Love: A Guest Post by Francis Chan

Why do you think God created you?

For much of my life, I believed that God created me to impact the world, so I made it my ambition to do as much as I could for Him. While the zeal itself was not necessarily wrong, in recent years, God has been showing me that some of it was rooted in an unhealthy insecurity. I was so obsessed with making sure my life reflected my devotion to God that I neglected to meditate on His love for me.

I now believe that God created me to have another person to lavish His grace upon. He doesn’t delight in me because I’m useful; He delights in me because I am His. Anyone who has had a newborn understands that you don’t love them because of their utility. They can’t do anything for you, and yet you can’t help but overflow with love for them. That is the heart of the Father. He abounds in love, so He creates beings to receive it.

We naturally tend to see ourselves as the subject rather than the object. But 1 John 4:19 teaches the opposite: “We love because He first loved us.” Our love is foundationally a love of response. God is always the initiator. We can’t do anything without first learning to simply receive His love. It is true that He has prepared good works for us to do, but they are meant to be the outworking of loving relationship, not the substance of it.

In a culture that is obsessed with accomplishment and climbing the ladder, it feels very counterintuitive to just sit back and be loved. But that is the very heart of the gospel – we are loved, redeemed, and adopted not because we earned it, but because while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Rom. 5:8). In Galatians 2:21, Paul writes “I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.” If we put our hope in anything other than the cross, not only are we on hopelessly shaky footing, we are actually nullifying the grace of God!

If you struggle to really believe in your heart that God loves you unconditionally or have doubts about your salvation, you are not alone. Church buildings are filled with people battling this insecurity, as I did for many years. God longs to set His children free from insecurity and fill them with His perfect love that casts out all fear (1 John 4:18). He did it for me, and I pray He uses Beloved to draw many out of doubt and into the thrilling and peaceful life that He saved us for.