Intense Love of God

27 May 2026  1 Peter 1:18-25

“Since you have purified yourselves for sincere brotherly love, love one another intensely from a pure heart.” (1 Peter 1:22)

The term “boilerplate” refers to standard, ready-to-publish text that is rarely, if ever changed, but is used over and over without alteration. In the 1880s and 90s large publishing syndicates would distribute syndicated stories, columns and advertising in the form of flat, metal printing plates that looked like the thick metal used to make steam boilers, hence “boilerplate.”

“Love one another intensely from a pure heart” (1 Peter 1:22). It is a relief and a deep joy to millions today that we can do that, that there is an intense Love that has already loved us like that, that there is an alternative to the cold, grey fog of these days.

And that is what “Love one another intensely from a pure heart” (1 Peter 1:22) sounds like, the kind of Christian-speak that is used any time, anywhere: “Lord, we just pray that we will love one another intensely from a pure heart.” Everybody says it, nobody hears it.

Unless they’re dying to hear it.

The classical world of Greece and Rome had long been meditating on its own mortality, and wondering if anything might preserve them. As far back as the 6th century B.C. Aeschylus had Hermes say to Prometheus, bound to a rock while a bird of prey pecked forever at his liver, “Look not for any end to this curse until a God appears, to accept upon His head the pangs of thine own sins vicarious” (Prometheus Bound). In the first century B.C. Cicero (De Republica) recounts one of the Sibylline Oracles about a “King whom we must recognize to be saved.” In the same first century, in 37 B.C., in his fourth Eclogue, Vergil looked forward to the time of “a chaste woman, smiling on her infant boy with whom the iron age would pass away,” and “whatso tracks remain of our old wickedness, once done away, shall free the earth from never-ceasing fear.” In the Silver Age of Latin literature, during the reign of the emperor Hadrian (c. A.D. 121), the historian Suetonius recalled that “there had spread over all the Orient an old and established belief that it was fated at that time for men coming from Judea to rule the world” (The Twelve Caesars, “Vespasian,” 4.5).

It wasn’t just the three wise men from the east (Matthew 2:1-12) who were looking for Jesus, dying to learn more about Him. In age after age there have been people who felt the cold death swirling about their feet and wondered if maybe the stories they had heard of a Divine Deliverer from the children of Abraham might just be true.

It is happening still.

Just ask the startling number of 20-something young men and women in our time who are returning to Church, or arriving there for the first time. Just ask the 780 million Christians in Africa, the home now to one third of all Christians worldwide; just ask the 94% of Catholics in Nigeria who attend Mass every week, several times a week, despite the danger of horrific persecution. Just ask the millions of people who have picked up the Bible in the last five years, doubling Bible sales in the U.S. since 2019. Algernon Charles Swinburne once famously lamented, “Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath” (“Hymn to Proserpine” in Poems and Ballads, 1866). But if the world has grown grey, cold, numb and uninteresting, it isn’t because of the Galilean. In fact, the Galilean is appearing to more and more people to be the solution.

“Love one another intensely from a pure heart” (1 Peter 1:22). It is a relief and a deep joy to millions today that we can do that, that there is an intense Love that has already loved us like that, that there is an alternative to the cold, grey fog of these days.