We Love Because He First Loved Us

What Is Love? | Day 17

"We love because he first loved us." 1 John 4:19, NIV

Good morning, friends. Every letter worth keeping ends with a line that gathers up everything the writer has been building toward the whole way through, one sentence meant to be read last precisely because it changes how every earlier sentence is read. This series has been writing toward a line exactly like that, and this morning we finally get to read it whole.

Every Love Traces Back to Him

Across this series we have watched one small English word split open into five distinct loves, each carrying weight the flattened word love could never hold on its own. Agape moved first and moved toward us before we had done anything to deserve it, poured into believers by the Holy Spirit rather than summoned up out of our own willpower. Storge planted itself in us before we ever chose it, the instinctive devotion of family that mirrors, however imperfectly, the God who made us for belonging. Phileo showed up as the friend who stays, choosing us again and again for no reason richer than affection freely given. Ahavah traced the delight and desire God designed for marriage, holy within the covenant he built for it. And chesed kept every promise long after the other side had given every reason to expect it wouldn't, a love with a memory that refuses to run out.

Five different words, five different shapes, and every single one of them, we have seen morning after morning, points back to the same origin. John names that origin as plainly as Scripture ever names anything. "Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us." (1 John 4:11-12, NIV). That love, on both sides, is agape, the same self-giving love this series traced back to its source on Day 1. We were never asked to invent love from nothing. We were asked to receive it first, and only then to let it move back out through us toward the people God has placed in our path.

That is the whole purpose of these devotions, and it is worth saying plainly one final time. The love behind every word this series has traced back to Scripture, agape, storge, phileo, ahavah, chesed, did not start with us. It could not have. We are not the source of any love worth having. We are the ones who received it first, long before we understood what had been given, and everything we have called love since has only ever been an echo of that first gift finding its way back out of us.

The Love That Keeps Us Loving

None of this is a debt paid off once and then forgotten. Jesus told his disciples exactly what continuing to receive that love looks like on an ordinary day. "My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends." (John 15:12-13, NIV). The love Jesus commands here is agape once more, laid down as far as a cross. Notice the word remain sitting just before that command in John's Gospel. Jesus does not tell us to love once and consider the matter settled. He calls us to keep remaining in the love he has already given, and loving one another is what that remaining looks like when it is lived out. This is not a status secured on some earlier morning and then set aside. It is a relationship we are still being kept in, one that asks something of us every day we are given, because the Spirit who first poured agape into us has not stopped pouring.

Paul reached for something even larger when he tried to describe what will still be standing once everything else in this life has run its course. "And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love." (1 Corinthians 13:13, NIV). The love Paul crowns above faith and hope is, again, agape, the love that outlasts everything else. Faith will one day become sight. Hope will one day become arrival. But love, the love this whole series has spent its mornings defining, will still be there on the other side of both, because it was never a temporary arrangement to get us through this life. It is the very nature of the God we will spend eternity with.

John gives us the last word this series needs, and it reaches all the way back to where these mornings began. "See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him." (1 John 3:1, NIV). That lavished love is agape too, the Father's love poured out before we had done anything to deserve it. Lavished is not a word for something rationed out carefully to those who have proven themselves worthy. It is a word for love poured out generously, extravagantly, on people who had done nothing yet to earn a drop of it. That is the love standing behind every word this series has traced, and it is the same love Jesus Christ carried all the way to a cross we did not build and could never have paid for ourselves, so that being called God's children would not be a hope we were still working toward but a gift we already hold.

Prayer

Heavenly Father, thank you for loving me first, long before I understood what that love had already cost you, and thank you for every shape that love has taken in my life, in family I did not choose, in friends who stayed, in promises kept long after I gave up expecting them. Thank you for lavishing your love on me and calling me your own child, not because I earned that name but because you decided, before I ever drew breath, that I would carry it.

Holy Spirit, keep pouring your love into me on the mornings ahead, and keep me remaining in it rather than drifting from it. Teach me to let what I have received here move back out through me toward the people you have placed in my life, and do not let me ever forget where this love began. I pray this in Jesus's name. Amen.

Whatever these mornings have stirred in you, whatever word or story or verse finally made one of these loves make sense, carry it with you now. The sentence this series has been writing toward all along was never really an ending. It was the line meant to send every earlier page back out into the middle of an ordinary week, into a marriage, a friendship, a family, a stranger on the road, so that the love poured into you here would keep finding its way into the world through you. That is what a love this large was always meant to do.

To God be the glory.

Pray, praise, and give thanks, for God is good and His mercy endures forever.

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