1 John 4:8
God is LOVE
8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.
God is LOVE and He shows us His LOVE in many ways...Knowing that we sin He LOVINGLY sent His Son to be our Savior from our sins and did not send Him to condemn us for our sinning...And in the end He had His Son die to save us from our own sinning selves...In on of His Son's last commands He says I AM giving you a new command: Love one another as I have LOVED you, so you must love one another...He continues, “By this everyone will know that you are My disciples, if you love one another.”...So we learn from this teaching, this command that we all are to love one another...
Bishop Desmond Tutu wrote these things about life and these specific quotes of his have an overarching theme of love in them...“We are made for loving...If we don’t love, we will be like plants without water.”...“We are made for goodness...We are made for love...We are made for friendliness...We are made for togetherness...We are made for all of the beautiful things that you and I know...We are made to tell the world that there are no outsiders...All are welcome: black, white, red, yellow, rich, poor, educated, not educated, male, female, gay, straight, all, all, all...We all belong to this family, this human family, God's family.”...“We were made to enjoy music, to enjoy beautiful sunsets, to enjoy looking at the billows of the sea and to be thrilled with a rose that is bedecked with dew… Human beings are actually created for the transcendent, for the sublime, for the beautiful, for the truthful...And all of us are given the task of trying to make this world a little more hospitable to these beautiful things.”...“Our maturity will be judged by how well we are able to agree to disagree and yet continue to love one another, to care for one another, and cherish one another and seek the greater good of the other.”...
The Bishop adds, “Dear Child of God, I write these words because we all experience sadness, we all come at times to despair, and we all lose hope that the suffering in our lives and in the world will ever end...I want to share with you my faith and my understanding that this suffering can be transformed and redeemed...There is no such thing as a totally hopeless case...Our God is an expert at dealing with chaos, with brokenness, with all the worst that we can imagine...God created order out of disorder, cosmos out of chaos, and God can do so always, can do so now--in our personal lives and in our lives as nations, globally...Indeed, God is transforming the world now--through us--because God LOVES us.”...“In the end what matters is not how good we are but how good God is...Not how much we love Him but how much He LOVES us...And God LOVES us whoever we are, whatever we’ve done or failed to do, whatever we believe or can’t.”...