We Love Him Because He First Loved Us

She is trying very hard and she has been trying since she was about twenty four.

The trying looks like this: a period of prayer in which she attempts to feel something toward God, followed by a period of noticing that she has felt very little, followed by a period of asking why, followed by a resolution to try harder tomorrow.

She has done this most mornings for eleven years.

She is not cold. She cries at films. She is fiercely loyal to about six people and would go a long way for any of them, so the machinery works, and that is what makes this so puzzling to her.

Toward God specifically, she can produce a kind of respectful attention and almost nothing else, and she has tried to squeeze more out of it every morning for over a decade.

Here is the sentence she has never said out loud.

She is not sure she loves God, and she thinks that if she stopped working at it she would find out that she does not.

Read which way it runs

There is a short sentence in John's first letter, and the whole of it is in the order.

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

Because he first loved us.

That is a causal statement about direction. The loving on our side is described as a consequence of something that happened earlier, from the other side, and the entire weight of the sentence sits on which came first.

And John has spent the whole chapter before it doing the same thing. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us. He raises the exact confusion you've been living in and settles it explicitly: not that we loved God.

Which means the thing you have been attempting for eleven years has a direction problem rather than a sincerity problem. You have been trying to originate something that Scripture describes as an echo.

Your loving is a response rather than a production, and 1 John 4:19 puts His first and yours second. That is what the word actually orders, not an easing I am doing, and the Holy Spirit is the One who starts a response in a woman who cannot start one herself.

An echo cannot be made without a sound

Now the plain thing, and it explains the eleven years exactly.

You've been sitting in a room every morning trying to produce an echo, and an echo is not a thing anybody produces. It is what happens after a sound.

So the whole practice has been aimed inward: examining your own chest, checking the temperature, asking whether that was affection or merely respect. And attention aimed at yourself is the surest way in the world to feel nothing, because affection of any kind arises when a person is looking at something else.

That is why you can love six people fiercely. You have never once sat down and tried to feel love toward them. You have simply looked at them.

And nothing about eleven flat years has ever proved that you do not love Him. Scripture puts the origin of the whole thing on His side and never on yours, and the Holy Spirit is not asking anybody to originate what only responds.

Look at what He did, and ask for nothing

Here is the practical piece, and the second half is what makes it work.

One sitting this week spent entirely on what He has already done. And ask for nothing.

Not for feeling. Not for a changed heart. Not even for help loving Him, which is a request you've made so often it has become part of the machinery.

Read a passage about the cross, or about how He dealt with somebody specific, and stay with it. And when you notice yourself checking your own interior, which will be within about forty seconds, go back to looking at Him.

That is the entire exercise. Look outward. Do not audit the result. The auditing is the eleven years.

You are able to look at Him without checking yourself, and the checking was what kept the room empty. 1 John 4:19 says we love because He first loved, and the Holy Spirit is the One who does in a woman what a woman has never been able to do in herself.