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Love

【Love】In a boiler room, it is impossible to look into the boiler to see how much water it contains. But running up beside it is a tiny glass tube, that serves as a gauge. As the water stands in the little tube, so it stands in the great boiler. When the tube is half full, the boiler is half full, if empty, so is the boiler. How do you know you love God? You believe you love him, but you want to know. Look at the gauge. Your love for your brother is the measure of your love for God.

【Love】This was the reaction of the unbelieving Greek writer Lucian (A.D. 120~200) upon observing the warm fellowship of Christians:

“It is incredible to see the fervor with which the people of that religion help each other in their wants. They spare nothing. Their first legislator (Jesus) has put it into their heads that they are brethren.

【Love】“It is our care for the helpless, our practice of lovingkindness, that brands us in the eyes of many of our opponents. ‘Look!’ they say. ‘How they love one another! Look how they are prepared to die for one another.’” –Tertullian

【What is Love?】 It’s silence when your words would hurt.

It’s patience when your neighbor’s curt.

It’s deafness when the scandal flows.

It’s thoughtfulness for another’s woes.

It’s promptness when stern duty calls.

It’s courage when misfortune falls.

【Example of Love】Once on a railway train an elderly man accidentally broke a minor regulation and was unmercifully bawled out by a young train employee. Later a fellow passenger nudged the old gentleman and suggested he give the employee a piece of his mind.. But the old man just smiled. “Oh,” he said, “if a man like that can stand himself for all of his life, I surely can stand him for five minutes.”

【Example of Love】A thirty-six-year-old mother was discovered to be in the advanced stages of terminal cancer. One doctor advised her to spend her remaining days enjoying herself on a beach in Acapulco. A second physician offered her the hope of living two to four years with the grueling side effects of chemotherapy and radiation treatment. She penned these words to her three small children:

“I’ve chosen to try to survive for you. This has some horrible costs, including pain, loss of my good humor, and moods I won’t be able to control. But I must try this, if only on the outside chance that I might live one minute longer. And that minute could be the one you might need me when no one else will do. For this I intend to struggle, tooth and nail, so help me God.” –Cited in Focus on The Family

【Example of Love】A young lady walked into a fabric shop, went to the counter, and asked the owner for some noisy, rustling, white material. The owner found two such bolts of fabric but was rather puzzled at the young lady’s motives. Why would anyone want several yards of noisy material? Finally the owner’s curiosity got the best of him and he asked the young lady why she particularly wanted noisy cloth.

She answered: “you see, I am making a wedding gown, and my fiancé is blind. When I walk down the aisle, I want him to know when I’ve arrived at the altar, so he won’t be embarrassed.”

Such love the young woman had for her man!

【Example of Love】One night a two-month-old baby kept his mother and father awake with his fussing and crying. The father was at wit’s end and had lost all patience. The mother, though, in her deep maternal love, picked up her son and, cuddling him, said, “That’s all right. I’m sorry you don’t feel better!” What an object lesson in self-giving love.

【Example of Love】After the U.S.S. Pueblo was captured by the North Koreans, the eighty-two surviving crew members were thrown into a brutal captivity. In one particular instance thirteen of the men were required to sit in a rigid manner around a table for hours. After several hours the door was violently flung open and a North Korean guard brutally beat the man in the first chair with the butt of his rifle. The next day, as each man sat at his assigned place, again the door was thrown open and the man in the first chair was brutally beaten. On the third day it happened again to the same man. Knowing the man could not survive, another young sailor took his place. When the door was flung open the guard automatically beat the new victim senseless. For weeks, each day a new man stepped forward to sit in that horrible chair, knowing fullo well what would happen. At last the guards gave up in exasperation. They were unable to beat that kind of sacrificial love.

【Example of Love】During the season of Super Bowl I, the great quarterback Bart Starr had a little incentive scheme going with his oldest son. For every perfect paper Bart Junior brought home from school, Starr gave him ten cents. After a particularly rough game against St. Louis, in which Starr felt he had performed poorly, he returned home weary and battered, late at night after a long plane ride. But he couldn’t help feeling better when he reached his bedroom. There attached to his pillow was a note: “Dear Dad, I thought you played a great game. Love, Bart.” Taped to the note were two dimes.

【Mature/Immature Love】Infantile love follows the principle:

“I love because I am loved.”

Mature love follows the principle:

“I am loved because I love.”

Immature love says:

“I love you because I need you.”

Mature love says:

“I need you because I love you.”—Erich Fromm

【Power of Love】A man who had been the superintendent of a city rescue mission for forty years was asked why he had spent his life working with dirty, unkempt, profane, drunken derelicts. He said, “All I’m doing is giving back to others a little of the love God has shown to me.”

As a young man, he himself had been a drunkard who went into a mission for a bowl of chili. There he heard the preacher say that Christ could save sinners, and he stumbled forward to accept the Lord Jesus as his Savior. Though his brain was addled by drink, he felt a weight lifted from his shoulders, and that day he became a changed person. A little later, seeking God’s will for his life, he felt the Lord calling him to go back to the gutter and reach the people still wallowing there. The power of redeeming love enabled him to carry on his ministry for forty years.

【Power of Love】He drew a circle that shut me out-

Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.

But Love and I had the wit to win:

We drew a circle that took him in. –Edwin Markham

【Hatred】”Hate at its best will distort you; at its worst it will destroy you; but it will always immobilize you.”—Alex Haley

【Hatred】A pastor in Ireland told this story:

“I was telling a Protestant group of a boy in our city, Paul McGeown, age two, who on summer days loved to go with his mother to the park to watch the birds. ‘Birdies! Birdies!’ he would say with glee. On his way to the park one day, the blast of a terrorist bomb hurled Paul right across the road, inflicting severe head injuries. For sixteen days, he lay unconscious in the Belfast Children’s Hospital. A brain surgeon operated, and when Paul regained consciousness, he could not see. Then a month later, a miracle happened. The nurse was holding Paul at the window. Suddenly he pointed. ‘Birdies! Birdies!’ Paul could see again.

“What was the reaction from the people to whom I was telling this story? Nearly all felt happiness for the child whose sight had been restored, I’m sure. But one woman angrily asked, ‘But wasn’t he a Roman Catholic?’”

【Kindness】It takes a long time to fill a glass with drops of water. Even when the glass seems full, it can still take one, two, three, four, or five or more additional drops. But if you will keep at it, there is at last that one drop that makes the glass overflow.

The same applies to deeds of kindness. In a series of kindnesses there is at last one that makes the heart run over.

【Kindness】One of the most difficult things to give away is kindness, for it is usually returned.

【Kindness】”You can accomplish by kindness,” wrote Publilius Syrus in the first century before the birth of Christ, “what you can cannot by force.”

William B. McKinley, President of the United States from 1897 to 1901, was a man who understood that principle. During one of his campaigns, a reporter from an opposition newspaper followed him constantly and just as persistently misrepresented McKinley’s views. Eventually during this campaign, the weather became extremely cold, and even though the reporter didn’t have sufficiently warm clothing, he still followed McKinley. One bitter evening, the president-to-be was riding in his closed carriage, and the young reporter sat shivering on the driver’s seat outside. McKinley stopped the carriage and invited the reporter to put on his coat and ride with him inside the warm carriage. The young man, astonished, protested that McKinley knew that he was opposition and that he wasn’t going to stop opposing McKinley during the campaign. McKinley knew that, but he wasn’t out to seek revenge. In the remaining days of the campaign, the reporter continued to oppose McKinley, but never again did he write anything unfair or biased about the future president.