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Wisdom from the Holy Bible

Before you can love others, you must receive God's love for yourself, because you cannot give away something you don't have.
God deeply and intimately loves you! His love for you is unconditional—no strings attached, and there is nothing that you can do to get God not to love you. St. Paul the Apostle in his epistle to Romans 8:38-39 says that there is nothing that can ever separate us from God's love.

Knowing that God loves you is central to your understanding of the Gospel, for the entire Gospel is based on God's love (See John 3:16, Romans 5:8, 1 John 3:16, 1 John 4:9-10). The good news is that God hasn't withheld His love from us; instead, God has poured out His love into our hearts (Romans 5:5).

But what do we do with that love? We know God loves us, but so what? What should we do with God's love? Give it away! Since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another (1 John 4:11). In other words, our response to the news of God's love for us needs to be to love others. Indeed, our Lord Jesus repeatedly commanded us to love others (See Matthew 5:43-47, Mark 12:28-31, Luke 6:27-35, John 13:34-35, John 15:12,17).

However, it is impossible to love others unless you know, believe and receive God's love. 1 John 4:19 says, we love because He first loved us. In other words, we are able to love other people, because God first showed His love to us. If God hadn't shown His love to us, we would have no standard and no example on which to base our love for others.

Similarly, 1 John 4:7 says, “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God.” Here again, our ability to love one another is only because love comes from God.

Think of your ability to love others like a glass of water. At first, the glass is empty. If you don't have any water in your glass, then you obviously can't give water to anyone else. But when you hold your glass under a faucet and let the water pour out into your glass, it will fill up. Then, once it is full, your glass will overflow, and you can let the water pour out to everyone around you.

If you don't have love in you, then you can't give love to anyone else. Therefore, you must first receive God's love, before you can love one another.

God loves you not because of what you do, but because of who He is.
At its heart, the Gospel is the story of a God who so deeply loves you and me that he was willing to humble himself, to suffer, and to pay the ultimate price just so that we could personally know him. We were powerless; there was nothing we could do to know God. Yet, he loved us so much that he gave us an opportunity to know him.

Romans 5:6-8 gets at the heart of how deeply God loves us: You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

We didn't earn or deserve God's love (we were still powerless and we were still sinners). However, God loved us anyway, because God is love (1 John 4:8) -- that is, his nature is love. God can't help but to love us, because that's what he is.

In Ephesians 2:4-5, St. Paul the apostle writes about the nature of God's love for us: Because of His great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions - it is by grace you have been saved.

Nothing you do can cause you to earn or deserve God's love. You can't earn God's love, but he loves you anyway -- that's why it's called grace. God loves you, because he is love not because you have earned his love.