giving oneself up for another1John 15:13
We find ourselves in “a holy struggle in which love and hate engage in mortal combat.”2Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship Everything hangs on love.3Matthew 22:37-40 Darkness is always overcome by light. Likewise, suffering love can vanquish evil. But what is this trump card actually? There are many misconceptions about love.
Love is sufficient in itself, gives pleasure through itself and because of itself. It is its own merit, its own reward. Love looks for no cause outside itself, no effect beyond itself… I love because I love, I love so that I may love. Love is something great insofar as it returns constantly to its fountainhead and flows back to its source, from which it ever draws the water that continually replenishes it… For when God loves, he desires only to be loved in turn. His love’s only purpose is to be loved, as he knows that all who love him are made happy by their love of him.
Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermon LXXXIII.4–6, translation by Hart, David Bentley, The Experience of God (p. 333). Yale University Press.
Popular belief might say that love involves the intense liking of something. In fact, love has nothing to do with liking a thing. “We admire things with reasons [i.e., they are attractive or they have utility], but we love them without reasons.”4G.K. Chesterton, Heretics They are intrinsically valuable. Despite popular definitions, love is not just a feeling of affection. “Anybody who has fallen in love knows that love is not just an elevated level of peptide in the hypothalamus.”5Leon R. Kass, The WSJ Weekend Interview by Sohrab Ahmari, April 20, 2013 Rather, love is a willingness to lay down one’s life for another.6John 15:13,71 John 3:16 It is costly. It involves giving up our rights for the sake of another because that’s what was done for us.81 John 4:19 This love is exemplified on the cross; the guiltless giving up his rightful throne, taking his place among common criminals to be scourged and executed so that others might live.9John 10:10 Christ absorbed the full force of a blast meant me, even as I rebelled against him.10Romans 5:8 This is the example we are to follow.11John 13:34
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