Quotes about Love

Contemporary wording of Jesus's comparison of God's kind of love, agape, and what normally passes for love might be "What's so great if you love those who love you? Terrorists do that! If that's all your 'love' amounts to, God certainly is not involved. Or suppose you are friendly to 'our kind of people.' So is the Mafia!" (Matthew 5:46—47).

This is the essence of the death-to-self life: that we should no longer live for ourselves, but for him who died for us and rose again.

It is the experience of having God look you right in the eye and saying, "I love you! I approve of you!" that is the unshakable ground of our self-worth.

Now, as St. Augustine saw long ago, the opposite of love is pride. Love eliminates pride because its will for the good of the other nullifies our arrogant presumption that we should get our way. We are concerned for the good of others and assured that our good is taken care of without self-will. Thus pride and fear and their dreadful offspring no longer rule our life as love becomes completed in us.

Mark 12 lists every dimension under the governance of Jesus' love.

Most but not all uncertainties in the minds of disciples—and this is only somewhat less so for people in general—are the result of unclarities and failures to understand. These shut down confidence and love, and we must never rest until they are cleanly dispersed from the mind.

We are blessed to live in a world where there is a fully self-sufficient, generous God who wants to provide what is best for us and loves us more than we could ever imagine.

Jesus, by contrast, brings us into a world without fear. In his world, astonishingly, there is nothing evil we must do in order to thrive.

There is a distinctive emphasis by Jesus on loving your neighbor, your "near dweller," not upon loving "humanity" or "everyone."19 What this means is that our duty and our virtue is to love those with whom we are in effectual contact—those we can really do something about.

God is not mean, but he is dangerous.

I routinely watched Dallas, like no one I had encountered before or since, wipe clean people's vision of who God was, what his Son did and why, and what the Holy Spirit wishes to do in and through his church and then replace it with an all-consuming, hope-filled, grace-empowered, joy-seeking, love-giving gospel of God's boundless goodness and power. All the while he never manipulated emotions, overcame people's will, or used fear as a motivator.

The other idea is, "I love you, and I will serve you by doing what is good for you, whether you want it or not.