relationships and community on Parental Love

Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.

Love makes people do crazy things. The stories we tell in literature and film are full of examples of the crazy things people will do for love. Love empowers Odysseus through madness and suffering, dr...

Gracious Father, too often we base our worth on our performance. We believe if we do well, your love grows, and if we falter, your love lessens. Our God, how far this is from the truth. We confess our...

The question of performance-free love transcends ethnicity, gender and socioeconomic status. “Am I forever loved for who I am? Is the background elevator music to our hearts.

We live a long time in order to become lovers. God is like a good parent, refusing to do our homework for us. We must learn through trial and error. We have to do our homework ourselves, the homework ...

Loving God, we confess today: We don’t even know what love truly is. We talk about love when we talk about favorite television shows and foods. We talk about love as if it happens to us. We describe l...

“Most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love,” writes John Steinbeck in East of Eden, a book full of characters who crave the love of a father, a brother, a lover, a son. The experience of fu...

He loved us, not because we were lovely to him, but to make us lovely.

If you want to impact someone’s life, love them when they least expect it and least deserve it.

A Valentine’s Day Tradition What better way to say, “I love you,” than passing your beloved some sugar, corn syrup, dextrose, and glycerin wrapped in a chalkly Necco wafer heart? Maybe some of you re...

Love is the crazy, mad, and perhaps ridiculous gesture of saying yes to life, of seeing it as worthy of our embrace and even worthy of our total sacrifice.

Love that reaches up is adoration. Love that reaches out is affection. But love that stoops is grace.

A missionary in a Muslim-majority country got a call one day from his wife. Their local house-helper (a common practice in that country) had accidentally dropped and broken their carafe from the coffe...

You shall love your crooked neighbor with all your crooked heart.

Prayer of Adoration Father God … our Abba: You seek us with relentless love – coming after us in Your Son, Jesus. When we are in the pits – You draws us up and out; When we are broken – You fix u...

The invitation of love is not a proposal for self-improvement or any other kind of achievement. Love is beyond success and failure, doing well or doing poorly.... Love is a gift.

If I fear to hold another to the highest goal because it is so much easier to avoid doing so, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, inso...

Here’s a testimony from Lisa Sharon Harper, author of The Very Good Gospel: Harper grew up as a child of a single mother. After her parents divorced, she and her mother moved from Philadelphia where ...

The content of the word “love” is given fully and exclusively in the death of Jesus on the cross; apart from this specific narrative image, the term has no meaning.

The Lord our God is rich in mercy, slow to anger, and abounds in steadfast love. He does not pay us back what we deserve, but even while we were his enemies he sent his son to die for us. Christ died ...

Even if people reject the gospel, we still must love them. A good example of this was reported by Ralph Neighbour, pastor of Houston’s West Memorial Baptist Church (in Death And The Caring Community ...

God of grace, love, and hope: Your grace comes when we least expect and don’t deserve it. Your love comes when we can’t comprehend why but we need it the most. Your hope comes at just the right time t...

Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.

The piling on of grace upon grace is incredible. God had given us his Son. We killed him. In response God says, “I want to forgive you and offer another ‘family member,’ so to speak.” It was a case of...

I’m convinced some company today could make a killing if it had the guts to market dysfunctional greeting cards. Most birthday or holiday cards gush with flowery sentiments such as, “To the greatest f...

Lord of Hosts, We come before you today in a tone of solemnity. We recognize that while it was Judas who betrayed you for 30 pieces of silver, that we often betray you as well. We know what is right,...

Lord God, we know that you are life, the life which is the light of the world But sometimes we allow the darkness to close in We find ourselves driven apart from you We confess that we do not ...

Lord and God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we have only begun to comprehend the wonder of the Incarnation, that you in Christ would become one of us, that you in Christ would live among us and be ...

Heavenly Father, we stand in awe of Your creation. You are the master of design. You know the change of seasons, You know the orbit of planets, and You know exactly what human beings were made for: a ...