Love Responding to Love

A child who learned early to be useful, and who by nine could read a room well enough to know what would be required before anyone said it.

If you were loved on those terms you learned to earn affection before you learned to ride a bike, and the arithmetic never fully switches off. It runs in prayer too. A good week and you feel entitled to ask; a bad one and you go quiet, on the unspoken theory that you have nothing to trade this month.

John puts the order the other way round, and puts it in a single clause. We love him, because he first loved us. And there is a detail worth knowing: in many of the oldest copies the sentence has no object at all. We love, because he first loved us. Not only our love for God but the whole capacity, the thing itself, arriving second. Which fits what he says next, because the very next verses are not about God at all; they are about the brother you can see, and about a man who claims to love God and hates him.

So whatever affection you have for God is not a down payment. It is a reply. He moved first, before you were interested, before you were good, before you knew there was anything to answer. Which is also why a thin week does not put anything in danger. He was never waiting on you to begin.

So test it where it costs something. Think of the person you serve while quietly keeping score, the one whose thanks you are still owed. Do one thing for them this week and tell nobody, not even by hinting. You are not buying anything from them, or from God. You are spending what was handed to you first.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 345 is The Burning Afterwards (Luke 24:32).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna