The first condition, then, of what is called a selfish love among men is lacking with God. He has no natural necessities, no passion, to compete with His wish for the beloved's welfare; or if there is in Him something which we have to imagine after the analogy of a passion, a want it is there by His own will and for our sakes. And the second condition is lacking too. The real interests of a child may differ from that which his father's affection instinctively demands, because the child is a separate being from the father with a nature which has its own needs and does not exist solely for the father nor find its whole perfection in being loved by him and which the father does not fully understand. But creatures are not thus separate from their Creator, nor can He misunderstand them. The place for which He designs them in His scheme of things is the place they are made for. When they reach it their nature is fulfilled and their happiness attained: a broken bone in the universe has been set, the anguish is over. When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy. Those Divine demands which sound to our natural ears most like those of a despot and least like those of a lover, in fact marshal us where we should want to go, if we knew what we wanted. He demands our worship, our obedience, our prostration. .C.s. Lewis
About This Quote
This quote is very insightful. In the example given, it is clear that Jesus wants us to worship him and obey his will. He does not want us to be selfish and demand that he should love us in a way that we can never be satisfied. Jesus says that we should love him because he loves us.
This is a very healthy view of a healthy relationship. A father would never want to be in a relationship where he was just a burden on the son's life. We need to realize that the only reason we are here to love Jesus is because he loves us.
We cannot say that we love him because we want something from him or because we do not understand his intentions for us. We need to let go of our selfishness and let Jesus love us because he wants to.
Source: The Problem Of Pain
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