“And you say, ‘Well the religions of the world say God is a God of love.’ Don’t you believe that. Buddhism doesn’t believe that God is personal. Neither does Hinduism really. And actually one time I remember having a dialogue, a public dialogue, with the Muslims–Muslims and Christians together–and we talked about God’s love. And the Muslims are willing to say ‘We believe in God being merciful,’ but when I brought up the Christian idea from the Bible, ‘God is our spouse, God is our lover, God is our father, God is our friend, God sheds his love abroad in my heart.’ And our Muslim friends said, ‘That is disrespectful. We would never talk about God that way.'” -Tim Keller, sermon “The God Who Is”
Tag Archives: love of God
“God is Love,” Not “Love is God”
“St John’s saying that God is love has long been balanced in my mind against the remark of a modern author (M. Denis de Rougemont) that ‘love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god’; which of course can be re-stated in the form ‘begins to be a demon the moment he begins to be a god’. This balance seems to me an indispensable safeguard. If we ignore it the truth that God is love may slyly come to mean for us the converse, that love is God.” -C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
A Barometer for our Spiritual Health
“a man’s spiritual health is exactly proportional to his love for God.” -C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
Guilt Can’t Produce the Obedience God Desires, Because It Has Nothing to Do with Love of God
“If love for God isn’t present in our heart, then Godward obedience will be absent in our life.” -Elyse Fitzpatrick, Comforts from the Cross
Hard Situations of Love Reveal the Riches of God’s Love for Us
“But, Brothers and Sisters, it is very wonderful that God should love us when we try our hardest to be rid of Him, when we are at enmity against Him, when we are opposed, even, to His love, and will not listen to the Gospel of His Grace! Yet so He did—He loved us even
in this condition! Perhaps some of you do not feel that there is anything very remarkable in this love of the Lord to the loveless. I should like you to try, if you could, love somebody who has nothing about him that is at all lovable. I hope, dear Christian people, that you do this, but if you learn to love the wicked, the ungodly, the injurious, the deceivers—if you
even love those who vilify you, those who slander you every day, those who despise you and deride you and those who are ungrateful to you—if you do this, then you will get into some sort of sympathy with God and you will begin to understand a little of what His great love must be!” -Charles Spurgeon
Nothing Seperates Us
“Whatever suffering we experience will never separate us from the love that God has for us in Jesus Christ.” -Phil Ryken
This Love Brings Peace
“Only when our greatest love is God, a love that we cannot lose even in death, can we face all things with peace.” -Tim Keller
Obeying Simply Because God is Good
“Besides, this [godly] mind restrains itself from sinning, not out of dread of punishment alone; but, because it loves and reveres God as Father, it worships and adores him as Lord. Even if there were no hell, it would shudder at offending him alone.” -John Calvin
If This Doesn’t Make Us Delight in God, What Will?
“If the love of a father will not make a child delight in him, what will? Exercise your thoughts upon this very thing, the eternal, free, and fruitful love of the Father, and
see if your hearts be not wrought upon to delight in Him. I dare boldly say: believers will find it as thriving a course as ever they pitched on in their lives. Sit down a little at the fountain, and you will quickly have a further discovery of the sweetness of the streams. You who have run from Him, will not be able, after a while, to keep at a distance for a moment.” -John Owen
See the love of God
“Many saints have no greater burden in their lives than that their hearts do not come clearly and fully up, constantly to delight and rejoice in God-that there is still an unwillingness of spirit unto close walking with Him. What is at the bottom of this distemper?
Is it not their unskillfulness in or neglect of this duty, even of holding communion with the Father in love? So much as we see of the love of God, so much shall we delight in Him, and no more. Every other discovery of God, without this, will but make the soul fly from Him.” -John Owen
A Pilgrim's Theology 