Todd’s thoughts on 1 John 4
Dear Friends,
Let us love one another, for love is from God, everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.
Is everyone who is capable of loving also born of God and do they bear witness to God in some firsthand basic way? Maybe this is not basic but pretty much everything– to receive God, is to receive the author of love. Can you administer love, child of God, but reject the one from whom your instinct to love comes from?
If you don’t love, it is obvious that you do not know God. If you DO love, than it is obvious that you are a witness to God and his instincts are embedded in you, his creation.
And God took everything lofty and philosophical about this conversation and brought into a practical and tangible, first hand experience for humanity, when he incarnated Himself among us in his son, Jesus, so that we might live through love.
This is love, not that we responded by loving God, but just that He loved us by atoning for every one of sin’s shortcomings— thus welcoming us and fully accepting us by God’s love in action, Jesus the Christ.
Sin is real. From God’s perspective, our shortcomings were obviously coming between us, so God did what only he could do to make things better on both sides of the relationship between God and humanity.
OK, so now that we are restored to God, we had better be unified through our love for one another. We can see God in eachother manifest through our love for each other. Nobody has seen God, but when we love each other, we manifest his measurable properties that he is present.
God lives in us for this purpose– to complete us by or willingness to participate in him and with him by loving him and each other. His love in us makes himself known to the world and makes him measurable like wind given form when harnessed in a sail. We are the sail for God, and by love our sail is filled for action, momentum, wholeness, healing, salvation, truth, life, and all of the qualities of love (see 1 Cor. 13). Because of love, people will like us and not be turned off by Jesus and will choose to be restored to God.
How can anyone come to salvation if they do not love God? Can any of us be saved if we have not love? This is why Jesus will say on the day of judgement, yes, you did a lot of stuff in my name, but I do not know you– he has no relationship with us outside of his love. We cannot discover and know him without loving each other. (see 1 John 4:19-21)
“And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him. In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgement, because in THIS world we are like him. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not mde perfect in love.” 1 John :16-18
