On Love

My dear children, let us love one another since love comes from God and everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God.  Anyone who fails to love can never have known God, because God is love.  

God's love for us was revealed when God sent into the world his only Son so that we could have life through him; this is the love I mean: not our love for God, but God's love for us when he sent his Son to be the sacrifice that takes our sins away.  

My dear children, since God has loved us so much, we too should love one another.  No one has ever seen God; but as long as we love one another God will live in us and his love will be complete in us.  We can know that we are living in him and he is living in us because he lets us share his Spirit.

We ourselves saw and testify that the Father sent his Son as saviour of the world.  If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him, and he in God.  We ourselves have known and put our faith in God's love towards ourselves.  

God is love and anyone who lives in love lives in God, and God lives in him.  Love will come to its perfection in us when we can face the day of Judgement without fear; because even in this world we have become as he is.  

In love there can be no fear, but fear is driven out by perfect love because to fear is to expect punishment, and anyone who is afraid is still imperfect in love.  We are to love then, because he loved us first.  

Anyone who says, 'I love God', and hates his brother, is a liar, since a man who does not love the brother that he can see cannot love God, whom he has never seen.  So this is the commandment that he has given us, that anyone who loves God must also love his brother. - 1 John 4:7-21

Love is always patient and kind; it is never jealous; love is never boastful or conceited; it is never rude or selfish; it does not take offense, and is not resentful.  Love takes no pleasure in other people's sins but delights in the truth; it is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes. - 1 Corinthians 13:4-8

On the Ordinary, from 'The Thing: Obstinate Orthodoxy'

G.K. Chesterton

I am ordinary in the correct sense of the term; which means the acceptance of an order; a Creator and the Creation, the common sense of gratitude for Creation, life and love as gifts permanently good, marriage and chivalry as laws rightly controlling them, and the rest of the normal traditions of our race and religion. 

It is also thought a little odd that I regard the grass as green, even after some newly-discovered Slovak artist has painted it grey; that I think daylight very tolerable in spite of thirteen Lithuanian philosophers sitting in a row and cursing the light of day; and that, in matters more polemical, I actually prefer weddings to divorces and babies to Birth Control."