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“When one has once fully entered the realm of love, the world â€� no matter how imperfect â€� becomes rich and beautiful, it consists solely of opportunities for love.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

“The joy of intimacy is the reward of commitment.”
― Joshua Harris, I Kissed Dating Goodbye

“We instinctively tend to limit for whom we exert ourselves. We do it for people like us, and for people whom we like. Jesus will have none of that. By depicting a Samaritan helping a Jew, Jesus could not have found a more forceful way to say that anyone at all in need - regardless of race, politics, class, and religion - is your neighbour. Not everyone is your brother or sister in faith, but everyone is your neighbour, and you must love your neighbour.”
― Timothy Keller, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just

“I am not a one-issue voter in the sense that indicates I am an ignorant fundamentalist who only cares about one thing. I believe in protecting the environment. I believe in caring for the poor, the orphan, the widow in her distress. These are some of the so-called "issues" that many of us use to justify voting for Obama. How can we possibly claim it is Christian love for the poor and helpless that motivates us to vote for such a man when he is so committed to the killing of the most helpless among us?”
― Joseph Bayly

“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. It wants to gain, to capture by every means; it uses force. It desires to be irresistible, to rule.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community

“First we must understand that all of the world's deceptions flow from the belief that love is primarily for the fulfillment and comfort of the self. The world poisons love by focusing first and foremost on meeting one's own needs.

Christ taught that love is not for the fulfillment of the self but for the Glory of God and the food of others. True love is selfless. It gives; it sacrifices; it dies to its own needs.”
― Joshua Harris, I Kissed Dating Goodbye: Study Guide

“Look for every opportunity to encourage someone. You don’t know who is wrestling with demons that could end his or her life that day. A kind word comes from God. Be brave enough to act on it.”
― Aaron Behr

“The word 'God' defines a personal relation, not an objective concept. Like the name of the beloved in every love. It does not imply separation and distance. Hearing the beloved name is an immediate awareness, a dimensionless proximity of presence. It is our life wholly transformed into relation.”
― Christos Yannaras, Variations on the Song of Songs

“My love is like agape and not eros.”
― Debasish Mridha

“No longer can we parse our fellow humans into the categories of ‘lovableâ€� and ‘unlovable.â€� If love is an act of the will â€� not motivated by need, not measuring worth, not requiring reciprocity â€� then there is no such category as ‘unlovable.”
― Jen Wilkin, In His Image: 10 Ways God Calls Us to Reflect His Character

“When we show love to others, God's presence is with us.”
― Linda Evans Shepherd, Praying through Hard Times: Finding Strength in God's Presence

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'The first command was clear and absolute, unalterable and unchanging. But there was a loophole in the second--wiggle room if we do not love ourselves. So at dinner Jesus tightened the loop, closed the hole:'A new command I give you, that you love one another as I have loved you.”
― Thomas R. Steagald, Every Disciple's Journey: Following Jesus to a God-Focused Faith

“Beginning in 1519 and continuing until the end of his life, Luther expounded a theme that the Sacrament brings and means a fellowship of love and mercy: "This fellowship consists in this, that all the spiritual possessions of Christ and his saints are shared with and become the common property of him who receives this sacrament. Again all sufferings and sins also become common property; and thus love engenders love in return and [mutual love] unites . . . It is like a city where every citizen shares with all the others the city's name, honor, freedom, trade, customs, usages, help, support, protection, and the like, while at the same time he shares all the dangers of fire and flood, enemies and death, losses taxes and the like. For he who would share in the profits must also share in the costs, and ever recompense love with love . . ." For Luther, unity with respect to the Sacrament meant both doctrinal agreement and love. When the prerequisite to church fellowship is defined merely (however important!) in terms of doctrinal fellowship, it can end in a Platonic pursuit of a frigid and rigid mental ideal. Doctrinal unity, true unity in Christ's body and blood, is also a unity of deep love and mercy. If I will not lay down my burden on Christ and the community, or take up the burdens of others who come to the Table, then I should not go to the Sacrament. Close(d) Communion is also a fellowship of love and mercy with my brother and sister in Christ as Luther taught in the previous citation.”
― Matthew C. Harrison, Christ Have Mercy: How to Put Your Faith in Action

“We almost always undervalue the significance of the Victory at the Cross.But as our understanding is gradually enlightened, we are continuously awed at how much the Father hath loved us”
― Kingsley Onwuchekwa

“To the objection that Christian love is extended to all people but friendship involves mutuality, Aquinas says that when we love a friend, we love everything about that friend. Thus our love will want to expand to include the friends of our friend, even if those friends have no other connection to us. 'When a man has friendship for a certain person, for his sake he loves all belonging to him, be they children, servants, or connected with him in any way. Indeed, so much do we love our friends, that for their sake we love all who belong to them, even if they hurt or hate us.' So when we love God, we also love those whom God loves. Each human being is, potentially, a friend of God. So whenever one human being, a friend of God, is loving God, that love is naturally extended to all the other friends of God--that is, to all other people insofar as they are also friends or potential friends of God. This is why we love our enemies: they too belong to God in that God's love extends to his enemies also.”
― Victor Lee Austin, Friendship: The Heart of Being Human

“Beloved his harp cries out in the night an hour my body does shift, the jerk loves to open me up while laughter from Christ like he’s drunk. Shall I stare at her the jumping let live? My wants are my needs so within. The take gives.”
― Adrianna Stepiano, This Christian Covered Life, Words and Poems to Read

“Loving others isn't about us at all. And until that sinks in, we'll never be able to love the way Christ truly loved.”
― Jarrid Wilson, Jesus Swagger: Break Free from Poser Christianity

“Of all powers, love is the most powerful and the most powerless. It is the most powerful because it alone can conquer that final and most impregnable stronghold which is the human heart. It is the most powerless because it can do nothing except by consent.

To say that love is God is romantic idealism. To say that God is love is either the last straw or the ultimate truth.

In the Christian sense, love is not primarily and emotion, but an act of the will. When Jesus us 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 yawn or a 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 own well-being to that end, even if it means just leaving them alone.

Thus in Jesus' terms we can love our neighbors without necessarily liking them. In fact, liking them may stand in the way of loving them by making us overprotective sentimentalists instead of reasonably honest friends.

When Jesus talked to the Pharisees, he didn't say, "There, there. Everything's going to be alright." He said, "You brood of vipers! How can you speak good when you are evil!" And he said that to them because he loved them.

This does not mean that liking may not be a part of loving, only that it doesn't have to be. Sometimes liking follows on the heels of loving. It is hard to work for somebody's well-being very long without coming in the end to rather like him too.”
― Frederick Buechner

“If friendship is the point of human life, we seem to have a problem with Jesus' rightly famous teaching that we should love our neighbor, indeed, that we should love even our enemy. It certainly seems that friendship and this commanded love (shall we call it 'Christian love'?) stand at odds. Friendship is particular, but Christian love is universal. Friendship is reciprocal, but Christian love is unidirectional. Friendship is drawn to the good and thus discriminates, unlike the rain that falls on the just and the unjust alike....The word translated 'love' here [in Matt. 5:44-45] is agape, and agape is generally taken as self-giving performed selflessly. It is taken as altruism, a turning to the other without regard to who the other is. It is said to act without regard for any internal attraction to the beloved, in distinction from erotic love, eros, which builds upon such attraction. And it is said to lack the particularity that characterizes philia, which is friendship.”
― Victor Lee Austin, Friendship: The Heart of Being Human

“Finding someone is easy, but finding the RIGHT someone the RIGHT way is not.

What we are looking for is character and chemistry

That is vision we are aiming for in a marriage : a couple hand in hand, pursuing God together - same direction, same pace, good chemistry.

Dating is the modern process of evaluation we use to find that person to marry”
― Ben Stuart, Single, Dating, Engaged, Married: Navigating Life and Love in the Modern Age