A Word in Season: Why We Love God (1 John 4:19)

Why Unbelievers Do Not Truly Love God

If you are not a Christian, then you do not love God. You may think of him from time to time, you may go through the motions of religious worship, you may hate and despise him, you might offer him a few scraps of your time and energy, you might even have some kind of fear of him, but you don't truly love him.

But if you are a Christian, then your answer to the question whether or not you love God is a hearty and humble yes. You don't love him as you should, you know that. You don't love him as you would, you're confident of that.

But you know that you do love him. Suppose I then pressed you and said, but why is that the case? Why do you love God? You might say, I can't begin to say the number of ways, the number of reasons, and the depth of each of those reasons.

I couldn't count them all and I couldn't get to the bottom of any one of them. If I think of the infinite perfections of the altogether holy and glorious God, his altogether loveliness as it shows in the person and the work of his beloved son, Jesus Christ.

If I think of all that I know of God, if I think of his power and his wisdom and his goodness and his mercy, the infinitude of his perfections, the eternality of his excellencies, everything that is in God is delightful and glorious.

How could I not love so great a being? And yet, there's the rub. Because the fact is that though now as believers we see nothing but glory and grace and beauty and majesty in the person of God and of his son, Jesus Christ, with eyes opened by the Spirit, the fact is that we would never have loved God until or unless he had loved us.

We Love Him Because He First Loved Us

So in 1 John chapter 4 and verse 19, John puts it bluntly. We love him because he first loved us. You see, this is the tragedy of sin. The apostle Paul says that by nature we are at enmity with God. We have carnal hearts.

We have hearts that are wedded to the world, wedded to the creature. We love ourselves. We may love other things around us but our gaze drops too low and our affections are not rightly directed. Rather than being directed toward God, we are against him.

We see ourselves on the throne and we have no space or time ultimately for God. God perhaps becomes someone who serves us when we think we have a need but not somebody that we serve out of true adoration.

And were it not for the fact that God in his mercy works in us and demonstrates his love toward us in the death of his son for us and then works his love out toward us by calling us through his Spirit, opening our eyes to see our own sin and misery and making clear the glory of the perfections that belong to the Most High, revealing that wisdom and that goodness and that power and that mercy in the person and the work of his son, we would see nothing lovely in God or in his Christ and we would remain set against him.

The Sinfulness of Sin and Our Need for Divine Love

Such is the sinfulness of sin. Such is the ugliness and the perversity of sin that we would remain set against God, twisted up in our conceptions, crippled in our conceptions and perceptions of who and what God is and still living with our fist raised against him.

But God loves his people. He's loved us from before the foundation of the world and then in time he sends his son into the world to suffer and to die in our place. And he so demonstrates his love toward us and then he turns us and he draws us and he brings us that we may see in the face of Jesus Christ the glory of God shining.

And that's where we begin to love the altogether lovely one. But unless God began with us, we would never come to him. Unless God first loved us, we would never have loved him. As Christians we need to confess that and to adore the God of love who has loved us and given his son for us.

Coming to the God of Love in Faith and Repentance

And if we're not yet believers, then we should come to this God of love as he makes himself known in Jesus Christ. That we should see there the loveliness of God in a way that draws us to him, binds us to him, brings us in submission, in faith, in repentance to him, to trust him and so to love him now and forever.