We don't exist so we can love God; we exist so God can love us - for our own sakes. God doesn't need anyone or anything, but She chooses to need us, because we need to be needed. God didn't stop at just giving us life, or even at showing us His love; He went on to show us He wants us. He wants our interaction with Him. Again, not for His sake, because God doesn't want for anything, but as a heavenly gift to us. We need to be needed, and God happily meets that need.
We never make the first move with God. We don't go searching through the depths and drag God out of Her hiding place. It's God who searches, God who pursues, God whose desires come first. As Her creations our role will always be a response, like an echo to a trumpet blast. That's why our whole purpose in life is to accept, not to offer. God's not interested in our strengths or victories. We were made to surrender: to stop clawing our way into the spotlight, and instead become a mirror of the Way, the Truth, and the Light. Only then can we experience God's love in its purest form.
Suggested Reading: Acts 17:24-27
Study Questions:
1) The Bible tells us to "seek and ye shall find." How is that God making the first move?
2) Think of someone who loves you but doesn't need you. Now think of someone who loves you AND needs you. How much closer is the second relationship? Do you enjoy being needed?
3) Why is it important to recognize that God made the first move?
*****
Original Text: "Our Highest Activity"
If the worlds exists not chiefly that we may love God but that God may love us, yet that very fact, on a deeper level, is so for our sakes. If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed. Before and behind all the relations of God to man, as we now learn them from Christianity, yawns the abyss of a Divine act of pure giving - the election of man, from nonentity, to be the beloved of God, and therefore (in some sense) the needed and desired of God, who but for that act needs and desires nothing, since He eternally has, and is, all goodness. And that act is for our sakes. It is good for us to know love; and best for us to know the love of the best object, God. But to know it as a love in which we were primarily the wooers and God the wooed, in which we sought and He was found, in which His conformity to our needs, not ours to His, came first, would be to know it in a form false to the very nature of things. For we are only creatures: our role must always be that of patient to agent, female to male, mirror to light, echo to voice. Our highest activity must be response, not initiative. To experience the love of God in a true, and not an illusory form, is therefore to experience it as our surrender to His demand, our conformity to His desire: to experience it in the opposite way is, as it were, a solecism against the grammar of being.
- The Problem of Pain
We never make the first move with God. We don't go searching through the depths and drag God out of Her hiding place. It's God who searches, God who pursues, God whose desires come first. As Her creations our role will always be a response, like an echo to a trumpet blast. That's why our whole purpose in life is to accept, not to offer. God's not interested in our strengths or victories. We were made to surrender: to stop clawing our way into the spotlight, and instead become a mirror of the Way, the Truth, and the Light. Only then can we experience God's love in its purest form.
Suggested Reading: Acts 17:24-27
Study Questions:
1) The Bible tells us to "seek and ye shall find." How is that God making the first move?
2) Think of someone who loves you but doesn't need you. Now think of someone who loves you AND needs you. How much closer is the second relationship? Do you enjoy being needed?
3) Why is it important to recognize that God made the first move?
*****
Original Text: "Our Highest Activity"
If the worlds exists not chiefly that we may love God but that God may love us, yet that very fact, on a deeper level, is so for our sakes. If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed. Before and behind all the relations of God to man, as we now learn them from Christianity, yawns the abyss of a Divine act of pure giving - the election of man, from nonentity, to be the beloved of God, and therefore (in some sense) the needed and desired of God, who but for that act needs and desires nothing, since He eternally has, and is, all goodness. And that act is for our sakes. It is good for us to know love; and best for us to know the love of the best object, God. But to know it as a love in which we were primarily the wooers and God the wooed, in which we sought and He was found, in which His conformity to our needs, not ours to His, came first, would be to know it in a form false to the very nature of things. For we are only creatures: our role must always be that of patient to agent, female to male, mirror to light, echo to voice. Our highest activity must be response, not initiative. To experience the love of God in a true, and not an illusory form, is therefore to experience it as our surrender to His demand, our conformity to His desire: to experience it in the opposite way is, as it were, a solecism against the grammar of being.
- The Problem of Pain
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