Sermon quotes on divine love
Augustine of Hippo
You are good and all-powerful, caring for each one of us as though the only one in your care.
Bernard of Clairvaux
Why should not the creature love His creator, who gave him the power to love? Why should he not love Him with all his being, since it is by His gift alone that he can do anything that is good? It was God’s creative grace that out of nothingness raised us to the dignity of manhood (or womanhood); and from this appears our duty to love Him, and the justice of His claim to that love.
G.K. Chesterton
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.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
There is no sin, and there can be no sin on all the earth, which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant! Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God. Can there be a sin which could exceed the love of God?
Elisabeth Elliot
Our vision is so limited we can hardly imagine a love that does not show itself in protection from suffering. The love of God did not protect His own Son.
Richard B. Hays
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.
John Jay Hughes
The deepest source of Jesus’s joy . . . was his relationship with his heavenly Father. At every moment of his life, in every circumstance, Jesus knew that he was deeply loved by his Father—that he was, as we might say, the apple of his Father’s eye. Every day Jesus realized anew that wherever he might go that day, with whomever he spoke, in whatever situation he might find himself, he remained in his Father’s loving embrace.
“That My Joy May Be in You,” Now You Know Media Blog, May 7, 2012,
Timothy Keller
He loved us, not because we were lovely to him, but to make us lovely.
Kosuke Koyama
God walks “slowly” because he is love. If he is not love he would have gone much faster. Love has its speed. It is an inner speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It is “slow” yet it is lord over all other speeds since it is the speed of love.
Frederick M. Lehman
The love of God is greater far
Than tongue or pen can ever tell;
It goes beyond the highest star,
And reaches to the lowest hell.
C.S. Lewis
God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that he may love and perfect them.
C.S. Lewis
The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.
Brian Loritts
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.
Max Lucado
God loves you just as you are but too much to leave you that way.
Brennan Manning
My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.
Thomas Oden
The primary purpose of creation is that God wishes to bestow love and teach love, so that creatures can share in tfcne blessedness of divine life, of loving and being loved.
Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology (New York: HarperOne, 1987.
John Ortberg
To be fully known and fully loved is the most healing gift one human being can give another.
John Oxenham
Love ever gives,
Forgives, outlives,
And ever stands with open hands,
And while it lives it gives.
For this is love’s prerogative,
To give – and give – and give.
Fred Sanders
The boundless life that God lives in himself … is complete, inexhaustibly full, and infinitely blessed…. The good news of the gospel is that God has opened up the dynamics of his triune life and given us a share in that fellowship.
The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything, Crossway, 2010, 62.
James Bryan Smith
Many people live with the assumption that God’s love is conditional. Our behavior, it’s assumed, determines how God feels about us. Consequently, God’s love is constantly in flux. It’s as if God were on a kind of swivel chair, looking at us and smiling when we keep our minds, hands and hearts pure, but the moment we sin God turns his back on us.
The Good and Beautiful God: Falling in Love with the God Jesus Knows (The Apprentice Series), InterVarsity Press.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Agape is disinterested love. Agape does not begin by discriminating between worthy and unworthy people, or any qualities people possess. It begins by loving others for their sakes. Therefore, agape makes no distinction between friend and enemy; it is directed toward both.
Kosuke Koyama
God walks “slowly” because he is love. If he is not love he would have gone much faster. Love has its speed. It is an inner speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It is “slow” yet it is lord over all other speed since it is the speed of love. It goes on in the depth of our life, whether we notice or not, whether we are currently hit by storm or not, at three miles an hour. It is the speed we walk and therefore it is the speed the love of God walks.
Kosuke Koyama, Three Mile an Hour God (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1979), p. 7.
Gerald May
As we are increasingly caught by love, our usual standards of efficiency will take a beating. . . . There are points where I may need to become a little less job-efficient if I want to be more loving.
The Awakened Heart (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), p. 78.
Augustine of Hippo
You are good and all-powerful, caring for each one of us as though the only one in your care, and yet for all as for each individual.
Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3.11.19, p. 50.
John McQuiston II
We know that there is an enormous power inherent in each of us, at every moment in time, to experience the unbounded love and deep joy which is potentially our inheritance.
Always We Begin Again: The Benedictine Way of Living, 1996, Morehouse, p. 80.
Anne Lamott
The secret is that God loves us exactly the way we are .. . and that he loves us too much to let us stay like this.
Traveling Mercies
Brother Lawrence
Let what may come of it, however many be the days remaining to me, I will do all things for the love of God.
The Practice of the Presence of God, Shambhala Publications, 2005.
Julian of Norwich
And in this vision, he showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, and to my mind’s eye it was as round as any ball. I looked at it and thought, ‘What can this be?’ And the answer came to me, ‘It is all that is made.’ I wondered how it could last, for it was so small I thought it might suddenly disappear. And the answer in my mind was, ‘It lasts and will last forever because God loves it; and in the same everything exists through the love of God.’
In this little thing I saw three attributes: the first is that God made it, the second is that he loves it, the third is that God cares for it. But what does this mean to me? Truly, the maker, the lover, the carer; for until I become one substance with him, I can never have love, rest or true bliss; that is to say, until I am so bound to him that there may be no created thing between my God and me.
Revelations of Divine Love, in Devotional Classics, ed. Richard Foster and James Bryan Smith (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990), 68–69.
Cornelius Plantinga, Jr.
To love God intellectually is to become a student of God—a student who really takes an interest in God. Have you ever noticed that a fair number of Christians are not particularly interested in God? Some of them are ministers. These are people who don’t ask about God, don’t talk about God, and maybe don’t even think about God unless they really have to. Their interest in God seems merely professional.
Isn’t this strange? Shouldn’t we be somewhat preoccupied with God? Isn’t that what lovers do? They get preoccupied with their beloved. They notice things about the one they love.
Thomas Merton
Contemplation reaches out to the knowledge and even to the experience of the transcendent and inexpressible God. It knows God by seeming to touch Him. Or rather it knows Him as if it had been invisibly touched by Him…. Touched by Him Who has no hands, but Who is pure Reality and the source of all that is real! Hence contemplation is a sudden gift of awareness, an awakening to the Real within all that is real. A vivid awareness of infinite Being at the roots of our own limited being. An awareness of our contingent reality as received, as a present from God, as a free gift of love. This is the existential contact of which we speak when we use the metaphor of being “touched by God.”
Brennan Manning
Define yourself radically as beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is an illusion.
Abba’s Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging (NavPress, 2015).
Charles Spurgeon
Our Lord Jesus is ever giving, and does not for a solitary instant withdraw His hand. As long as there is a vessel of grace not yet full to the brim, the oil shall not be stayed…. He is a rock in the desert, ever sending out streams of life from His smitten side; the rain of His grace is always dropping; the river of His bounty is ever-flowing, and the well-spring of His love is constantly overflowing. As the King can never die, so His grace can never fail.
Morning and Evening (1866)
S. Trevor Francis
O the deep, deep love of Jesus,
Vast, unmeasured, boundless, free,
Rolling as a mighty ocean
In its fullness over me.
Underneath me, all around me,
Is the current of Thy love;
Leading onward, leading homeward,
To my glorious rest above.
“O the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus,” 1872.
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