Love (43)
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I saw the other day in an Italian grotto a little fern, which grew where its leaves continually glistened and danced in the spray of a fountain. It was always green, and neither summer's drought nor winter's cold affected it. So let us for ever abide under the sweet influence of Jesus' love.
Lectures to my Students
The man whose heart is endeared to the woman he loves, he dreams of her in the night, hath her in his eye and apprehension when he awakes, museth on her as he sits at table, walks with her when he travels and parlies with her in each place where he comes.Thomas Hooker, 7heApplication of Redemption (London: Peter Cole, 1659), 137. Michael A. G. Haykin. The Christian Lover: The Sweetness of Love and Marriage in the Letters of Believers (Kindle Location 122). Kindle Edition.
Faith goes up the stairs that love has built and looks out the windows which hope has opened.
It will take all of eternity to fathom God's love, and those who are saved will never plumb the depths of it.
The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.
A person deeply in love cannot keep his thoughts from the object he loves. The reason we think on God no more, is, because we love Him no more!
God is love. But the supreme object of that love is himself. And because he loves himself supremely he cannot suffer what belongs to the integrity of his character and glory to be compromised or curtailed. That is the reason for the propitiation.Redemption Accomplished and Applied, 28
although indeed 'God is love', yet we have to remember that his love is 'holy love', love which yearns over sinners while at the same time refusing to condone their sin.The Cross of Christ (88)
propitiation does not detract from the love and mercy of God; it rather enhances the marvel of his love. For it shows the cost that redemptive love entails.Redemption Accomplished and Applied, 28
propitiation is not a turning of the wrath of God into love. The propitiation of the divine wrath, effected in the expiatory work of Christ, is the provision of God's eternal and unchangeable love, so that through the propitiation of his own wrath that love may realize its purpose in a way that is consonant with and to the glory of the dictates of his holiness.Redemption Accomplished & Applied, 27
To know that God knows everything about me and yet loves me is indeed my ultimate consolation.
God loves all in some ways, and God loves some in all ways.
In the New Testament, grace means God's love in action toward people who merited the opposite of love. Grace means God moving heaven and earth to save sinners who could not lift a finger to save themselves. Grace means God sending his only Son to the cross to descend into hell so that we guilty ones might be reconciled to God and received into heaven.
There is tremendous relief in knowing his love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery can disillusion him about me.
It is the love of Christ, i. e. his love to us which passes knowledge. It is infinite; not only because it inheres in an infinite subject, but because the condescension and sufferings to which it led, and the blessings which it secures for its objects, are beyond our comprehension. This love of Christ, though it surpasses the power of our understanding to comprehend, is still a subject of experimental knowledge. We may know how excellent, how wonderful, how free, how disinterested, how long-suffering, how manifold and constant, it is, and that it is infinite. And this is the highest and most sanctifying of all knowledge. Those who thus know the love of Christ towards them, purify themselves even as he is pure.
works are done on the basis of faith through love, not that a man is justified through love.Commentary on Galatians
Love influences the graces, it excites the affections, it makes us grieve for sin, it makes us cheerful in God; it is like oil to the wheels; it quickens us in God's service. How careful then should we be to keep alive our love for God!
Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.
Love should be the silver thread that runs through all your conduct. Kindness, gentleness, long suffering, forbearance, patience, sympathy, a willingness to enter into childish troubles, a readiness to take part in childish joys, - these are the cords by which a child may be led most easily, - these are the clues you must follow if you would find the way to his heart.
divine love, by contrast, is not reactive but creative: God does not find that which is lovely and then move out in love toward it; something is made lovely by the fact that God first sets his love upon it. He does not look at sinful human beings and see among the mass of people some who are intrinsically more righteous or holy than others and thus find himself attracted to them. Rather, the lesson of the cross is that God chooses that which is unlovely and repulsive, unrighteous and with no redeeming quality, and lavishes his saving love in Christ upon it.
The cross is proof of both the immense love of God and the profound wickedness of sin.
The greatest sorrow and burden you can lay on the Father, the greatest unkindness you can do to him is not to believe that he loves you.
To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul's paradox of love.
We must love God propter se, for himself, for his own intrinsic excellencies. We must love him for his loveliness.The Ten Commandments, 7
What is love? It is a holy fire kindled in the affections, whereby a Christian is carried out strongly after God as the supreme good.The Ten Commandments, 6
The things that we love tell us what we are.
We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject, for both have labored in the search for truth, and both have helped us in finding it.
Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.
Commandments are the railroad tracks on which the life empowered by the love of God poured into the heart by the Holy Spirit runs. Love empowers the engine; law guides the direction. They are mutually interdependent. The notion that love can operate apart from law is a figment of the imagination. It is not only bad theology; it is poor psychology. It has to borrow from law to give eyes to love.The Whole Christ: Legalism, Antinomianism, and Gospel Assurance Why the Marrow Controversy Still Matters (pp. 168-169). Crossway.
The subtle danger here should be obvious: if we speak of the cross of Christ as the cause of the love of the Father, we imply that behind the cross and apart from it he may not actually love us at all. He needs to be "paid" a ransom price in order to love us.The Whole Christ: Legalism, Antinomianism, and Gospel Assurance Why the Marrow Controversy Still Matters (p. 68). Crossway.
Without Jesus Christ, talk about the "depth of God's love" would be simply an abstraction. Without Jesus Christ, God could send you sixty volumes, with every page saying, "I love you deeply, I love you deeply, I love you deeply," but it would still be an abstract concept, not a life-changing reality. To genuinely understand the depths of God's love you must know the depths to which Jesus Christ went in order to love you.Prayer, 174
Christ's humiliation and sacrifice point to a new way in which believers are to love one another. And this model of love is a greater model of love than what is found in the Old Testament, since it was ontologically impossible for God to act in sacrifical love toward his people. In other words, it was the incarnation that made a suffering love possible, and therefore it was only after the incarnation that this heightened form of love could be required on the basis of Christ's own example. Therefore, contrary to antinomianism, the New Testament heightens, not lessens, the place of the moral law in the life of the believer, for the indicative has been heightened through Christ's mediatorial work.Antinomianism (Loc 817/ Kindle)
For the Reformers and those who followed in their steps-such as the Puritans of the seventeenth century and the evangelicals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries-marriage had an innate excellence, was vital for the development of Christian affection and friendship, and was one of God's major means for developing Christian character and spiritual maturity.The Christian Lover: The Sweetness of Love and Marriage in the Letters of Believers (Kindle Locations 65-67). Kindle Edition.
God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.
I once was lost in darkest night
Yet thought I knew the way.
The sin that promised joy and life
Had led me to the grave.
I had no hope that You would own
A rebel to Your will.
And if You had not loved me first
I would refuse You still.
Song:All I Have Is Christ
Love is not defined by the response of the loved. A person can be genuinely loved and feel hurt or offended or angered or retaliatory or numb without in any way diminishing the beauty and value of the act of love that hurt him. We know this most clearly from the death of Jesus, the greatest act of love ever performed, because the responses to it covered the range from affection (John 19:27) to fury (Matt. 27:41-42).
On the whole, God's love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for Him. Mere Christianity (Book3:Charity)
So the love of God who is spirit is no fitful, fluctuating thing, as the love of man is, nor is it a mere impotent longing for things that may never be; it is, rather, a spontaneous determination of God's whole being in an attitude of benevolence and benefaction, an attitude freely chosen and firmly fixed. Knowing God (The Love of God, 134)
God's love is an exercise of His goodness towards individual sinners whereby, having identified Himself with their welfare, He has given His Son to be their Saviour, and now brings them to know and enjoy Him in a covenant relation Knowing God (The Love of God, 136)
"Do you feel most loved by God because He makes much of you, or because He frees you to enjoy making much of Him forever?" This is the test of whether our craving for the love of God is a craving for the blood-bought, Spirit wrought capacity to see and glorify God by enjoying Him forever, or whether it is a craving for Him to make us the center and give us thee pleasures of esteeming ourselves. Brothers, We are Not Professionals (16)
So the question is not whether we will be extremist, but what kind of extremist we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Letter from Birmingham Jail (8-9)
Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket-safe, dark, motionless, airless-it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The Four Loves
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