1 JOHN 4:7-12 EVERYONE WHO LOVES IS BORN OF GOD AND KNOWS GOD

1 John 4:7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. 8 He who does not love does not know God, for God is love. 9 In this the love of God was manifested toward us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him. 10 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. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 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.

First, love is the proof that we're in the fellowship. 

First time he's saying it means you belong to the community of believers. 

 Second, love is the evidence of our sonship. 

Second time it means you belong to the family of God Himself

 This time he identifies it as that perfect love which is not just a proof of fellowship, not just an evidence of sonship, but a manifestation of the presence of God in us. .  Third time it means God dwells in you. 

 And so, typical of John in this epistle, cycling back through the same great moral proofs and doctrinal proofs of salvation, but always with a richer and deeper purpose. 

And so John comes for the last time to this theme, with greater depth, greater breadth, greater insight.  The chapter 2 section was a few verses, the chapter 3 a little more, and the chapter 4, more yet.

If you love, you obey.  If you obey, you demonstrate love.

 

These are the three reasons Christians are to love one another: first, because God is love and we are of God; second, because God loved us in Christ and so revealed his love to us; and third, because God is at work in us by his Spirit to bring that love to completion.^[1]

V7-8 It's a love basically that is granted to someone who needs to be loved, not to someone who somehow is attracting that love.  It is love that chooses to love because there is a need to be loved, no matter how unattractive the person might be.  Who chooses out of that love sacrificial service because there is a need for that service and an opportunity for that sacrifice.

Here it is a demonstration of the life of God in us. 

Reason number one, because love is the fundamental nature of God

God is light(truth demonstrated in our life) and God is life.  And here we find out God is also love.  If we then know God, if the life of God is in us and the light of God is in us, then the love of God is in us. If you're going to call yourself a Christian, if you're going to say you are God's and you belong to God and you truly are His, then conduct yourself as He would, with love.

Love does not define God, God defines love. Eph 4:15 but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head--Christ—

 If God was only Law, He would leave me to the consequence of their sin.  The moral law would operate, the soul would die, eternal justice would damn the soul. 

God defines what love is.  He defines it by His kindness, His generosity, His goodness and His redemptive grace.  All that those difficulties tell us is what sin has done and they provide a background for us to understand the greatness of God's love. 

there's a sense in which He shows love even to the unregenerate, even to those who ultimately will go out of His presence forever. 

 How is that love manifest?  Common grace.  The world is a beautiful place.  The sun shines on the just and the unjust, the rain falls on the just and the unjust.  God's goodness pervades the world in which we live. 

There's another way God manifests His love on a temporal, physical level and that is compassion.  God expresses throughout history pity and compassion and tender-heartedness toward man that causes Him to withhold judgment.  Every sinner should die at the strike of the first sin, right?  "The wages of sin is death."

A third way in which it's expressed is the myriad of warnings that are given to sinners.  The Bible is filled with them..filled with them, warning about what is coming.  All the warnings of the Bible are evidences of the compassion of God.  God finds no pleasure in the death of the wicked. 

And fourthly, by extending the gospel offered to the ends of the earth.  The light that lights every man that comes into the world, the truth of God which can be known by every man so that if they don't live up to the truth that they've been given, they're without excuse, Romans 1.  And then He sends His ministers over the face of the earth to tell the story of the gospel to every creature. 

There's another kind of love in which God loves His own, this is a marvelous love.  John 13:1, "Before the feast of the Passover, Jesus knowing that His hour had come that He should depart out of this world to the Father.  the next part of verse 1, He loved them perfectly He loved us, literally, into perfection.

V9-10 Second reason, we are to love with this perfect love not only because it is the nature of God to love, but because this love was manifest by Christ. 

Isaiah chapter 53 "He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities, the chastening for our well being fell upon Him and by His scourging we are healed."  Verse 6 then, this wonderful verse, "All of us like sheep have gone astray, each one of us is turned to his own way, but the Lord has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on Him."  Second Corinthians 5:21, "He who knew no sin became sin for us."  Galatians 3:13, "He was made a curse for us." 1Peter 3:18 the just for the unjust

V11 We ought a command, talks about we must, should, a debt we owe, Paul Rom 1 a debtor to the

Go back to chapter 3 verse 16.  "We know love by this, that He laid down His life for us and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren." That's it.  No one who has truly been to the cross, no one who has really stood there and seen God's love displayed in which God would take His holy, beloved Son and slaughter Him, as it were, under the fury of His wrath under the weight and the guilt of all the sins of all who had ever believed, no one has ever stood there and comprehended that kind of sacrifice and truly possessed the life of God and then gone back to a life of selfishness.  If you have, you don't know God.  You are not begotten of Him.  Our ability to love comes from the life of God in us.  Our duty to love is demanded by the immensity of the sacrifice of the Father in the giving of His Son.  That love is our standard and we understand the cross because we couldn't experience salvation without understanding it.

V12 Third reason.  We are also to love because love is our testimony "No one has beheld God at any time.  If we love one another, God abides in us and His love is perfected in us."  No one has beheld God at any time.  No one has ever seen God.  Why is he saying that here?  Why is he bringing that up.  He's simply pointing up the fact that nobody can see God, so how are people going to know of His power and His glory if we love one another?  God abides in us, He's perfecting His love in us and thus He's putting Himself on display.  That's the point.  If we love one another, God is on display.  By this, Jesus said in John 13:34 and 35, shall men know that you're My disciples if you have love for one another. 

God didn't just give us love, He gave us an example of love.  And then He made love the way in which He discloses Himself to those who could never see Him.  You, if you are a true Christian, have the capacity to love, you have the example to love, and you have the responsibility to love, cause that's how you prove you belong to God.  That's how you express His love in sacrificial service to others and that's how you witness to the watching world.  Love then becomes core to our Christian experience.

 

At this point it would be good for us to review what John has been saying about the basic truth that “God is love.”

This truth is revealed to us in the Word, but it was also revealed on the cross, where Christ died for us. “God is love” is not simply a doctrine in the Bible; it is an eternal fact clearly demonstrated at Calvary. God has said something to us, and God has done something for us.

But all this is preparation for the third great fact: God does something in us! We are not merely students reading a book, or spectators watching a deeply moving event. We are participants in the great drama of God’s love! Wiersbe, W. W. (1996). The Bible exposition commentary (Vol. 2, p. 518). Wheaton, IL: Victor Books.

When you read 1 John 4:12–16, you feel like saying, “So that’s what it’s all about!” Because here we discover what God had in mind when He devised His great plan of salvation.

To begin with, God’s desire is to live in us. He is not satisfied simply to tell us that He loves us, or even show us that He loves us.

It is interesting to trace God’s dwelling places as recorded in the Bible. In the beginning, God had fellowship with man in a personal, direct way (Gen. 3:8), but sin broke that fellowship. It was necessary for God to shed the blood of animals to cover the sins of Adam and Eve so that they might come back into His fellowship.^[1]

One of the key words in the Book of Genesis is walked. God walked with men, and men walked with God. Enoch^.  But by the time of the events recorded in Exodus, a change had taken place: God did not simply walk with men, He lived, or dwelt, with them. God’s commandment to Israel was, “And let them make Me a sanctuary; that I may dwell among them” (Ex. 25:8). The first of those sanctuaries was the tabernacle. When Moses dedicated it, the glory of God came down and moved into the tent (Ex. 40:33–35). Did the glory ever return? Yes—in the Person of God’s Son, Jesus Christ! “And the Word became flesh, and tabernacled among us, and we beheld His glory” (John 1:14, lit.). The glory of God dwelt on earth in the body of Jesus Christ, for His body was the temple of God (John 2:18–22). But wicked men nailed His body to a cross. They crucified “the Lord of glory” (1 Cor. 2:8). All this was part of God’s thrilling plan, and Christ arose from the dead, returned to heaven, and sent His Holy Spirit to dwell in men.

The glory of God now lives in the bodies of God’s children. “Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own?” (6:19, nasb) The glory of God departed from the tabernacle and the temple when Israel disobeyed God, but Jesus has promised that the Spirit will abide in us forever (John 14:16).^[1]

That important little word abide (or dwell, kjv) is used six times in 1 John 4:12–16. It refers to our personal fellowship with Jesus Christ. To abide in Christ means to remain in spiritual oneness with Him, so that no sin comes between us. Because we are “born of God,” we have union with Christ; but it is only as we trust Him and obey His commandments that we have communion with Him. Much as a faithful husband and wife “abide in love” though they may be separated by miles, so a believer abides in God’s love. This abiding is made possible by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit (1 John 4:13). If a man love Me, he will keep My words; and My Father will love him, and We will come unto him, and make Our abode with him” (John 14:23).

Three different witnesses are suggested in these verses: 1. The witness of the believer that Jesus Christ is God’s Son (1 John 4:15); 2. the witness in the believer by the Spirit (1 John 4:13); and 3. the witness through the believer that God is love and that He sent His Son to die for the world (1 John 4:14).

These witnesses cannot be separated. The world will not believe that God loves sinners until they see His love at work in His children’s lives.^[1]

Mark 8:36 "For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?

John 14:6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me. Have you trusted Him as your Savior? He can Save you if You ask Him based on His death, burial, and resurrection for your sins. Believe in Him for forgiveness of your sins today.

“And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”  -John 8:32

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