Day 3 (Wednesday) – 1 John 4:7-21
Today’s Passage
Read the passage – 1 John 4:7-21
Loving relationships are at the heart of Christian faith. God’s love for us in turn leads to our love of others. When we consider love, does our head knowledge match our heart knowledge? Is love just intellectual? On a practical level, John makes a radical statement that if we cannot love a brother or sister in Christ, we cannot love God. Love must characterise us as believers. Read the passage again. What are you challenged by in the passage?
Prayer
- Holy Spirit, equip me with wisdom and love to serve others faithfully.
- Thank God for His love to us in Jesus.
- Ask God to renew your love for others.
- Ask that our local churches would be characterised by love.
- Pray that love would run so deep in us that people would know the authenticity of our faith.
Go Deeper
Patrick Mitchel, The Message of Love: The Only Thing That Counts, ed. Derek Tidball, The Bible Speaks Today (London: Inter-Varsity Press, 2019), 105–106, 111-113.
Within 1 John, the use of love language begins to intensify in chapter 3 (9 occurrences) but peaks within chapter 4 (27 occurrences). There are a remarkable 15 uses of the noun or verb for love in the eight verses of 1 John 4:7–14, making it the most ‘love-saturated’ text in the Bible. It is also the most theologically developed section on love within the letter. Famously, of course, it contains the phrase “God is love” (v.8, repeated in v.16).
John’s words cut right to the marrow of human pride and self-sufficiency. It is not that John is saying humans are incapable of love, but that we can know the God who is love and be transformed to live a life of love only by depending on what God has done for us in His Son. John’s consistent emphasis is that there will be visible evidence if someone ‘abides in’ and thus knows God—that evidence is love.
Conversely, “whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen” (v.20). A second tangible ‘proof’ that believers can be assured they “live in Him and He in us” is that “He has given us of His Spirit” (v.13). It is the Spirit who makes known God’s presence and love.
Knowing God must be transformative, and for John, that transformation means to love—at least to a limited degree—like God Himself: “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them” (v.16). What this looks like in practice could not be more exalted—“in this world we are like Jesus” (v.17). To be like Jesus is to live a life of obedient, self-giving love.
Songs for Worship and Reflection
