“The two most difficult things to get straight in life are love and God.  More often than not, the mess people make of their lives can be traced to failure or stupidity or meanness in one or both of these areas.

The basic and biblical Christian conviction is that the two subjects are intricately related.  If we want to deal with God the right ways, we have to learn to love the right way.  If we want to love the right way, we have to deal with God the right way.  God and love cannot be separated.

John’ three letters provide wonderfully explicit direction in how this works. Jesus the Messiah, is the focus:  Jesus provides the full and true understanding of God; Jesus shows us the mature working-out of love.  In Jesus, God and love are linked accurately, intricately, and indissolubly.

But there are always people around who don’t want to be pinned down to the God Jesus reveals, to the love Jesus reveals.  They want to make up their own idea of God, make up their own style of love.  John was a pastor to a church (churches) disrupted by some of these people.  In these letters we see him reestablishing the original and organic unity of God and love that comes to focus and becomes available to us in Jesus Christ.”  –Eugene Peterson, Introduction to John’s letters, The Message Bible

GOD IS LOVE—LOVE IS GOD

1 John 4, The Message

Don’t Believe Everything You Hear

4 My dear friends, don’t believe everything you hear. Carefully weigh and examine what people tell you. Not everyone who talks about God comes from God. There are a lot of lying preachers loose in the world.

^2-3 Here’s how you test for the genuine Spirit of God. Everyone who confesses openly his faith in Jesus Christ—the Son of God, who came as an actual flesh-and-blood person—comes from God and belongs to God. And everyone who refuses to confess faith in Jesus has nothing in common with God. This is the spirit of antichrist that you heard was coming. Well, here it is, sooner than we thought!

^4-6 My dear children, you come from God and belong to God. You have already won a big victory over those false teachers, for the Spirit in you is far stronger than anything in the world. These people belong to the Christ-denying world. They talk the world’s language and the world eats it up. But we come from God and belong to God. Anyone who knows God understands us and listens. The person who has nothing to do with God will, of course, not listen to us. This is another test for telling the Spirit of Truth from the spirit of deception.

God Is Love

^7-10 My beloved friends, let us continue to love each other since love comes from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and experiences a relationship with God. The person who refuses to love doesn’t know the first thing about God, because God is love—so you can’t know him if you don’t love. This is how God showed his love for us: God sent his only Son into the world so we might live through him. This is the kind of love we are talking about—not that we once upon a time loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to clear away our sins and the damage they’ve done to our relationship with God.

^11-12 My dear, dear friends, if God loved us like this, we certainly ought to love each other. No one has seen God, ever. But if we love one another, God dwells deeply within us, and his love becomes complete in us—perfect love!

^13-16 This is how we know we’re living steadily and deeply in him, and he in us: He’s given us life from his life, from his very own Spirit. Also, we’ve seen for ourselves and continue to state openly that the Father sent his Son as Savior of the world. Everyone who confesses that Jesus is God’s Son participates continuously in an intimate relationship with God. We know it so well, we’ve embraced it heart and soul, this love that comes from God.

To Love, to Be Loved

^17-18 God is love. When we take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives in us. This way, love has the run of the house, becomes at home and mature in us, so that we’re free of worry on Judgment Day—our standing in the world is identical with Christ’s. There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love banishes fear. Since fear is crippling, a fearful life—fear of death, fear of judgment—is one not yet fully formed in love.

¹⁹ We, though, are going to love—love and be loved. First we were loved, now we love. He loved us first.

^20-21 If anyone boasts, “I love God,” and goes right on hating his brother or sister, thinking nothing of it, he is a liar. If he won’t love the person he can see, how can he love the God he can’t see? The command we have from Christ is blunt: Loving God includes loving people. You’ve got to love both.

Lord,

I love you with all my heart, mind, and soul.  It is easy to love those who also love you.  Help me to love others, even my enemies, with your love guiding all I think, say, and do as I relate to you and to others.  May I love others like you love me so others will know you, too, by the love we share.

In Jesus Name, Amen