The apostle John reveals the secret of loving God: our love is always responsive, never originating in ourselves. We cannot generate love for God through determination or willpower any more than we can save ourselves through good works. Love, like salvation, flows from God to us before it can flow from us back to Him.

In 1929, C.S. Lewis sat alone in his Oxford study, night after night, feeling what he described as "the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet." The brilliant atheist professor had spent years building intellectual defenses against God, yet found himself slowly, reluctantly being pursued by divine love. Lewis later described himself as "perhaps the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England." His conversion wasn't a Damascus Road flash but a gradual surrender to a love that wouldn't let him go. Through conversations with Christian friends like J.R.R. Tolkien, through reading George MacDonald and G.K. Chesterton, through his own study of the Gospels, God's love broke through every barrier Lewis had erected. In Trinity Term 1929, Lewis finally "gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed." He hadn't generated love for God through willpower or intellectual achievement. Instead, he discovered that his love for God was a response—an echo of the love that had been pursuing him all along.

This understanding transforms our spiritual life. When our love for God feels cold, the remedy isn't trying harder to manufacture affection. Instead, we return to meditation on God's love for us—demonstrated supremely in Christ's sacrifice. As we behold His love, ours rekindles.

Prayer: Heavenly Father, thank You for loving us first, for pursuing us when we ran from You. Help us to daily remember Your love demonstrated at Calvary, and let that remembrance kindle our hearts with responsive love. Amen.