1 John 4:19 Meaning We Love Him

The order settles everything. Nobody begins the relationship with God, and nobody can. The capacity to love him at all is itself a gift already placed in the person before any choice was made, which is why grace is not a reward handed out for good behavior but the thing that makes good behavior possible.

That order also steadies a person on bad days. Feelings for God rise and fall, and if the whole arrangement rested on the strength of one's devotion, every dry spell would be a crisis. The foundation is the other love, which does not fluctuate with mood or performance.

The order matters, and it reverses what most people assume. A person does not generate his devotion out of nothing and then hope it is answered. The love he feels rising toward his ideal is the echo of a pull already placed in him. He wants because he was first wanted.

That first love is the creative self reaching for its own expression through a man's desires. A longing carries no weakness in it. The deeper part of him is drawing him toward what it means to become. When someone feels drawn to a better state, that drawing came before his noticing of it. His yearning answers a call that was issued in him ahead of his reply, and the whole movement began on the inner side, not the outer.