We love because He first loved us. In other words, the grace of God captivates our hearts with such a grip that loving Him back becomes a responsive way of life. God doesn’t love us conditionally; that’s the way the world loves. God’s love for us is a grace love that has nothing to do with our performance. It simply flows out of who He is and personally discovering that remarkable reality will wreck you for anything else. All of our fountains are truly in Him, and to drink deeply of His grace is so quenching that it leaves you never thirsting again. When Jesus met the woman at the well, He told her upfront that He had a gift for her. He actually said, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who is saying to you, “give me a drink,” you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.” It is so sad that so many Christians don’t understand that the Christian life is all about the “gift of God.” Everything about our walk with the Lord starts and ends with the free gift of God’s grace in Christ. Even before the Fall of Man, God had concluded that the only solution to our fallenness and our inability to get it right was going to be as a result of the free gift of His grace. The wild plan of God’s Love was to become one of us, and to die as us, taking all of our brokenness to the cross and the grave, and to rise on the third day in union with us that we might experience by His grace alone the free gift of Him getting it right on our behalf through us. Amazing grace!
