January 12, we are the objects of His love

We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the Divine love may rest 'well pleased'.
-C.S. Lewis

When the human race chose sin we became filthy creatures. Period. In our walk with God I think we, and maybe rightly so, see ourselves at almost all points in the road as filthy creatures who need cleansing, who need correcting, who need healing, who need... to not be filthy. Yes, this is absolute truth, we are filthy creatures. The cleansing blood of Christ is the only reason we are able to come before the Father; not because we have made ourselves clean but because Christ, Jesus has cleansed us.

But we are still here, still living on earth in the flesh, still battling our filth and at least, as far as I'm concerned, still consider ourselves horribly filthy on a daily basis. I'm afraid whenever I start feeling the least bit clean pride begins to creep in and I no longer attribute my cleanliness to the One who cleansed me but to my works. Yuck, that's about as filthy as we can get. "Not by works..." Titus 3:5

And now I do a 180 and say, but God created us so that He may love us. I know He loves me. I know that Christ gave His life up for me. I know that God created me. But I can't say that I often sit and think to myself, "God created me so that He might pour His love upon me." I think Lewis is correct in this statement. I can't come up with any argument against it but I certainly don't sit around thinking along these lines. Wow. How much more would we desire to bless Him if we did sit around and think, "I was created so that He may love me"?

God created you to love. Your weren't an accident. You weren't an experiment. You weren't made by your parents. God made you to be an object of His love; not simply a messenger, not simply someone to adore Him, not simply another gear in the machine, but so that He might love you.

Ah, but now we get to choose whether or not we want His love...

When Christianity says that God loves man, it means that God loves man: not that He has some 'disinterested', because really indifferent, concern for our welfare, but that, in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the 'lord of terrible aspect', is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work and despotic as man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. How this should be, I do know know.... We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the Divine love may rest 'well pleased'. To ask that God's love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God: because He is what He is, His love must, in the nature of things, be impeded and repelled, by certain stains in our present character, and because He already loves us He must labour to make us lovable. We cannot even wish, in our better moments, that He could reconcile Himself to our present impurities.
-C.S. Lewis
The Business of Heaven