Loved First: On Discovering That My Love for God Was Never the Beginning

A friend asked me, across a table, with no edge in it at all: why do you love Jesus?

He was not arguing. That is what made it land. He had watched me change — watched me get baptized, watched the fasting reorganize my week, watched me leave a table early on a Saturday night because of where I had to be in the morning — and he wanted to know what was underneath it. It is the fairest question anyone has ever asked me about my faith. And I answered it badly.

I said what I had always said. He made me. He died for me. He is worthy of it. Every one of those sentences is true, and I could hear, even as they left my mouth, that they were not answers to what he had asked. He had asked why I love Him. I had recited reasons why I should. Those are different sentences, and my friend, who is not a theologian and did not need to be, heard the difference and let it sit there politely between us.

I went home bothered. Not because I doubted the love — I have been in the Church long enough now to know it is there, the way you know a room is warm without checking a thermometer. I was bothered because I could not account for it. I had been carrying something for years without ever once asking where it came from.

And when I finally sat down with the question, what I found was that I had the whole thing pointed the wrong way. Every answer I had given him ran outward from me: I owe, I offer, I give. I had made myself the source. In that picture, love for God is something I generate and send upward, and the entire weight of the relationship rests on how much of it I can produce on a given morning.

Scripture says the opposite, and it says it in a sentence short enough to miss. We love Him because He first loved us (1 John 4:19). Not “we should love Him.” Not “if we love Him, He will love us back.” Because He first loved us. The love did not start in my chest. It arrived there.

The Question I Could Not Answer

The strange thing is that I could have told my friend, in some detail, why I believe. There were arguments, and books, and a slow accumulation of things that stopped making sense any other way, and then a font and a chrismation and a first communion. That road I can map. But belief and love are not the same operation. You can hold a thing to be true with your whole mind and still not be able to say why you would die for it.

So the answers I reached for were all debts, because a debt is the only shape I had. He made me, so I owe Him this. He saved me, so I owe Him this. He is worthy of it, and I am not the sort of man who withholds what is owed. Not one of those produced a single degree of actual warmth. They produced obligation, which is a different substance entirely, and obligation has a way of curdling when you leave it out in the open too long. You start to resent the ledger. Then you feel guilty for resenting it. Then you pray harder to fix the guilt, which was never the problem.

What I could not see is that a debt-shaped love has me at the origin. It runs outward from me toward God, and its quality depends entirely on the raw material available in me on a given morning — my sleep, my mood, my week. On a good day I could work up something that felt like devotion. On a bad day I had nothing to give and concluded, reasonably enough, that I was failing. Baptism did not exempt me from this. It only meant I was making the error inside the Church instead of outside it.

And underneath both the good days and the bad ones sat an assumption I had never once examined: that God’s disposition toward me was somehow keeping pace with mine toward Him. That He was, in some sense, waiting to see what I would bring.

Paul closes that door and locks it. God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8). Read that slowly, because the timing is the whole point. Not after we repented. Not once we had assembled some minimum of devotion worth responding to. While we were still sinners — which is to say, at the precise moment when there was nothing in us to reward. If His love were a response to ours, the Cross happened at the wrong time. It came too early. It came before we had done anything at all, which means it was never a reply to us in the first place.

So the question I could not answer turns out to have been badly posed. I kept asking how do I produce love for God? — and the honest answer, the one the tradition has always given, is that I do not. Not first. Not on my own. Something has to reach me before anything can leave me.

The Order I Had Backwards

Go back to that verse and take it apart, because the grammar is doing real work. We love Him because He first loved us.

There is a cause in that sentence, and it is not me. His love is not the response to mine. His love is the reason mine exists at all. The word first is not a courtesy — it is not John saying that God happened to get there before we did, the way one person arrives at a meeting early. It is a claim about origin. Take away His prior love and there is nothing for mine to be made out of.

A few verses earlier John says it even more starkly: In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us (1 John 4:10). He is drawing a line under the whole confusion in advance. If you want to know what love actually is, do not look at the human side of the transaction. Look at the divine side. That is where the thing itself is.

And then he says the sentence that reorganizes everything, because it moves from what God does to what God is: God is love (1 John 4:8). Not God is loving. Not God loves, among the other things He does. God is love — it is not a mood He is in, not a policy He adopted toward creation at some point after making it, not one attribute sitting on a shelf beside justice and power. It is what He is, eternally, before there was any creature to direct it at. The Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father and the Spirit is not a bystander to it; love is the life of God before it is ever a gift to us.

This is the piece I had genuinely never absorbed, and absorbing it changed the temperature of prayer. If God is love, then His love toward me is not a verdict He renders after review. It is not weather. It cannot cool because I have been distracted for a week, any more than fire can decide to stop being hot while remaining fire. St. John of Damascus (c. 749) makes exactly this point when he insists that God’s goodness is not something He possesses but something He is — He does not acquire it, cannot increase in it, cannot be talked out of it.

Which means that when my friend asked his question, I went looking in the wrong place for the answer. I was checking my own pockets to see what I had brought, while standing in a house that was already full.

St. Ignatius of Antioch (c. 107 AD), writing on the road to his own execution, says a strange thing about this. My love has been crucified, he tells the Romans — and he does not mean his affections have died. He means his love has a name and a body and a location in history. It is a Person, and that Person went to a cross. Ignatius is not describing a feeling he generated on the way to the arena. He is describing something that had already taken hold of him, so completely that he could no longer locate the seam between his love and the One who was its source.

That is the order. His love first, always, and mine as the answering motion.

Love With a Face

But there is a problem with everything I have said so far, and I want to name it rather than walk past it. “God is love” is the sort of sentence that can dissolve into nothing at all. It is on greeting cards. It is agreeable to people who believe nothing. Left abstract, it becomes a warm haze — a general benevolence somewhere overhead, which asks nothing and reaches no one and changes exactly nothing about a Tuesday morning in front of the icons.

Christianity does not leave it abstract. This is the whole scandal of it. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). Love did not send word. Love did not remain a principle. Love took a body — a specific body, in a specific province of a specific empire, under a governor whose name we still recite in the Creed. It had a face you could look at and a voice you could recognize across a courtyard. It got tired. It wept at a friend’s grave, knowing full well what it was about to do there.

St. Athanasius (c. 298–373) puts the logic plainly: we had turned away, and we could not turn ourselves back, and so the Word who made us came into what He had made and took our condition on Himself. Not as a gesture. As a rescue that required Him to go all the way down into the thing that had us — into death itself — because that was where we were. And St. Irenaeus (c. 180), earlier still, describes Him passing through every stage of human life, sanctifying each one from the inside, so that there is no part of what it is to be a person that He has not entered and healed by entering.

This is why the Incarnation is not a doctrine I hold at a distance and nod at. It is the actual answer to my friend’s question, and it was sitting there the whole time I was fumbling for reasons. He asked why I love Jesus. The answer is not a quality I discovered in myself. It is that Jesus came and got me, and that He was moving toward me before I had any opinion about Him at all. What Christianity offers is not an idea. It is a Person who arrived first.

We love God because He loved us first. He is Love itself, and in Christ that love became flesh — suffering, dying, and rising to unite us to Him. Our love for God, then, is always a response, not an origin.

Every clause there matters, but the last one is the hinge. Always a response. Not sometimes. Not once, at conversion, after which I take over the maintenance. Always. The love I offer this morning is made of the love that reached me before I woke up, the way the light in a room is made of the sun and not of the room.

And notice what the Resurrection adds, because without it this stays a beautiful tragedy. He suffered and died — and then He rose, and did not leave the flesh behind when He did. Human nature went up with Him. The point was never only that God pitied us from close range. The point is union: that we are joined to Him, made partakers, taken into the life that He simply is. The love did not come near in order to be admired. It came near in order to take us in.

So when I go looking inward for evidence of love and come back holding nothing, I have been asking the wrong instrument for a reading. The question is not what have I generated? The question is what has already been done, and am I turned toward it?

Then What Do I Do Tomorrow Morning?

Here is where I expected the reorientation to make prayer easier, and it did not, exactly. It made it truer, which is a different thing. Because a real question survives all of this: if I cannot manufacture love, and it comes to me from outside, then what am I actually supposed to do? Wait passively for feelings to arrive? That cannot be right either. The saints were not passive.

Christ answers this, and He answers it with a verb. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you (Matthew 6:33).

Put the two verses side by side and they are not two separate instructions. They are one sequence. Loved first tells me why I love — the origin, which is never me. Seek first tells me what that love does with its hands once it is awake. Grace comes before anything; love answers it; seeking is the shape the answer takes across an ordinary day. Take away the first term and the seeking becomes a way of earning, which is exhausting and never finishes. Take away the last term and the being-loved stays a private warmth that never costs anything and never grows.

I find it clarifying that Christ does not say feel first. He says seek. Seeking is something I can do on a morning when I have nothing. It does not require a mood as its raw material — it requires a direction and a body willing to go that way.

In practice, in the Church, this is not vague. It is a rule of prayer kept on the mornings it feels like reciting a grocery list, because the rule is not a report on my interior state; it is me putting myself where the love is. It is the fast, which is not a fee paid to God but the loosening of a grip so that my hands are free for something else. It is confession, where the shame I would rather manage privately gets spoken out loud to a priest and stops being the thing that runs me. It is walking up to the chalice on a Sunday when I have been irritable all week and have not earned the right to be there, and receiving anyway, because the Body and Blood of Christ are not a prize for the composed. Every one of these is a form of seeking, and not one of them requires me to feel anything in particular before I begin.

And there is a counterfeit here that I have fallen into more than once, so I will name it. It is possible to take all this machinery and aim it at the wrong target — to seek, very diligently, the feeling of being loved rather than the Kingdom. It looks nearly identical from outside. Same prayers, same fasting, same attendance. But the attention has quietly turned around. I am no longer looking at Christ; I am monitoring myself for evidence of Christ, checking the gauge after every service to see whether the level went up. Prayer becomes a mirror. And a mirror will show you your own face for as long as you are willing to stand there, which is the whole trouble with it.

The corrective is in the verse itself. Seek the Kingdom — not the sensation of the Kingdom. The feelings, when they come, are added things, and Christ is explicit that added things are exactly what you get when you stop chasing them.

What the Door Looks Like Now

I have not gone back to my friend yet. When I do, I know what I want to say, and it is not any of the three answers I gave him at the table.

I want to tell him that he asked the right question and I gave him the wrong kind of answer — that I handed him a list of reasons a person should love God, which is what you produce when you are searching your own chest and finding it emptier than you hoped. And that the true answer is not located in me at all. I love Jesus because He loved me first, and He did it before I was in any condition to be loved, and He did not do it from a distance. He came into a body and a century and a country. He was hungry. He was betrayed by a friend at a table not unlike ours. He went down into death, and came back up, and did not leave our nature behind when He came.

That is not a feeling I worked up. It is something that happened, whether or not I am warm on a Tuesday. And I did not have to reach it — it reached me, at the font, and it keeps reaching me at the chalice, and my love is only the motion of turning around to face where it is coming from.

What I would say to anyone checking their own chest and finding it unimpressive — inside the Church or still standing at the door of it — is that you are not failing a test. You may simply have the order backwards, the way I did for years after my baptism. You are not being asked to originate a love strong enough to reach God. You are being asked to notice one that has already crossed the entire distance to reach you, and then to spend the day seeking the Kingdom it opened.

We love Him because He first loved us.

The door was never something I had to build. It was opened from the other side, a long time ago, at considerable cost, and it has not closed since. All that is asked of me this morning is that I keep walking through it.