Love One Another

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love. In this the love of God was manifested toward us, that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another... There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment... We love Him because He first loved us. (1 John 4:7–19)

The invisible God is made visible to the world through the tangible love expressed in His people.

A Familiar but Vital Theme

I'm going to attempt something unprecedented in our study of 1 John—preaching through more than three verses at once. Joking aside, I believe God has something He wants to speak to us here. John returns in this passage to a topic he has been pressing throughout the letter: love.

We've already seen it. In 1 John 2:5 he writes that whoever keeps God's Word truly has the love of God perfected in him. In 1 John 3:1 he marvels at the manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God. And in 1 John 3:11 he says this is the message we heard from the beginning, that we should love one another.

This is the teaching Jesus gave His disciples on the night He was betrayed. But it is not only the teaching of Jesus—it is the teaching of the Old Testament as well, specifically Leviticus 19. As I was praying, though, I recognized that maybe we don't have the fullest comprehension of what love is. Our culture certainly thinks it does.

What Love Actually Means

John explains the love he means. In 1 John 3:16, "By this we know love, because He laid down His life for us. And we also ought to lay down our lives for the brethren." Two verses later he adds, "Let us not love in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth." And in verse 23, this is God's commandment: that we believe on the name of His Son Jesus Christ and love one another.

That is the backdrop for our text. If you grew up in a Protestant Bible church like I did, you may even hear a little song in your head when you read these verses. It's good to commit truth to memory, because these verses make up the core of the Christian faith and of the gospel.

This brings us to the first point: Christians love one another in response to God's great love. Now this is fascinating to me. For the last few weeks I've been talking about identifying and separating from false teachers, and because of our misunderstandings of love, some might say that sounds unloving. Our culture says love is most perfectly revealed in constantly accepting everything and everyone. But that is not what this passage teaches.

The Propitiation for Our Sins

How do we know God's great love? "By this we know love, because He laid down His life for us." That word propitiation in verse 10 means the payment—Jesus deals with the problem of sin that you and I could not deal with ourselves.

Man has been trying to deal with the stain of sin since sin first came. Genesis 3 describes the first sin, and what is sin? John tells us in this very book: sin is lawlessness. When Adam and Eve ate of the tree, their eyes were opened, they saw they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves. That was man's first attempt of many to deal with sin on his own—and it is insufficient. Every religious effort to deal with the stain and shame of sin is insufficient. So God sent forth His Son to be the payment for our sins, a demonstration of His love: "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son."

This is not a novel truth I'm bringing you. You've heard it many times, because it is the ground on which the entire Christian faith is built. It is the truth Christians have taught their youngest children for centuries.

God Is Love—Not Love Is God

John tells us God is love. Those three words are not unknown in our culture; they're deeply embedded in Western thought. But have we ever taken time to understand what it means? It tells us something about the very heart of God: at His core He is love. We see this even in the doctrine of the Trinity—one God in three persons—where love exists eternally within the Godhead.

But our culture has flipped the words around and now lives as if love is God. For most of our culture, the supreme form of love is sexual intimacy, and they treat that as God. That is not what Scripture says. When we understand God rightly, it changes the way we understand reality. And the further we move from these truths—God's nature, what God did in Christ, and our ethical response—the more the wickedness of man shows through, as we have seen so vividly in our nation these last weeks.

When the Foundations Are Removed

I'm not saying atrocities are the direct result of these truths being unknown, but they are certainly a cause. I read this last week in The Federalist by a writer named Bella Mo: "Once upon a time you had meaning. You knew you had meaning because you had a mom and a dad who told you so, and a God who loved you, in a community that needed you."

He continues, "We have created a society that now offers almost none of these things that make people truly happy—family, community, spiritual belonging. These are the foundational and primal building blocks of human happiness, and they are rapidly disappearing. The outcome is predictable: isolation, depression, anxiety, despondency, drug abuse, and death."

We live in a culture with more available to us than at almost any time in history, yet we see exactly that. He goes on: "When we destroy the church—the very institution that has been our bedrock of values, morality, and redemption for thousands of years—despair, immorality, desperation, and evil combine, and we know exactly what happens." His last line: "Destroy the family, abandon the community, raze the church to the ground. What could go wrong? Everything."

Interesting but "Useless"?

A couple of days before Christmas I found a box on my doorstep. Those who know me know I have a thing for Apple products—watch, phone, iPad, iMac, laptop. So what do you give a guy who has all that? Inside was a Macintosh 512, the second edition Macintosh, with floppy discs. It still worked—you turn it on and it beeps—but it's practically useless. It's interesting because it shows us where we came from.

That is how our culture treats the truth of Scripture: interesting, a relic of where we came from, but practically useless. I want to suggest that the things in Scripture are vital, and we see their value precisely in what happens to a society that moves away from them.

A follower of Christ exhibits connection to God by loving other people. The inverse is also true: if God is love and love flows from Him, then those connected to Him display love, and those separated from Him display a lack of love. Look at our culture. I reveal that I know God by loving others as He has loved me, and I reveal that I do not know God by my lack of love.

Love as an Expression of God's Character

This brings us to the second point: Christians love as an expression of God's character. Paul writes in Galatians 5:22 that the fruit of the Spirit is love—fruit, singular. From love flow joy, peace, kindness, gentleness, self-control, and so on. The evidence that God's Spirit is in my life is love, and that love produces all the rest.

We cannot see God, because God is spirit and God is holy. We are not holy; if we saw Him we could not stand in His presence. But we see the evidence of His presence through love in the life of His followers. This is why Jesus said in John 13:34, "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another as I have loved you. By this all people will know that you are My disciples." The evidence that I have trusted and am following Jesus is self-sacrificial love.

Therefore, in 1 John 4:11, "Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another." Circle those words "ought to"—it's ethical language. The word "if" here can also be translated "since," as the NIV reads: "Since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another."

The Invisible God Made Visible

When I follow Jesus' example—loving God, loving His people, even loving those outside who would count us as enemies—what follows? Verse 12: "No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God abides in us, and His love has been perfected in us." That word perfected means made manifest, revealed. We get to manifest God's glory by His love being resident in us.

This is point three: the invisible God becomes visible through His tangible love expressed in His people. His invisibility is a problem for modern Westerners who disbelieve the supernatural. The atheist Bertrand Russell, asked what he would say if he died and stood before God, replied, "I will tell God You did not give me enough evidence." Most people you interact with say the same thing.

But what is the supreme evidence? Love. And this is striking, because you cannot prove love by scientific experiment or empirical verification, yet we all know it is there; we see its effects. God reveals His nature through the love of His people. Since God is known through that love, it makes sense that Jesus commands His disciples to love—it's not a suggestion.

The Power to Obey the Command

The awesome reality is that you and I cannot fulfill the commands of God in our own strength, but God working in us by His Spirit causes us to will and to do His good pleasure. Consider the man with the withered hand. I assume he tried to stretch it out every morning of his life and it never worked. Then Jesus commanded, "Stretch forth your hand," and with the command came the enabling power. So Jesus says to us, "Love one another as I have loved you." I am wholly incapable in myself, but by His power I can.

All the commandments can be reduced to two. In Matthew 22 a lawyer—an expert in the 613 laws of the Pentateuch—asked Jesus the greatest commandment. Jesus answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength," and "You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets." All 613 laws, and even the writings of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Zephaniah, Malachi—all of it—wrapped up in this: love God, love one another. Paul echoes this in Galatians 5:14: "All the law is fulfilled in one word: You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

Assurance Through Righteousness and Love

When we fulfill the command, look at verse 13: "By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us, because He has given us His Spirit." And the fruit of the Spirit is love. This is point four: the abiding presence of God's love in my life assures me of my connection to Him.

John gives two assurances in this letter that we are connected to God: righteousness and love. In 1 John 2:3, "By this we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments"—that's righteousness. Verse 5, "Whoever keeps His word, truly the love of God is perfected in him." In 1 John 3:18, love is not in word or tongue but in deed and truth, and by this we assure our hearts before Him. In 3:24, He who keeps His commandments abides in God, and by the Spirit—whose fruit is love—we know it.

I cannot produce either righteousness or love apart from God's power. So when I see the overflow of His power helping me to walk in rightness and to show love, it proves I am connected to Him. Religion says you must make yourself right before God, and some of you have lived that way, in frustration and despair—like the man trying to stretch his withered hand without Jesus. But when God is in you by His Spirit, He enables you to love and walk in rightness, because He works in you both to will and to do His good pleasure (Philippians 2:13).

Past Love, Present Assurance, Future Boldness

This brings us to point five: God's love demonstrated in the past—Jesus on the cross—brings me assurance in the present and boldness in the future. Verse 17: "Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness in the day of judgment."

How many of you, at some point, have been fearful about future judgment? Modern Westerners say that fear is just imposed by an oppressive Christian culture. But I suggest that fear of judgment is written upon your very psyche by the God who created you. It is accentuated by two thousand years of cultural history, yes, but it is written on the human heart—this recognition of moral accountability. And when a culture removes all moral responsibility, people walk into a Walmart and shoot twenty-one people, because they believe they will answer to no one.

But if I have received the love of God in Christ, I can have boldness in that day. Not because I am perfect, not because I kept the law well, but because He loved me. This is the very thing the Jehovah's Witness or the Latter-day Saint lacks. They are often good, moral people with good families who tithe and go on missions—but they do not have assurance. That's why they're knocking on your door. The Book of Mormon says you're saved by grace after all you can do. I am saved by the grace of God demonstrated in the love of Jesus on the cross, and therefore I have boldness in the day of judgment.

The Good News

"There is no fear in love; perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment." If you are afraid of future punishment and are not confident of your standing with God today, you have not received the fullness of God's love. Paul says in Romans 3, "All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." In Romans 6, "The wages of sin is death." But Romans 5:8, "God demonstrated His love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." The gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus.

Therefore Romans 10:9: "If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved." Saved from sin, death, and the wrath of God—because Jesus bore my sin, died on the cross, and took God's wrath upon Himself so that you and I could receive grace and forgiveness. This is the demonstration of the love of God, and this is the message we are given to share with everyone around us who is in desperate need of it, to bring them back into connection with God and with one another.

Closing Prayer

God, thank You for the truth of the Scriptures. We thank You, Jesus, that You make it possible for us to know assurance and boldness, confidence, hope, and joy. We thank You for what You give us in Christ, and that You demonstrated Your love toward us in that, while we were still sinners, You died in our place. If we trust in You and call upon You, You will rescue and save us. We praise You today.

If you are still fearful of judgment, without that peace and assurance, Jesus died on the cross to deal with all of our sin and punishment and to make us whole. Paul said, "Whoever calls upon the Lord shall be saved." If that's you, pray with me where you are: Dear Jesus, I know I cannot deal with my own sin. I thank You that You died on the cross for me and rose from the dead so You could give me new life. I pray that You would come into my life, forgive me of my sin, and help me to follow You by faith. In Jesus' name. Amen.