The Perfection of Love

REFLECTION QUOTES

“They will think me very narrow (whatever that means) if I say that the remarkable thing about Christianity was that it was the first to preach Christianity. Its peculiarity was that it was peculiar… Christianity was the answer to a riddle, not the last truism uttered after a long talk.”

~G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) in Orthodoxy


“It is fitting that an effect be proportionate to its cause. Therefore the good that we properly and principally expect from God ought to be an infinite good, commensurate to the power of God’s help: for it is appropriate that an infinite good proceed from an infinite power. This good is eternal life, which consists in the enjoyment of God Himself: for we should hope for nothing less from Him than Himself, since no less is his goodness, by which he communicates good things to the creation, than His very essence.”

~St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274), famed theologian

“…in the Incarnation the whole human race recovers the dignity of the image of God…Through fellowship and communion with the incarnate Lord, we recover our true humanity, and at the same time we are delivered from that individualism which is the consequence of sin, and retrieve our solidarity with the whole human race.”

~Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), German pastor-theologian executed at Flossenbürg concentration camp for his opposition to the Nazis

“Aren’t the hairs of your head certainly of less value than your other members? What is cheaper, more despicable, more lowly in your body than the hairs of your head? Yet if the barber trims your hair unskillfully, you become angry at him because he does not cut your hair evenly. Yet you do not maintain that same concern for unity of the members of the church.”

~Augustine (354-430), famed North African Bishop

“When one does not love too much, one does not love enough.”

~Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), famed French mathematician

SERMON PASSAGE


1 John 4:7-21 (ESV)

7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

13 By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. 14 And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. 15 Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. 16 So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. 17 By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world. 18 There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. 19 We love because he first loved us. 20 If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. 21 And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.