“Your directions, your judgment, your disposition to rebel must be subjected and reduced to ashes. How? In the fire of obedience, for it is there that you will find out if you are truly a follower of Divine love or self love.”
“Contrary to popular culture, love can say no. What we cannot do is let the world tell us [followers of Christ] where we should draw the line; the world should not tell us what we can do and can’t. Our cultural elites tell us that if we were ‘loving’ we would do what they think we should. But we derive our definition of love from God’s Word, not from the vicissitudes of the cultural currents.”
“Love is the unfathomable ground that is hidden in darkness, but the resolution is the triumphant victor who, like Orpheus, fetches the infatuation of falling in love to the light of day, for the resolution is the true form of love, the true explanation and transfiguration.”
“Your love for your friend should be grounded in Me, and for My sake you should love whoever seems to be good and is very dear to you in this life. Without Me friendship has no strength and cannot endure. Love which I do not bind is neither true nor pure.”
“When God will have any great matters done, he sets his people's hearts to work at prayer by a kind of gracious instinct. He stirs them up and moves their hearts by the influence of his Holy Spirit.”
“Meanwhile Aeneas the True longed to allay her grief and dispel her sufferings with kind words. yet he remained obedient to the divine command, and with many a sigh, for he was shaken to the depths by the strength of his love, returned to his ships.”
“Sin and love are exact opposites. Love is benefiting others at the expense of yourself. Sin is benefiting yourself at the expense of others. Sin is selfishness; love is selflessness.”
“There is always more we can do in ministry, but God is not asking 'Can you do more?'. He is asking 'Do you love me?' Some of those extras are not always as vital as we think them to be.”
“In Heaven there will be no anguish and no duty of turning away from our earthly Beloveds. First, because we shall have turned already; from the portraits to the Original, from the rivulets to the Fountain, from the creatures He made lovable to Love Himself. But secondly, because we shall find them all in Him. By loving Him more than them we shall love them more than we now do.”
“Just as there are none good but God, and nothing good but goodness, so there are no loves but love its self, the very love; and that what I call the other unnatural loves, are not loves at all in their own right but become so only so far as they participate in the very love.”
“The faces we lose track of most easily are the faces of the people who are closest to us, the people we love the most whose faces we see so often that we can't really see them anymore.”