Sermon quotes on sacrificial Love
W.H. Auden
You shall love your crooked neighbor
with all your crooked heart.
“As I Walked Out One Evening” in Another Time, Random House, 1940.
Augustine of Hippo
What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.
“Homily on 1 John 4:1-12,” Homilies on the First Epistle of John
Mark Batterson
If you want to impact someone’s life, love them when they least expect it and least deserve it.
A Trip Around the Sun: Turning Your Everyday Life Into the Adventure of a Lifetime.
William Blake
Love seeketh not Itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care; But for another gives its ease, And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair. So sung a little Clod of Clay, Trodden with the cattle’s feet; But a Pebble of the brook, Warbled out these metres meet Love seeketh only self to please, To bind another to Its delight, Joys in another’s loss of ease, And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.
F.F. Bruce
Where love is the compelling power, there is no sense of strain or conflict or bondage in doing what is right: the man or woman who is compelled by Jesus’ love and empowered by His Spirit does the will of God from the heart.
Paul – Apostle of the Heart Set Free, Eerdmans, 1977, p. 21.
Dorothy Day
We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world. We repeat, there is nothing we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as our friend.
“Love Is the Measure,” Catholic Worker, June 2, 1946.
Alain De Botton
True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.
Henry Drummond
Is life not full of opportunities for learning love? Every man and woman every day has a thousand of them. The world is not a playground; it is a schoolroom. Life is not a holiday, but an education. And the one eternal lesson for us all is how better we can love.
Elisabeth Elliot
To love means to open ourselves to suffering. Shall we shut our doors to love, then, and be “safe”?
Minucius Felix
Our bond, which you resent, consists in mutual love, for we know not how to hate; we call ourselves ‘brethren’ to which you object, as members of one family in God, as partners in one faith, as joint heirs in hope. You do not acknowledge one another, amid outbursts of mutual hate; you recognize no tie of brotherhood, except indeed for fratricidal murder.
Octavius
Bob Goff
Selfless love is always costly. Fear can’t afford it, pride doesn’t understand it, but friends never forget it.
Bob Goff
If I’m only willing to love the people who are nice to me, the ones who see things the way I do, and avoid all the rest, it’s like reading every other page of the Bible and thinking I know what it says.
Everybody, Always: Becoming Love in a World Full of Setbacks and Difficult People
Bob Goff
The power of love is in the sacrifice and commitment it requires. Sacrifice and commitment always travel with love and action. Love looks like showing up with hands to help even when we don’t know what to do. Love looks like stopping by even if we don’t know what to say. Simply put, love doesn’t just think about it; love does it.
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.
Paula Ripple
Jesus reassures us that every effort to love ourselves and others more faithfully, however imperfectly we are able to do this, is a response to God’s call to love as he loved. It is a response to the two greatest commandments as they stand in relationship to one another.
Fred (Mr). Rogers
Love isn’t a state of perfect caring. it is an active noun like struggle. to love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.
The World According To Mister Rogers: Important Things To Remember, Hyperion, 2003.
Horace Bushnell
There is a Gethsemane hid in all love
John Wesley
We should always remember that love is the highest gift of God. All of our revelations and gifts are little things compared to love…. Settle in your heart that from this moment on you will aim at nothing more than that love described in 1 Corinthians 13. You can go no higher than this.
Edwin Markham
He drew a circle that shut me out—
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in!
Poem: “Lincoln, Man of the People.” Read at the Dedication of the Lincoln Memorial.
Hans Urs von Balthasar
This total self-giving, to which the Son and the Spirit respond by an equal self-giving, is a kind of “death,” a first, radical “kenosis ,” as one might say. It is a kind of “super-death” that is a component of all love and that forms the basis in creation for all instances of “the good death,” from self-forgetfulness in favor of the beloved right up to that highest love by which a man “gives his life for his friends.” “Life is only genuinely alive insofar as it … grows beyond itself, lets go of itself. It is rich only insofar as it can be poor, insofar as it loves.… Death will not allow itself to be pushed to the very end of life; it belongs right at the center, not in mere knowledge, but in action. Death characterizes our breakthrough into a life that is ever greater. It is through this positive death that we amass life.