The Price of Love

What is love?
An easy walk in the park?
A warm fuzzy feeling on a cold winter’s night?
Bathing in the afterglow of moments of absolute bliss?

What of the other side of love?
What of pain? What of loss?
What of the price, when it all hits the fan?
What of the cost, when a choice is demanded?

Is love really the easy path?
Is God’s Love seriously easy?
Jesus, hanging on a cross, tortured and bleeding, to save us.
Pouring himself out, to carry our wrongs: easy? No.

There are many kinds of loves, just as there are many kinds of people.
There are many walks in life.
But Love beckons us beyond our human love.
Love calls us beyond our natural selves.

What is Love?
An easy walk? A warm feeling? An afterglow of bliss?
Love is cost: Love is pain.
Love is commitment, even to death.

Love is choice.

The greatest Love laughs at the greatest price.
Death beckons, and Love smiles.
For what is death, next to Love? Only a temporary thing.
Love passes through death to forge a new way of life.

Teen Church


Love

Any living creature must love. Love can be presented in many different ways. There is loving your partner, loving your boyfriend, loving your annoying little sister, loving your friends, and even loving your dog! Love is one of the most important parts of life. God created us to love, so it is important to love the things, people, and places he made for us. But most of all, it is important to love God.

Love has won.

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Love has won.
Is there injustice? Love is truer.
Is there fighting? Love is bolder.
Is there pain? Love is stronger.
Is there corruption? Love is purer.

We struggle, we fight, but there is a higher way:
a Way that eclipses our way;
a Way that transcends our way;
a Way that overcomes our way and embraces it easily into itself.

This Way comes with a price, as it must,
for any call worthy of our lives cannot be easy, or temperate.
The Way of true Life boldly demands our all.
It is the Light in the Darkness;
the rising Sun.

Christ is pure Love.

God is Light and Love

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God is Light and Love.
Why is God Light? Because Light illuminates, in the darkness. Light beckons. Light evokes a brighter more vibrant way of Life.
And why is God Love? Because Love unleashes Life. Love provides a Way for a better Life. Love sacrifices to ensure the greater Life of His or Her children.

But if this is so, if God is Light, why is there Darkness?
The Darkness gives greater brilliance to the Light.
The Darkness can enhance our choice between Darkness and Light.
And if God is Love, why is there Hatred?
Love allows for Hatred, in His midst.
Love calls Hatred into Her own arms.

God is Light and Love, and so we have been given the choice.
Light, or Darkness?
Love, or Hatred?
And if we should choose Light, Love has provided the Way.
A greater Way; a better Way.
The Way of Christ, with all of its cost.
For the best kind of Life rightly demands our all.

Love Never Fails

Love is powerful.

It raises the dead to life.

It pushes through pain to delivery.

It laughs in the face of adversity.

Love never fails.

 

Frailty shakes, but Love holds out its hand.

Fear corrupts, but Love calls those full of fear to greater courage.

Self-defence sacrifices others in its own Dark Shrine, but Love sacrifices itself for its enemies, to show them the way into its Light.

Love never fails.

 

Frailty fails: Love rebuilds.

Fear shakes: Love girds.

Self-defence runs: Love remains.

Love never fails.

 

Though the mountains may shake, and the valleys flood, Love will remain.

Though fear may decimate, Love will prevail.

Though war may come, Love will prevail.

Love never fails.

 

Death may take us all: but, even at the last hour, Love smiles in transcendence over Death.

Love never fails.

Love

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What is the purpose of life?

When all is stripped away, when money is laid aside, when aspirations are lost, or found, when life begins, and when it ends, what’s it all about? What’s it all for?

Love.

Paul, in the Bible, describes love. He says it is patient, and kind – it doesn’t envy, or boast. Love never fails. Life is meaningless without love.

But what is love?

Is love that attraction you feel for that guy over there, or that girl? Is it that power within that might lead you to die protecting that little girl, or boy? Is it the power of friendship: of helping one another – of listening to one another, and sharing in each other’s joys and struggles?

All of these things, and more.

There is a deeper kind of love: there is a deeper searching for love.

There is God.

Beyond our human kind of love, vital in its own right, needed in life, and in death, is God’s kind of love.

God’s love is all encompassing, and all-consuming. It demands our all, and in turn gives us our all back again, though changed.

To gain God’s kind of love, we need to give up our lives: in order to truly gain them.

Love is an offering: love is the source and reason for life.

God is Love.

There are two reasons for living –  two callings greater than we are in life, that Jesus gave to us:

Love God, and love humanity – even our enemies.

Love: it’s the only way to truly live.