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We love because…
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Monday, May, 24, 2010
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by John Fischer
Life is for love. We live to love. Love is so important, it is synonymous with God, or, as the Bible says it: "God is love." When you love, you are near to God. When you get near God, you don't become more spiritual, you become more loving.
"We love each other because He loved us first" (1 John 4:19). This immediately says a lot about the situation.
Primarily, it makes God's love a starting point for everyone. This is not about growth -- some spiritual mountain to climb where we can finally start loving other people -- it's quite the opposite. It's spiritual ground zero. God loves us first. That's where we all start. In the beginning, God loved us, and John says that because He loved us first, we can love each other.
So what's the connection between His love for us and our love for each other? Well, think about this. When you start with being unconditionally loved by God, you take the wind out of the sail of earning love, or of locating the reason for love in yourself. We are loved because God choose to love us, not because of us, but because of His nature. He is love; so He loves us.
That means we're all at ground zero when it comes to being loved. We have no worth in ourselves except that which comes from being loved by God. As John Ortberg wrote in Love Beyond Reason, "There is a love that fastens itself onto ragged little creatures, for reasons that no one could ever quite figure out, and makes them precious and valued beyond calculation." What a deal: God loved us into existence, loves value on us, and loves us home to Him. And we, "ragged little creatures" that we are, do nothing to bring about any of this.
This is why we can love. Because God loved us first this way, we can love others, too, because they have been given worth by the same unearned love, just as we have. The only catch is (and its' a big one) we have to accept God's love on this basis -- on the basis that we do not deserve it; we merely receive it.
The only thing that can keep us from knowing God's love is thinking we deserve it.
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