1 John 4:19

I had a little bit of an epiphany last night. I wrote in my other blog about love and I was pondering a little bit on it afterwards....and I realised that I had been "loving" God selfishly. I was loving God for me. To be saved, to be able to claim His promises. These are not bad things in themselves, but I think I was missing the point. Love is not selfish. And real love cannot spring from selfish roots. Now I finally understand the meaning of this verse:

We love because he first loved us. - 1 John 4:19

We were incapable of loving God first. There was no way we could have loved God first. We are bound up in our own selfishness. It is because He first loved us, that we came to see what selfless love is. True love. And so we can now love Him truly, forgetting ourselves, because we recognise the depth of His selfless love for us. We can abandon ourselves to Him, because we can trust Him. He gave Himself to us first. Our efforts to try to love Him will fail - we can only respond to His love with awe and with gratefulness. He is astounding...