self-giving love Quotes

Love is not just a passion spark between two people; there is infinite difference between falling in love and standing in love. Rather, love is a way of being, a "giving to," not a 'falling for"; a mode of relating at large, not an act limited to a single person.

Any kind of love that lacks the iron of the Cross in it, is anemic love.

Christian love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will.

Divine love, agape, is self-sacrificing love, which sounds difficult, as it is, and not very attractive. If the best image we have of love is of a man who's been tortured and hung upon a cross to die an excruciating death, this is something that human beings find very, very hard to understand as love. But it is the highest Christian image of love.

True love does not pay attention to the evil it suffers. It rejoices in doing good.

So the divine love is sacrificial love. Love does not mean to have and to own and to possess. It means to be had and to be owned and to be possessed. It is not a circle circumscribed by self, it is arms outstretched to embrace all humanity within its grasp.

When the Bible speaks of God's love for us and the kind of love we are to have for him and for other people, the word is always apage, signifying a commitment to act.

God loves us NOT because we're lovable, because He is love. Not because He needs to receive, because He delights to give.

Human love is directed to the other person for his own sake, spiritual love loves him for Christ's sake. Therefore, human love seeks direct contact with the other person; it loves him not as a free person but as one whom it binds to itself.

Even Bertrand Russell, who fancied he saw flaws in Christ's character, confessed nonetheless that 'What the world needs is love, Christian love, or compassion.' But this belies a belief in what most others acknowledge, namely, that Christ was the perfect manifestation of the virtue of love.

In the Christian sense, love is not primarily an emotion but an act of the will. When Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, he is not telling us to love them in the sense of responding to them with a cozy emotional feeling. You can as well produce a cozy emotional feeling as you can a cough or sneeze. On the contrary, he is telling us to love our neighbors in the sense of being willing to work for their well-being even if it means sacrificing our well-being to that end.

A universal love is not only psychologically possible; it is the only complete and final way in which we are able to love.

Dear young people, we have seen that it is the Holy Spirit who brings about the wonderful communion of believers in Jesus Christ. True to his nature as giver and gift alike, he is even now working through you. Let unifying love be your measure; abiding love your challenge; self-giving love your mission!

Pure love is in the will alone; it is no sentimental love, for the imagination has no part in it; it loves, if we may so express it, without feeling, as faith believes without seeing.

The highest form of worship is the worship of unselfish Christian service.

The measure of all love is its giving. The measure of the love of God is the cross of Christ.