Loving God is contingent on our knowing the God Who Is Love.
It is the active love of God and our loving God, together, that sustains a thriving walk with God. Love, and its expression in worship, turns God's sails toward us. It brings Him near. His nearness transforms us. We experience revelation. We respond "Woe is me, I am undone!" Then we are aligned in righteousness to Christ and His life lives in us.
In the last few blog posts, I've been breaking down this process that I've summed up in the following "formula":
To know Him is to love Him.
To love Him is to trust Him.
To trust Him is to obey Him.
To obey Him is to follow Him.
To follow Him is to die to our self/absolute surrender and walk in abundant life.
As we begin to know God, each revelation of His nature and character directly meets a need, but the Great Revelation has always been that He loves us and wants to have a relationship with us. He states this several times to Abraham in the Covenant terms and in Ezekiel 37:26-27:
My dwelling place will be with them; I will be their God, and they will be my people.
This is known as the Tripartite Promise but the entire Bible displays this theme, culminating in Christ, Immanuel, the God who dwells among us. When we come to know God as the God Of Love, we love Him, as John tells us:
The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love. - 1 John 4:8
Since God is love, He is the source of all love, as He has always been existent and previous to all other experiences of love.
"And it is a well-known law of the spiritual life that our love for God will spring up and flourish just as our knowledge of Him increases. To know Him is to love Him, and to know Him better is to love Him more."—A. W. Tozer, Set of the Sail
In my experience, this is because if we truly know Him, we won't be able to help but love Him! Who else, when He calls us to pursue Him, would have already given His life to ensure we could?
But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. - Romans 5:8
See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called children of God; and such we are. - 1 John 3:1a
Being rescued is a good start to knowing God and His love for us, but He doesn't stop. there—He adopts us and makes us co-heirs with Christ (Ephesians 1:5; Romans 8:17)! Then He promises to continue to reveal Himself to us:
He who has My commandments and keeps them is the one who loves Me; and he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and will disclose Myself to him. - John 14:21
Loving Christ brings more of His presence-based revelation or manifestation. It's like a dance of sorts: Because of His great love for us, drawing us, we begin to know God and we worship Him. Our worship draws God nearer. We see God and ourselves. We mourn our sins, repent, and worship again, drawing Him ever closer. The dance repeats.
As I pointed out in last week's blog, God is a never-ending source of new revelations of His nature and character—deeper ways to know Him and to fall more in love with Him.
One of the revelations that makes me love Him the most is that He is the God Who Comes. Even if your life is a disaster like Job, and you've nothing left but to hurtle a challenge to the skies, God comes:
Then the Lord spoke to Job out of the storm."—Job 38:1
"This is the God who, though He allows us to taste misery along with joy, loves us so much that He comes into the camp alongside us. And not just to experience our misery, but, it turns out, Himself to make atonement for us." - Mark Buchanan, The Holy Wild
This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. - 1 John 4:9-10
And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. - 1 John 4:16
To love God, we rely on the love God has for us. In all things—even in loving Him—God is previous. We love because He first loved us. And because He loves us, He hard-wired into us an unquenchable need to be loved by the God who created us.
"You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you..." said Aslan in the Narnia Chronicles. "We love because He first loved us," says John the Apostle.
God's grace calls us to love Him so that we can love Him.