The Letters of John John 4:7-12 love one another The rest of John 4 is about God being love. This is divided into three sections, the first 7-12 is about our need to love one another, the next 13-16 is about living in love and the last 17-21 is about perfecting that love. Today I will be looking at loving one another. In verse 7, John tells us that we must love one another because love is from God. We can love because God gives us love. We are not talking about some human emotion but a divine love sent from God. This is the love that is a fruit of the spirit. It is evidence that we are born of God and know God. It is not enough to just be born of God. That is merely the walking through the gate of the sheep pen. To reach the pasture we must follow Jesus. This means we must grow in knowledge of God for the rest of our lives. To emphasise the point, John presents the negative (v8). If we do not love then we do not know God. How is this so? Because God is love. It is in His nature to be love. We can only know love if we know God. Verse 9 emphasises that this love is not found just anywhere. The only source of this love is God. We cannot achieve love without receiving it from God because He is love. God’s love is displayed in a very practical way by Him sending Jesus into the world so that we can have life through Him. Without Jesus atoning sacrifice we cannot have access to God. That is love, that He loved us so much He sent His son as the atoning sacrifice for our sin. For this reason we should love one another. This is the proof that God lives in us. The first fruit of the spirit (Galatians 5:22). No-one has ever seen God, even though the Old Testament is full of examples of people who came face to face with God, these encounters were incomplete because we can only see God completely through Jesus. These verses are hard. We are told to love others and show that love as proof we love God, but this is such a hard thing to do. It is so easy to love the people who are easy to get along with, but what about the people who are not loving to us? The people who hurt us? The people who seek to destroy our reputation? It is so much harder to love them. Yet we are required to do that. So how do we love the hard to love? The only way we can even begin to do that is through constant prayer, quiet time with God and reading the Bible. As I worked on these verses I was reminded of someone who has been really nasty to me. I have forgiven her but God brought to mind an attitude I had to her that showed I was withholding my love from her. I know I can only correct that through a lot of prayer and reliance on God. My experience is not unusual, all people struggle like that. We will never be perfect in this world, but we can work at it and look forward to the day when we are in heaven and do not have to struggle any more. That is love.
Posted on: Sat, 01 Feb 2014 05:17:09 +0000
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