Quotes about Love

Love is a gift from God, who is love. We can seek a gift and we can receive a gift, but we do not perform for a gift. So, when we read passages of Scripture like those above, we must remember that the call to us is not to do as much as it is to receive.

Jesus is the expression of the love of God for us, and in him we see the many ways God deals with people in mercy and grace.

We should not try to love that person; we should train to become the kind of person who would love them. Only then can the ideal of love pass into a real possibility and practice. Our aim under love is not to be loving to this or that person, or in this or that kind of situation, but to be a person possessed by love as an overall character of life.

Thomas Oord, in his Science of Love and elsewhere, defines or describes love as acting intentionally, in sympathetic response to others (including God), to promote overall well-being. I believe this to be one of the better efforts toward articulating agape love. Most importantly, it distinguishes love from desire, and locates it in the will, leaving room for desire and feeling to play an appropriate role in love without making them the heart of the matter. 

John 3:16 is not about forgiveness of sins, no matter the guy with rainbow hair in the end zone who's holding up that sign. John 3:16 is about life now.

Love is something that has three essential characteristics: 1.) Love arises in people whose lives are already marked by certain qualities of the whole self, chief of which are faith in our all-sufficient God and joyful embracing of death to self. 2.) Love involves an orientation of the whole self toward what is good and right. 3.) Love has amazing, supernatural power for good as it indwells the individual.

We will never have the easy, unhesitating love of God that makes obedience to Jesus our natural response unless we are absolutely sure that it is good for us to be, and to be who we are. This means we must have no doubt that the path appointed for us by when and where and to whom we were born is good, and that nothing irredeemable has happened to us or can happen to us on our way to our destiny in God's full world.

The miracle is not that God loves me; it would be a miracle if he didn't love me, because he is love. That is God's basic nature—a will to good.

Standing in the kingdom, we make responsible decisions in love, with assurance that how things turn out for us does not really matter that much because, in any case, we are in the kingdom of the heavens. In that kingdom nothing that can happen to us is "the end of the world.

Petition: Casting Your Cares on Him Having risen in praise and thankfulness, then you pray for yourself, for the people in your life, and for the things you are facing that day. Declare your dependence upon God, asking him to remove all fear and to fill you with his love for your life and all that enters it.

Our challenge is to fill our hours, minutes, and actions from day to day with the appropriate amount of love for God's creation and creating, and then work to produce more of the good he has put in this world. This is every person's calling.

An older Franciscan brother said to Brennan Manning on the day he joined the order, "Once you come to know the love of Jesus Christ, nothing else in the world will seem as beautiful or desirable.