Stages Of Love Essay

In the book, On Loving God, by Bernard of Clairvaux, he describes four stages of loving god.  
First stage: Love of self for self’s sake.
As God children should only love God sake and not for our selfishness.   Man only seeks God love for his help when we are going through trial and tribulation. That is not the way of God; we should always seek him and love him every day, during the good times as while as the bad time.   Also, when loving ourselves only, a sterile love is produces nothing and leads nowhere.   In time, we will notice that we cannot survive alone and that God graciously meets our needs.
Greed, materialistic, self-pride, is love of self-sake, not sharing , wanting more than others ,when we think of ourselves before anyone else that falls in the category of self-love.  
  2 Timothy 3:2-5 states:
 For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3 heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, 4 treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, 5 having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people.

Second and Third Stage:   Loving God for self- sake and love thy self
What God can and has done for us is the reason why we should love him. God wants us to love him unconditionally like he loves us.   Seek him in all that we do, learn about him and his ways.   People proclaim their love of God, but the action and their ways says different.  
As servants of God we shall do his will for the fear of being punished for disobeying him. Keep his commandment to show us as a good servant of the Lord, which will prove how much we love him.   Going to battle for the Lord is another way of showing our love.   We shall fight for him and the word without selfishly so.  
He also wants us to love our neighbor and our brother and sisters like we love ourselves.   Never love with...