Make Love Your Aim , livre ebook

Turner Publishing Company - Eugenia Price

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

91 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

“Everyone today is an expert on love,” is Dr. Allan Fromme’s cryptic reflection on our current mood. With a sense of human adventure, Eugenia Price suggests in Make Love Your Aim that anyone can be “an expert on love” if he will dare to discover for himself the love God offers.

“We have so sentimentalized our concept of love that it bears no resemblance to the original,” Miss Price writes. “We have taken the word of romantic novels and motion pictures and TV and perfume and men above the Word of God. The Bible declares that God is love. How closely does your concept of love resemble the love of God? We tend to judge the quality of love according to the way it makes the loved one feel. But to judge love by feeling is our big error and the point at which we turn aside from God’s original concept.”

Make Love Your Aim is a companion piece to the author’s last book, The Wider Place, which was described by some readers as a “controversial challenge” to try the inner freedom God grants to anyone who want it enough to assume the responsibilities that come with it.

Freedom and love are two sides of the same coin. And we can only understand them enough to practice them if we know the way God defines them. How does He do this? In Jesus Christ, the final yet continuing revelation of God’s true intentions toward all of us. Those who are familiar with Eugenia Price’s books will recognize this as a recurring theme. Make Love Your Aim develops it with imagination and versatility: “Jesus said, ‘If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed.’ But He was offering to wave no magic wand over our heads so that we could do as we pleased. He also said, ‘This is my commandment, That you love one another as I have loved you.’ His is the love of the Cross, without self-defense, without self-pity – and totally free.”

Sujets

Religion

Christianisme

Christian Living

Inspirational

Philosophie et théologie

Love of God

Eugenia Price

Christianity

Informations

Publié par	Turner Publishing Company
Date de parution	27 avril 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781684427291
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0900€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

MAKE LOVE YOUR AIM
OTHER BOOKS BY EUGENIA PRICE
Discoveries - Made from Living My New Life
Never a Dull Moment
Share My Pleasant Stones
Early Will I Seek Thee
The Burden Is Light
What Is God Like?
Beloved World
A Woman s Choice
Find Out for Yourself
God Speaks to Women Today
Woman to Woman
The Wider Place
Beloved Invader
Eugenia Price
MAKE LOVE YOUR AIM
Turner Publishing Company
Nashville, Tennessee
www.turnerpublishing.com
Copyright 1967, 2020 Eugenia Price
Make Love Your Aim
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or I 08 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 750-4744. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to Turner Publishing Company, 4507 Charlotte Avenue, Suite 100, Nashville, Tennessee, (615) 255-2665, fax (615) 255-5081, E-mail: submissions@turnerpublishing.com .
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and the author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
Cover design: Bruce Gore
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Upon Request
9781684427277 paperback
9781684427284 hardback
9781684427291 ebook
To my friend,
F LOYD T HATCHER
An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.
Robert Louis Stevenson
CONTENTS
I.
Chapter 1. God Is Still Love
Chapter 2. What Is Love?
Chapter 3. Who Needs Love?
II.
Chapter 4. The Freedom of Love
Chapter 5. Love Is Unreasonable
Chapter 6. Do We Love Only the Idea of Love?
Chapter 7. How Do We Learn to Love?
III.
Chapter 8. Loving Enough to Identify
Chapter 9. Loving Enough to Trust
Chapter 10. Loving Enough to Relinquish
Chapter 11. Loving the Unfamiliar
Chapter 12. The Responsibility of Love
Chapter 13. Loving Enough to Speak the Truth
Chapter 14. Loving Ourselves
Chapter 15. Loving Enough to Laugh
Chapter 16. For God So Loved the World
PREFACE
After the unusual experience of writing The Wider Place , (Zondervan, 1966) I began to be aware that I had explored only one side of the coin of freedom which God offers to everyone who wants it enough to enter in. My own capacities were stretched in the writing, and the direct relationship of freedom to love gripped me. I felt I had only begun the exploration, and my feeling was verified when (unknown to each other) my editor, Mr. Floyd Thatcher, and my friend, Dr. Anna Mow made identical suggestions to me for a book to follow The Wider Place -a book on love.
Their suggestions confirmed what I had begun to realize: There is no freedom without love and no love without freedom. Love and freedom are two sides of the same coin-neither fully explorable by a mere mortal, but both of a piece. And both outright gifts from God.
Love and Freedom are gifts from God, but Make Love Your Aim has to do with our part in learning how to make use of these gifts.
We can study the nature of love for all the years of our earthly lives and still not plumb its depths. Yet, the merest child can grasp love s essence, can learn to make use of it. The merest child can do this, but most adults have never given love an honest try. Love is the aim of the few. If it could become the aim of the many, our world would be changed. Making love our aim is quite simply, giving God the freedom to act as he would act. We do not learn how to give God this freedom in a minute, even when we have decided to make love the aim of our life. Loving requires practice, and one intent of this book is to emphasize the necessity for the practice of love. We tend to pray: Oh, God, give me more of your love. He has already given all of his love when he gave himself: God is love. Our part is to permit love to become a habit by practicing all that we see of it in our human relationships. It is a gift, but we must form the habit of using the gift or it lies worthless in the drawer of our inertia.
I feel it necessary to explain once more that what I have written in this book, as in others, is written for persons with basically normal minds. When I speak of showing love in these pages, it is always with the thought in mind that when a mentally unbalanced person is involved, we can frequently do more damage than good. Increasingly, from sometimes bitter experience, I urge professional counsel in these instances.
If it appears (and it will to some) that I have referred often to the matter of the need for love between the races, it is because I am genuinely troubled by the racial barriers which still stand high within the Christian church. These barriers are usually invisible, but too often they still stand. I propagate no cause here, except the cause of Christ who commanded that we are to love one another as he loved us. With Jesus Christ, the Saviour of all mankind, there are no. barriers.
More than ever before I am indebted to Joyce Blackburn for expert correction of my manuscript; to my mother, who goes on being my constant source of encouragement; to Frances Pitts and Anna Mow for helpfully critical readings and once again deep thanks to Elsie Goodwillie for her careful and loving handling of the typescript.
And not for duty s sake, but for love s sake, I feel compelled to thank the Father for being love and for revealing himself so plainly in Jesus Christ that no one ever needs to doubt his heart.
E UGENIA P RICE
St. Simons Island, Georgia
Part I
for God is love. I John 4:8 (RSV)
Chapter 1
God Is Still Love
Man comes to know God is love
when he comes to know
that God is as he revealed himself
in Jesus Christ.
CHAPTER ONE

God Is Still Love
I N THE DEEPEST HEART of every man God planted a longing for himself, as he is: a God of love. No matter what we say, our hearts cry out for God to care, to be involved with us, to love us. This is his idea. He created this longing in us. It is the longing toward the light that lighteth every man who cometh into the world.
The human race longs for love because the human race longs for God. God and love are not similar. Love is not merely one of God s characteristics. God is love.
No matter how it looks to us, nothing changes this. He is not dead. He is . And if we believe he is, then we can know that he is love.
Anyone can be freed to see both the truth about our world and the truth about God and come out free not only to believe in love, but to love. This does not happen overnight, but it can begin happening at any moment to anyone, and because God is growth and life as well as love, it can go on happening. Light from God does not dim, as light from the sun dims at the end of a day. Light from God grows clearer, and only appears to dim as we insist upon standing in the shadows made by our human tendency to remain stunted. A baby bird in a nest, who refuses to try his wings, stays nest-bound, stunted in body and courage and daring, eventually dies. It feels safe in the nest, but that kind of safety is intended to last only for a short period. The time comes to fly, and those who fear or refuse flight enter the realm of death. We can peer fearfully over the side of our personal nests and see only the distance we could fall. We can also peer over the side of our nests and, making use of continuing knowledge of God, dare to fly-facing both the fact of the danger and the fact of God s ability to sustain us. The stunted, confused, or pompous among us always questions this.
The stunted mind looks at the ugly facts-the brutality in our streets, the mass slaughter from falling bombs, murder at the hands of mentally deranged individuals, the senseless deaths on our highways and from still unconquered disease-and blames God. The stunted mind looks at only one set of facts-the ugly facts about the world around us-and draws back, never examining the facts about God, the fact of God.
The confused mind tends to fly in all directions at once, with no destination and no sense of distance. Looking only at the turmoil and heartache and tragedy in our world, the confused mind is unable to focus on anything. Happiness is too short-lived to hold the attention. Tragedy and violence too terrible. Failure too complete, fear too smothering. Looking at the chaos in the world can lead only to confusion, because nothing holds the gaze. The confused mind must dart from fear and brutality and grief and failure to something else just for relief. There is only one stable, reliable, eternal focal point-the fact of God himself, and the confused mind, the mind unsure about His nature, cannot concentrate on Him long enough or steadily enough to learn.
The pompous mind demands that God live up to its idea of what he should be like, if it admits his existence at all. God cannot be a God of love to the pompous mind because he permits suffering and death. (I understand this mind. I once possessed it. Looking at the carnage of Hiroshima I decided God did not exist at all. I preferred that he be nonexistent rather than capable of allowing such agony.)
Since the po