Loving God

For this morning, we're going to turn to the twelfth chapter of Mark and we're going to be looking at verses 28 through 34 . . . 28 through 34. You'll notice that I've titled this, “Loving God,” and that's really obvious. And as I was thinking this week about love and loving God, obviously a huge subject, something came across my desk that I thought was interesting, from Ripley's Believe It Or Not. And according to Ripley, the longest expression of love ever written was the work of a Parisian painter named Marcel De LaKurre, who wrote it in 1875. It was addressed to Magdalena DeVilla Lora, his artistic light of love, he said.

This particular letter contains the phrase chevu omi, I love you, one million eight-hundred and seventy-five times. Why that number? A thousand times a calendar year of the date, 1875. This prodigious expression of love was not, however, written by Marcel's own hand, rather he hired a scribe. And if he were a lazy man, he would have instructed the scribe, “Write the sentence one million eight-hundred and seventy-five times. But that would not have expressed his love, so LaKurre was too entranced with the sound of those two words in French and with the woman to whom he was expressing them, so he dictated it word for word, and had the hired man repeat it verbatim before he wrote it. All in all, therefore, the phrase was uttered orally and in writing five million, six hundred and twenty-five thousand times before it reached its destination. . . .

http://www.gty.org/resources/sermons/41-63