“This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10).

You don’t have to approve of someone’s conduct to love that person. Before we believed in Jesus our conduct certainly didn’t deserve God’s approval. We were living to please ourselves and were acting as though we didn’t need Him. We ignored Him and disobeyed Him in countless ways. Yet, He loved us then anyway.

C. S. Lewis said he didn’t understand hating the sin and loving the sinner until he realized that he had been doing that with himself all his life. He hated his sin but never stopped loving himself. That’s how God felt about us before we turned our lives over to Him. He hated our sin but He never stopped loving us.

Thankfully, He showed His love to us by what He did for us. He “sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” Once we receive by faith what Jesus did for us we are able to return God’s love by surrendering ourselves to Him in gratitude. That is the exciting moment in our lives when we begin to really enjoy a loving relationship with the God who created us. But with all that it is important to remember that our relationship with Him is because He loved us before we loved Him.