TEXT: Matthew 5:43-48

TITLE: LOVE & HATE

 

OUTLINE:

THE DISTORTION OF LOVE

• Matthew 5:43
• Leviticus 19:18
• Leviticus 19:34
• Exodus 23:4-5

THE DEPTH OF LOVE

• Matthew 5:44-47
• Matthew 5:11

THE DIVINE LOVE

• Matthew 5:48
• “Even if you cannot change all the people around you, you can change the people you choose to be around. Life is too short to waste your time on people who don’t respect, appreciate, and value you. Spend your life with people who make you smile, laugh, and feel loved.”

-Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart

• “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”

-C.S. Lewis, Four Loves