Rowan Williams Quotes

The love which moves the world, according to common Christian belief, is God's love and the love of God.

Agape, the love of each one of us for the other, from the closest to the furthest, is in fact the only way that Jesus has given us to find the way of salvation and of the Beatitudes.

Jesus' love for His children continues to be the greatest love story of all time.

The story of Hosea and Gomer is the second most powerful picture of God's love in the Bible. Other than Christ's death, there is no greater picture of love.

Love is a spiritual grace. We learn it from God.

Agape is something of the understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill for all men. It is a love that seeks nothing in return. It is an overflowing love; it's what theologians would call the love of God working in the lives of men. And when you rise to love on this level, you begin to love men, not because they are likeable, but because God loves them.

To live according to the spirit is to love according to the spirit.

The love of Christ is not a pretend love. It is not a greeting-card love. It is not the kind of love that is praised in popular music and movies.

One who loves God sees everything in relation to God. Therefore, their love flows spontaneously toward everyone, at all times, everywhere. They even love those who wish them harm. If you love God, you can't hate anything or anyone. If the love one offers is met with hate, it doesn't die; rather, it manifests in the form.

As Christians, our compassion is simply a response to the love that God has already shown us.

In heaven there are two distinct loves, love to the Lord and love towards the neighbor, in the inmost or third heaven love to the Lord, in the second or middle heaven love towards the neighbor.

To love for the sake of being loved is human, but to love for the sake of loving is angelic.

Love of God is not always the same as love of good.

God is limitless in His love, and asks that we at least make the effort to be limitless in ours.

What is this love that endures decades, passes on sleep, and resists death to give one kiss? Call it agape love, a love that bears a semblance of God's.

We do not truly know what love is unless we know Christ.

Pure love is in the will alone; it is no sentimental love, for the imagination has no part in it; it loves, if we may so express it, without feeling, as faith believes without seeing.

Love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.

To understand the nature of love — that is to be a Christian!

Moral judgment is not life-giving; love that transcends the boundaries of judgment as Jesus' love did, is.

Since our peace lies in loving as God loves, we must strive to love everyone. The only love that completes us is the love of God, and the love of God is the love of everyone.

But the kind of love that God created and demonstrated is a costly one because it involves sacrifice and presence. It's a love that operates more like a sign language than being spoken outright.

Even Bertrand Russell, who fancied he saw flaws in Christ's character, confessed nonetheless that 'What the world needs is love, Christian love, or compassion.' But this belies a belief in what most others acknowledge, namely, that Christ was the perfect manifestation of the virtue of love.

For me to love you, Jesus, as you love me, I would have to borrow your own love and then only would I be at rest.

Jesus recognized that love is greater than like.