You Love Because He Loved You First

"We love because He loved us first." — 1 John 4:19 (NET)

Do not rush past the order of those words. The order is the whole thing. You do not love your way up to God and then collect His love as your wage. It runs the other direction entirely. He loves you first. You receive it. And then — to your own surprise — you find love for Him rising up in you, like an echo coming back off a far wall. It did not start with you. It started with Him, and now it is pouring back the way it came.

This is why the great command is not the crushing weight it first sounds like. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. Heard cold, that sounds like an order to manufacture something you do not have. But the command rests on a gift already given. What He asks of you, He has already supplied. You do not wring the love out of yourself by trying harder. You receive His love, and the loving follows it out.

And now I have to give you both halves of loving Him back, because people are forever grabbing one and dropping the other.

The first half is what you do. John — who understood love as well as anyone who ever lived — wrote: let us not love with word or with tongue, but in deed and truth. Love that is all talk is not love. It is a feeling with no hands. The love God is after has work in it. It washes feet. It covers shame. It shows up. It gives what it costs to give. A love that never does anything is not the real thing.

The second half is what is in your heart while you do it. He looks at the heart. He is not satisfied with the right thing done by someone who would rather be elsewhere, and He can tell the difference. What He loves to see is a heart that actually wants His way — like the old song that says I delight to do Your will, O my God; Your law is within my heart. Not a law beaten into you from outside. A desire grown up on the inside, where His Spirit has been at work.

Both together. That is the whole of it. The deed without the heart is religion going through the motions. The heart without the deed is a nice feeling that never helped a soul. But the two of them together, both welling up out of the love He poured in — that is the thing you were made to give Him.

And I promised you I would not hide the hard part, so here it is once more, plainly. This will cost you. Jesus said it without flinching: if anyone wants to follow Me, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me. This love does not put you first — that is nearly the whole definition of it. There will be days you do not feel like loving. People in front of you who have not earned a thing. Long seasons where you keep on loving and see nothing come back. He knows all of it. He is not surprised by it, and He is not absent in it. He is making something in you through the very cost. The Scriptures trace the road: suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope — and hope does not disappoint, because God's love has been poured out in our hearts. See where the love arrives in that line — at the end, past the suffering, past the endurance. You reach the deep love by going through the hard thing. Not around it. Through it. The same way He did, in His garden, with His cup.