Dear Friends,

It is a great blessing in our lives to know and understand deeply the nature and completeness of the love of God for us. The apostle John gives it to us in his first general letter, chapter 4 and verse 10. He says, "This is love; not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a propitiation for our sins." My understanding has been specially deepened by the consideration of the words "but that He loved us". It is not so much that I have learnt something new, but that God has given me a more complete understanding of what he has always taught me.

Firstly, I have appreciated that when God loves, he loves with all his love totally. When we love, our love can grow or diminish. It can deepen. It can fluctuate more or less. Further our love is always deficient to some degree and imperfect. When God loves he loves totally from the start. His love is perfect and complete. God cannot love me more tomorrow than he loves me today, because his love today is all the perfect love he has. His love tomorrow will not diminish from what it is today, because God's love is never ever anything but complete and full. When John say God loves us, it is with love that can't be more full or perfect, because when God loves he loves us with all the love he has.

Secondly, in my relationship with God, it is God who started the loving. John describes God's love as loving us when we did not love him. He loved us first. (1 John 4:19). This means that God loved us with all the love that is in him when we had nothing in us to stimulate his love.

Our love is usually dependent on, and stimulated by, something attractive in the person we are loving. The reason that God loves us is simply that God is love and wills to love us. He purposes by his sovereign will to love me.

His love is not prompted by any good in us. Nor is the reason for his love any perceived good he may produce in us. Nor is his love dependent on the fact that by his foreknowledge he knows that in time we will believe. Rather our belief and loving him is the result of his love for us. In a word, God's love for us is totally without condition. He loves us completely because he determines to love us.

His love does not regard our sins, except that he determines to save us from them. His love is not given through lack of knowledge of what we are like in our rebellion, weakness, failure and wrong doing. God knew and knows exactly what we are like. He knew what we were like before we believed, and he knew exactly what we would be like throughout our Christian life. His love is not determined by our behaviour or our attitude to God. Rather his love is the reason God's grace works in our lives to make us loveable.

Thirdly, this revolutionises my understanding of God's love to me now and throughout my Christian life. I do not find it hard to appreciate that God loved me before I loved him, and that he gave his beloved Son, so infinitely precious to him, in love, so that he might suffer in my place, so saving me from the punishment for my sins. I can appreciate that God loved me because he willed to do so, and not because of anything loveable in me.

But I have struggled all my life with the feeling that now I am saved, and God has done so much for me by giving his Son to die for me, that God's continued love depends on my response to his love. That if I love him little, somehow God will reduce his love to me. That when I sin and fail, God will reduce his love, or withdraw his love, until I repent and do a bit better. This is not so. I could not deserve God's love at all when he saved me. I cannot and can never deserve God's love now I am saved. God just loves me with all his love because he has willed to do so.

God’s love for me does not diminish whatever I do or whatever I am like. I know this sounds a very dangerous thing to say, and a seeming license to sin, but I believe and understand that it is a right understanding of John's words, "he loved us" and "God first loved us", because God knew from the beginning every stage in our lives, and determined to love us in spite of all the unattractiveness and undeserving he saw there. This is such a strong comfort to me as I struggle with the problems of life, the driving emotions within, and the conflicts which I experience.

The Book of Common Prayer Collect for the first Sunday after Trinity describes what I know to be true, that "through the weakness of my mortal nature I can do no good thing without God". When the Bible tells me to do good and to give myself a living sacrifice to God, etc., I am totally destroyed if God's continued love for me depends on my success. But when I understand that God loved me totally first and that his love is without condition, I am encouraged to go on, because I am assured that God's love never diminishes towards me. He commands me to love and obey him because his love is working to make it so.

I am conscious now more than ever before that I cannot remain a Christian a moment in my own strength. My own weakness and sinful nature, together with so powerful an enemy in Satan, leaves no confidence in myself, either to do what I may know to be best, or even to know the right way for the future. That God has loved me totally is my life line, for it assures me he will never let me go and never stop loving me whatever my action in life, and that his love means he works to produce his holy loving image in me. Such love is the spring from which true love for God begins to spring in my heart; and contemplation of it, the means by which my love for God has any hope of growing.

Your servant for Christ's sake,