Source: https://www.bertha-dudde.org/en/proclamation/1553

1553 Divine love.... Greatest gift of grace....

August 4, 1940: Book 25

‘I do not give to you as the world gives....’

God's most marvellous gift is His greater that great love, which He offers to all people in order to make them blisfully happy. Divine love embraces all His creatures, it leaves no being out, only the degree of the rays of love varies depending on the being's distance from God. The strength of the will directed towards God determines the degree of God's love for man, and thus approaching God or distance from Him means increased or diminished love.... Thus, man can make himself partaker of the greatest gift of grace or deprive himself of it if his way of life is in accordance with God's will or strives completely against it. In divine love, man finds the fulfilment of his longing on earth, for a wondrous peace enters the heart of the one who is seized by God's love. He desires nothing other than to be able to remain in this divine love, he longs for God and demands nothing more from the world. God's love expresses itself in such a way that the human being always desires God more and more. Divine love therefore also ignites the fervour of love for God in the human heart.... ‘I do not give to you as the world gives....’ It is a different fulfilment that makes man happy; man no longer longs for earthly pleasures, but his desire is purely spiritual and so is the fulfilment of it. And yet it makes man unspeakably happy and cannot be compared with earthly happiness. After all, it is God Himself Who communicates Himself to people, for God is Love. To be made happy by God's love means to be allowed to carry Him within oneself, and therefore the human being should endeavour to only ever do what brings him divine love, as this guarantees him the most blissful state. Countless earthly pleasures may seem worth striving for to him, they are only deceptive lights in comparison to divine love, and they will also, like deceptive lights, extinguish and leave nothing behind, whereas divine love can never ever pass away once it has seized the earthly child, for what God gives is incomparably glorious and imperishable....

Amen

Translated by Sven Immecke