19), or commanded to love (John 15:17).

For they know the approval—and the worth they assign to this approval— would not be there without certain behaviors on their part. Hence, they never experience unconditional love and worth.

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

This is the foundation of all sin: the lie that God is untrustworthy, the lie that God is not altogether loving and that he doesn't have our best interests in mind.

If we only love those who agree with us, we are in fact not loving others at all; we are only loving the (assumed) "rightness" of our own ideas!

The challenge, then, is not first and foremost to love like Christ. The challenge is to live in Christ's love, for only then can we love as Christ loved. And as with everything else about our lives, this can only be done in each present moment.

Love is the all-or-nothing of the kingdom of God. Above all we are to love (Col. 3:14; 1 Peter 4:8). Everything we do is to be done in love and, thus, communicate love (1 Cor. 16:14). We are to imitate God by living in Christlike love (Eph. 5:1—2), and if we do this, we fulfill the whole law (Matt. 22:37—40; Rom. 13:8—10). If we lack this, everything else we do is devoid of kingdom value, however impressive it might otherwise be (1 Cor. 13:1—3).