Love Responding to Love

Some people learned as children that love had to be earned. By the age of nine, a child like that can read a room and know what will be needed before anyone asks.

If you were loved on those terms, you learned to earn affection before you learned to ride a bike, and that habit never fully switches off. It even shows up in prayer. After a good week, you feel you have the right to ask God for things. After a bad week, you go quiet, because deep down you think you have nothing to offer Him this time.

John puts the order the other way round, and he does it in one short line: "We love him, because he first loved us." Here is a detail worth knowing. In some of the oldest Greek copies of this letter, the word "him" is not there, so the line simply says that we love, because He first loved us. That means our love for God comes second, and so does our whole ability to love anyone at all. It fits what John says next, because the very next verse turns to the brother you can see: "he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?"

So whatever love you have for God is a reply to His love. He moved first. He loved you before you were interested, before you were good, and before you knew there was anything to answer. That is why a thin week does not put His love in danger. He was never waiting for you to begin.

So test this where it costs something. Think of the person you serve while quietly keeping score, the one whose thanks you feel you are still owed. Do one kind thing for them this week, and tell nobody, not even with a hint. You are not buying anything from them, or from God. You are giving away what He gave 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