Accepting Love

Thought I would pass along a daily devotional I received today from PurposeDrivenLife.com. I was particularly moved by the two attitudes that block our acceptance of God's love.

We Love Because…
by John Fischer

Life is for love. We live to love. Love is so important, it is synonymous with God, or, as the Bible says it: “God is love.” When you love, you are near to God. When you get near God, you don’t become more spiritual, you become more loving.

“We love each other because He loved us first” (1 John 4:19). This immediately says a lot about the situation.
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Primarily, it makes God’s love a starting point for everyone. This is not about growth — some spiritual mountain to climb where we can finally start loving other people — it’s quite the opposite. It’s spiritual ground zero. God loves us first. That’s where we all start. In the beginning, God loved us, and John says that because He loved us first, we can love each other.

So what’s the connection between His love for us and our love for each other? Well, think about this. When you start with being unconditionally loved by God, you take the wind out of the sail of earning love, or of locating the reason for love in yourself. We are loved because God choose to love us, not because of us, but because of the His nature. He is love; so He loves us.

That means we’re all at ground zero when it comes to being loved. We have no worth in ourselves except that which comes from being loved by God. As John Ortberg wrote in Love Beyond Reason, “There is a love that fastens itself onto ragged little creatures, for reasons that no one could ever quite figure out, and makes them precious and valued beyond calculation.” What a deal: God loved us into existence, loves value on us, and loves us home to Him. And we, “ragged little creatures” that we are, did nothing to bring about any of this.

This is why we can love. Because God loved us first this way, we can love others, too, because they have been given worth by the same unearned love, just as we have. The only catch is (and its’ a big one) we have to accept God’s love on this basis — on the basis that we do not deserve it; we merely receive it.

Two attitudes will block our ability to do this: 1) Thinking we are beyond hope: no one, even God, could love us; or 2) Thinking we are more worthy that most — that we in some way deserve to be loved. Actually both of these are true at the same time. We know both how undeserving we are, and how blessed we are to have God love us anyway. We love, then, because the world is full of scoundrels like us who are loved, just as we are.

John Fischer is the Senior Writer for Purpose Driven Life Daily Devotionals. He resides in Southern California with his wife, Marti and son, Chandler. They also have two adult children, Christopher and Anne. John is a published author and popular speaker.