1 John 4:7-17 Daily Devotions: Selfless Love

1 John 4:7 Dear friends let us love one another for love comes from God.  Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 

John is speaking of agape love.  This love is different from romantic love.  It is a true selfless love.  Wherever self-sacrifice for others is the only motive, God is present.  To love like this is to know God and follow his Spirit. 

• 1 John 4:8 Whoever does not love does not know God because God is love.

God’s love is so central to His being that it is infectious.  When you really know God it changes you.  You can tell when a person is being transformed from the inside by God because they begin to make selfless choices.  Not always, but increasingly, they show genuine concern for others.  They pray.  They give gifts.  They say encouraging things.  They celebrate over the life victories of others. If this isn’t happening at all, then you can be pretty sure that a person doesn’t really have a relationship with God. 

• 1 John 4:9 This is how God showed his love among us: he sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.

I find this sentence fascinating: “he sent his one and only Son into the world that…” 

Pause for a moment and consider what John could have said here: 

“…we might know the character of God.”,

“…that our sins could be forgiven.”,

“…that God could assume his rightful place as king.”,

But instead we find: 

“…we might live through him.”

It strikes me that the “life” that is being talked about here is more than simply the life we know.  Jesus said that we must be “born again” to see the kingdom of God (John 3:3), and Jesus came so that we could be reborn through him.  Born to ETERNAL life… back into a permanent relationship with God.  Yes, Jesus lives his life in and through us now by his Spirit dwelling in us, but also we will be raised to live forever, just like Jesus was raised to live forevermore three days after his crucifixion.

• 1 John 4:10 This is love: not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

“Atonement” is an unfamiliar concept to us.  I heard a sermon about atonement many years ago and the pastor (Steve Harling) described losing a fancy hubcap from his car and having to search to find a shop to buy a replacement.  When he found one and arrived at the shop to buy it, he discovered that he was literally buying back his own hubcap that the shop owner had found along the side of the highway.  This is atonement, buying back something you once owned but subsequently lost. 

The Greek word used for atoning, in this verse, illasmon, is only used twice in the New Testament both times in 1 John.  In the Greek translation of the Old Testament, in Ezekiel 44:27, this same word is used to describe the animal sacrifice offered for the purification from sins under the law of Moses.  Unlike the sacrifices offered to pagan gods that were typically made to appease an angry god or curry their favor, God required a substitutionary sacrifice to pay the just debt for our sin.  You see, in the beginning God gave all the trees of the world as food for Adam, except that God forbid Adam from eating from one tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  God said to Adam, “On the day you eat of it you will surely die”.  When Adam and Eve ignored this command and were enticed by the Devil to rebel against God eating that fruit, they forfeited eternal life.  Mercifully God allowed them to have progeny, but we, as their heirs, too are barred from eternal life and must die. 

The animal sacrifices under the law could never pay the debt for our sin, thus they had to be repeated year after year (see Hebrews 10:1-10).  To fully atone for us God required a perfect sacrifice, thus he sent his Son, Jesus, as a man without sin to pay humanity’s collective debt and die in our place.  In this way both God’s word to Adam and the redemption of Adam’s line are simultaneously accomplished through Jesus’ atoning death.  Our redemption has a high price indeed.

• 1 John 4:11 Dear friends since God so loved us, we ought to love one another.

Jesus demonstrates his unwavering love for us in his willingness to associate with undeserving sinners and restore and redeem them, such as Zacchaeus, Mary Magdalene and me.  We are to view people as Jesus does, seeing what they could become in Christ not being turned away even by their animosity toward Jesus’ message.  Instead we patiently love them and pray for their salvation.  The NIV translation says that “since God so loved us…” but this translation is not as precise as the original Greek word “houtos” that is here translated “so”.  Houtos means “in this manner” or “like this” (this is true in John 3:16 too!).  John is not saying that the great extent of God’s love (which is undeniably amazing) makes us obligated, like a debt, to love one another, but rather the manner or way God loved us.  Psst.. Jesus loves you so much that he left heaven on a rescue mission, so he could come to earth expressly so he could die on a cross for you… pass it on!

• 1 John 4:12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

John is saying that no one has ever beheld God and perceived all that He is, truly grasping Him (the full sense of the Greek verb tethayahtai).  The promise that God will abide in us if we love one another is an amazing one.  In fact, the concept is more than just that God’s love is “made complete” in us, it is that His love has already been perfected in us and continues to be expressed through us (this is the full meaning of the perfect tense of this Greek verb, a past action with continuing ramifications forever in the future).  Our love for one another is evidence of a permanent change inside us.  We may not see or grasp His infinite eternal nature, but He is nonetheless God with us, Immanuel.  He fills the emptiness in us and asks us to share his love with others to help Him fill the emptiness in them as well.

• 1 John 4:13 This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit. 

Here is my translation: “By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us, because it comes from out of the Spirit He gave us that is still in us.”

The knowledge that God’s Spirit is in us is not just head knowledge.  The experience of having the Spirit in us guiding, directing, and confirming the truth of God’s word is itself the confirmation of His presence.  The Spirit is himself the origin of our confidence that we are in God.  I find that speaking is not the Spirit’s primary means of communication.  Often I feel him nudging my soul, like a gentle touch, that raises the hair on my arms, when something is said or thought or prayed that is true.  Sometimes He does speak in a quiet voice in your head if you can quiet your soul to listen.  Then he guides you to do the right thing, rather than the instinctive or even socially acceptable thing.  Not only can the Spirit show us the right choice, but if we ask Him, He even gives us the power to choose it.

• 1 John 4:14 And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the savior of the world.

Although I wasn’t there at the cross, I can honestly give testimony to Jesus saving me personally.  I had a dream where I said, “What if God were malevolent?” Even as I said this, in my heart, before I was even saved by Jesus, I knew that God wasn’t evil because I had read enough about Jesus to know that Jesus was good.  In that moment God turned his face from me and his Spirit withdrew from me and I knew fear.  A demon-wind howled in my ears and I awakened from the dream, scared.  My muscles were unresponsive, clenched, agonizing. 

When I cried out, “Jesus save me” everything changed.  The howling in my ears was silenced.  My clenched muscles relaxed.  The warmth of God’s Spirit returned.  I was awake and I felt God near me. 

Jesus is my Savior.

Although I was not physically there at the cross, spiritually his sacrifice has had a permanent impact on my life.  Jesus shows every sinner who repents unmerited favor, what we call grace.  He saves us from a mindset of vengeance and anger because we now view life through a lens of the grace that he extended to us while we were still lost in sin and deserving hell. Truly Jesus is the savior that God provided, the Messiah for the whole world:

Acts 4:12 “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.” 

• 1 John 4:15 If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God.

Acknowledge makes it sound too easy in English, too casual.  The Greek word means to declare, confess, profess, pledge, admit (in a court of law).  In Acts 24:14 Paul uses this same word when he “admits“ before Festus, in a trial setting, that he is a follower of the Way (of Christ).  We can be confident that God lives in us, but Jesus made it clear exactly what this entails: 

Luke 12:8  “I tell you, whoever publicly acknowledges me before others, the Son of Man will also acknowledge before the angels of God.”  

Acknowledge in this sense is not just a belief, but a willingness to make a public statement of this belief.  This is why it is so important for disciples to follow Jesus’s command and be baptized.  Baptism is a public confession of faith that declares that an individual is trusting in and identifying with the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus, the Son of God.

• 1 John 4:16 And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.  God is love.  Whoever lives in love lives in God and He in them. 

We are to view God’s love as a constant unchanging reality in our lives, not as a backdrop or safety net. “Rely” is a fascinating translation of this use of the verb pisteo, which in Greek typically means “believe” or have “faith”.  In this case, though, it is used in the perfect tense (the only one other place it is used in this form is John 6:69).  The perfect tense carries the sense that it is something we have believed in the past, but it carries forward with continuing ramifications for the rest of our lives.  Biblical faith is a relationship word more akin to our English concept of trust.  So truly this ongoing trust is something we do “rely” upon.  We need to lean on God’s love in our life, and as a vine that nourishes the branch and allows it to bring forth fruit, so God’s love, his very nature, becomes part of us.

• 1 John 4:17 This is how his love is made complete among us so that we have confidence on the day of judgment:  in this world we are like Jesus.

There are many who struggle with confidence in life. It’s hard to imagine having confidence on judgment day, and even harder to imagine being like Jesus.   But John is not expecting us to be perfect, but rather to be loving, trying to interact with people following Jesus’ example.  When we think about confidence on judgement day, we need to remember that God has declared that we are his children because of our faith in Jesus, not because any of our actions in trying to emulate Jesus merit this status.

An interesting wrinkle is that this “confidence” in Greek literally means “freedom to speak boldly”. We are called to be bold and outspoken in this world, just as Jesus was. Then we will not be silenced and ashamed before Christ at the judgement, but rather rejoicing.  Jesus showed us all that God’s love is active not passive.  To be an ambassador for Jesus we need to let our light shine and actively love others as well.