Quote Source – C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Lewis knew what it costs to love a broken world. Real love isn’t a warm feeling you conjure up when people are kind to you. It’s a decision you keep making even when the world takes and takes and never quite pays you back. And that’s exactly why so many of us run dry. We try to love out of what we have left over at the end of the day, instead of out of what God has already promised to give us before the day even starts.
Living from God’s promises means something more than believing they’re printed somewhere in a Bible on your shelf. It means letting those promises set the terms for how you spend your one life—your time, your money, your reputation, even your safety. A Christian who actually believes God will supply every need and finish the good work He started, raise the dead on the last day and is free to spend Himself on people who can’t repay Him.
Fear Runs the World; Promise Runs the Kingdom
Most of the love we see around us is fear wearing a nicer coat. People love conditionally because they’re afraid of being used, afraid of loss, afraid there won’t be enough left for them if they give too freely. That fear isn’t irrational—apart from Christ, it’s the sane response to a world with no guarantees. Scripture names the root of it plainly: the fear of death, which holds people in lifelong slavery until something breaks its grip.
So that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us. We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain. [Hebrews 6:18-19]
An anchor doesn’t keep a boat from feeling the storm. It keeps the boat from being destroyed by it. That’s what God’s promises do for love. They don’t make loving people painless—it still costs plenty—but they hold you steady enough to keep loving through the cost instead of quitting when it comes due.
A Love the World Cannot Manufacture
John states the sequence bluntly: we love because He first loved us. Love that starts with an empty tank always turns into transaction eventually—you give so you can get. But love that starts overflowing from a promised inheritance, a promised resurrection, a promised presence that never leaves, doesn’t need the world to reimburse it. That’s the paradox running through Lewis’s larger argument in Mere Christianity: set your heart on Heaven, and you end up loving earth better, not worse. Chase the world directly for what it can give you, and you’ll love it poorly, protectively, with one eye always on the exit.
This is why the martyrs could forgive their executioners, why persecuted believers keep planting churches in places that hate them, why ordinary Christians quietly forgive debts and keep showing up for people who’ve hurt them before. They aren’t braver than everyone else by nature. They’re just spending from a supply that doesn’t run out when the world refuses to refill it.
Living It Out Today
Practically, this looks like small, unglamorous risks: giving generously when your budget says you can’t, staying in a hard relationship instead of walking away, and telling the truth even when silence would be safer. None of that comes from optimism about people. It comes from certainty about God. Trust His promises, and loving the world stops being a gamble you might lose. It becomes the natural overflow of a life that’s already been secured.
Salvation – Eternal Life in Less Than 150 Words
Distributed by – BCWorldview.org
Editor Comment: In an anxious age that measures love by risk and scarcity, remembering God's sure promises frees Christians to give without fear of running out.