Love Is A Relationship
1John 4:11 (RSV) If God loved us, we also ought to love one another.
The word love, as it is used in the biblical texts, has two obvious qualities. St John, the master teacher on love...taught that love has its own origins in God ("we love; because he first loved us" 1John 4:19) and that it is a relationship with persons ("if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another" 1John 4:11). Love is not a word that describes my feelings. It is not an ideal, abstract and pure, on which I meditate or discourse. It is acting in correspondence with or in response to God in relation to persons.
Eugene H. Peterson
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