Learning to Be Lovedናሙና

How to Learn God’s Love

You did not love God first. God loved you.

We struggle to believe God loves us as deeply as he does because we look at ourselves first instead of at him.

We often base God’s love for us on our actions, disposition, and performance. When we do well, God must love us more. When we do poorly, God must love us less.

This is how we often feel about the practices of the Christian life, too. We seem to feel God’s love more when we have a stronger prayer life, regularly read the Bible, and are faithful to our local church. So surely his love ebbs and flows with our actions.

But as you probably know, this is so backward.

In our book Learning to Be Loved, we explore twenty “gateways to intimacy” with God. These gateways are spiritual disciplines through which Christians have experienced God’s love for centuries, such as prayer, fasting, Sabbath, and Bible reading.

But we get so much about the spiritual disciplines wrong. We often view them as ways to get to God and prove our love for him. However, we need to reclaim these gateways as ways God gets to us and proves his love for us.

We don’t awaken God’s love for us when we pray. We pray because God is already speaking to us in love. We don’t read the Bible to show God our devotion. We read the Bible to learn of God’s devotion to us. We don’t fast so God sees our commitment to him. We fast to feast on God’s commitment to us.

To truly learn God’s love for us, we need to unlearn the lies we believe about our relationship. The primary lie we need to escape from is that our love awakens God’s love. That we love first.

Most of us know this is not true in our heads, but we feel that way in our hearts.

That is why I invite you to meditate on a passage from 1 John today. In it, we hear the famous words, “God is love.” But alongside this beautiful declaration, we get a definition of what kind of love God has.

God’s love is first. God’s love initiates, begins, pursues, and instigates. He loved us first. Before we knew him, obeyed him, or followed him, God loved us.

Read this passage as often as necessary until that truth sinks in. You did not love God first. God first loved you.