Choose to love the Lord your God and to obey him and to commit yourself to him, for he is your life.
The Bible, Deuteronomy 30:20 nlt
Love to God purifies and ennobles every taste and desire, intensifies every affection, and brightens every worthy pleasure.
Author unknown
For when love is pure, you consider yourself as worthless, see yourself as dead and as nothing, and present yourself to God as dead and putrid.
Anglea of Foligno
Late have I loved thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new … For behold, thou wert within me and I outside.
Augustine of Hippo
Where there is love, there is a trinity: a lover, a beloved and a spring of love.
Augustine of Hippo
Suppose, brethren, a man should make a ring for his betrothed, and she should love the ring more wholeheartedly than the betrothed who made it for her? Certainly, let her love his gift: but, if she should say, “The ring is enough, I do not want to see his face again,” what would we say of her? The pledge is given her by the betrothed just that, in his pledge, he himself may be loved. God, then, has given you all these things. Love Him who made them.
Augustine of Hippo
He loves too little, who loves anything together with Thee, which he loves not for Thy sake.
Augustine of Hippo
To love God entirely, the soul must be pure and strong, staying faithful to God in times of trouble, alert against dishonesty and fraud. In this way man will not just find the supreme good, he will himself become like the supreme good – because he will be transformed into the image of God.
Augustine of Hippo
The reason for loving God is God himself and how he should be loved is to love him without limit.
Bernard of Clairvaux
The way to the Love of God is Folly to the World, but is Wisdom to the Children of God. Hence, whenever the World perceiveth this Holy Fire of Love in God’s Children, it concludeth immediately that they are turned Fools, and are besides themselves. But to the Children of God, that which is despised of the World is the Greatest Treasure; yea, so great a Treasure it is, as no Life can express, nor Tongue so much as name what this enflaming, all-conquering Love of God is. It is brighter than the Sun; it is sweeter than any Thing that is called sweet; it is stronger than all Strength; it is more nutrimental than Food; more cheering to the Heart than Wine, and more pleasant than all the Joy and Pleasantness of this World.
Jacob Boehme
My brothers, the love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender.
Albert Camus
Not by traveling, Lord,
men come to you,
but by the way of love.
Amy Carmichael
The reason why God’s servants love creatures so much is that they see how much Christ loves them, and it is one of the properties of love to love what is loved by the person we love.
Catherine of Siena
Love him totally who gave himself totally for you love.
Claire of Assisi
The nearer we draw to God in our love for him, the more we are united together by love for our neighbor; and the greater our union with our neighbor, the greater is our union with God.
Dorotheus of Gaza
The more a true saint loves God with a truly gracious love, the more he desires to love Him, and the more miserable he is at his lack of love to Him.
Jonathan Edwards
The will to love God is the whole of religion.
F. Fénelon
True love rests in the depths of the heart.
F. Fénelon
There is no true love to God which is not habitually supreme.
Edward Griffin
Love cannot think any evil of God, nor endure to hear any speak evil of him, but it must take God’s part.
William Gurnall
I love my God, but with no love of mine
For I have none to give;
I love Thee, Lord, but all that love is Thine,
For by Thy life I live.
I am as nothing, and rejoice to be
Emptied and lost and swallowed up in Thee.
Madame Guyon
To be one with love is an awesome calling and those who long for it should spare no effort.
Hadewijch
Love consists not in feeling great things but in having great detachment and in suffering for the Beloved.
John of the Cross
Who falls for love of God shall rise a star.
Ben Jonson
To approach God requires neither art nor science, but only a heart resolutely determined to apply itself to nothing but Him, or for His sake, and to love Him only.
Brother Lawrence
Our only business is to love and delight ourselves in God.
Brother Lawrence
A little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all.
C. S. Lewis
Every Christian would agree that a man’s spiritual health is exactly proportional to his love for God.
C.S. Lewis
To love God is to hate oneself and to know nothing apart from God.
Martin Luther
To love God is the greatest of virtues; to be loved by God is the greatest of blessings.
Portuguese proverb
Let us make God the beginning and the end of our love, for he is the fountain from which all good things flow and into him alone they flow back. Let him therefore be the beginning of our love.
Richard Rolle
The commandment of God is, that we love Our Lord in all our heart, in all our soul, in all our thought. In all our heart; that is, in all our understanding without erring. In all our soul; that is, in all our will without gainsaying. In all our thought; that is, that we think on Him without forgetting. In this manner is very love and true, that is work of man’s will. For love is a willful stirring of our thoughts unto God, so that it receive nothing that is against the love of Jesus Christ, and therewith that it be lasting in sweetness of devotion; and that is the perfection of this life.
Richard Rolle
That we ought to love Him we are never in doubt, but whether we do love Him, we may well begin to question. A deep yearning in our innermost being “to know Him more clearly, love Him more dearly and follow Him more nearly” is probably all to which we dare lay claim.
Helen Roseveare
Our work is the love of God.
Jan Van Ruysbroeck
As our love is the best thing we have, and none deserves it more than God, so let him have our love, yea, the strength of our love, that we may love him with all our souls, and with all our mind, and with all our strength.
Richard Sibbes
Our love for God is tested by whether we seek Him or His gifts.
Ralph Sockman
The devil does not understand real love and affection; but the child of God can tell the devil to his face that he loves God if he covers him with sores and sets him on the dunghill, and by God’s good help he means to cling to God through troubles tenfold heavier than those he has had to bear, should they come upon him.
C.H. Spurgeon
If you knew the whole Bible by heart, and the sayings of all the philosophers, what good would it do you without the love of God, without grace?
Thomas à Kempis
All is vanity but to love God and serve Him.
Thomas à Kempis
It behooves the lover of Jesus to forsake all other love besides Him, for He will be loved alone, above all others. The love of creatures is deceptive and disappointing, but the love of Jesus is faithful and always abiding. He who clings to any creature must of necessity fail as the creature fails. But he who cleaves abidingly to Jesus shall be made firm in Him forever.
Thomas à Kempis
He who loves God with all his heart dreads neither death, torment, judgment, nor hell, for perfect love opens a sure passage to God.
Thomas à Kempis
Whom should we love, if not him who loved us, and gave himself for us? If the bliss even of angels and glorified souls, consists greatly in seeing, and praising, the Son of God; surely, to love, to trust, and to celebrate the friend of sinners, must be a principal ingredient in the happiness of saints not yet made perfect.
Augustus Toplady
The Soul is shriveled up and buried in a grave that does not love.
Thomas Traherne
Love to God is armor of proof against error. For want of hearts full of love, men have heads full of error; unholy opinions are for want of holy affections.
Thomas Watson
Love for God
John Newton
It is a point I long to know,
Often it causes anxious thought,
“Do I love the Lord, or no?
Am I His, or am I not?”
If I love, why am I thus?
Why this dull and lifeless frame?
Hardly sure could they be worse,
Who have never heard His name.
Could my heart so hard remain?
Prayer a task and burden prove?
Every trifle give me pain,
If I knew a Savior’s love?
When I turn my eyes within,
All is dark and vain and wild.
Filled with unbelief and sin,
Can a deem myself a child?
If I pray, or hear, or read,
Sin is mixed with all I do.
You that love the Lord indeed,
Tell me, is it thus with you?
Yet I mourn my stubborn will.
Find my sin a grief and thrall.
Should I grieve for what I feel,
If I did not love at all?
Could I joy His saints to meet,
And choose the way I once abhorred?
Find at times the promise sweet,
If I did not love the Lord?
Lord decide the doubtful case.
You who are Your people’s Sun.
Shine upon Your work of grace,
If indeed it has begun.
Let me love You more and more.
If I love at all, I pray.
If I have not loved before,
Help me to begin today.
John Newton
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