Changed by God’s Love

When we truly experience God’s love, we are never the same.

That’s one of the key ideas John has been trying to teach us in his letter, and it’s what he’s emphasizing in the second half of 1 John 4.

The love that we as believers in Jesus show–whether it’s love for God, love for other believers, or love to people outside the family of faith–is a reflection of and a response to the love that God has shown us.

John says, “We love because He first loved us.” (1 John 4:19).

As a matter of fact, God’s love for us, especially His love for us in the sacrificial death of Jesus for our sins is the true definition of love. It’s the example of love that we should emulate (in the sense of being selfless). John says that real love is not the love that we have for God–though we should love God–but that He loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.

It’s a beautiful claim that John is making: God loved us first, and in a sense, He is the only one doing the loving: on our best day, we don’t love Him like He loves us. We still love Him, and our love for Him grows day by day. But no matter how much we think we love Him, He loves us more. No matter how much we think we love Him, our love still looks up to the death of Jesus as payment for our sins as the ultimate example of what love really is.

If this is ultimate love, we take encouragement in our lives from the fact that we can never out-love God.

We are never going to be in a situation where we love God more than He loves us.

Along the same lines, as God calls us to love other people, He is not asking us to do something that He is unwilling to do, or has not done, for those same people.

There are times when the people around us, believers or not, seem hard to love. We do well to remember that God loves those people, like He loves us on our worst days. He calls us to love them like He does. John tells us that loving our brothers and sisters in Christ is key evidence of our relationship with God. John goes so far as to say that if we can’t love our fellow Christians, we can’t possibly love God! (1 John 4:20)

John also reminds us that this command isn’t meant to be fear-inducing. When we see love flowing out of us, we remember what the source of our love is. As human beings, we aren’t naturally loving. When we see self-sacrificing love that puts others first and that models Jesus’s own love coming out of us, we realize that we are becoming more like Jesus. John puts it beautifully: “as he is, so also are we in this world.” (1 John 4:11)

As He is, so also are we in this world.

That’s worth being a rallying cry for our hearts. It’s a call to love–to love God, to love our fellow believers in Jesus, and to love all the lost people around us.

John says when we see that in ourselves, we develop confidence that, at the end of all things, we will be found to be among God’s chosen. God has given us His Spirit (1 John 4:13) which has transformed us into people who are becoming like God: people who love. As He is, so also are we in this world.

The more we adopt God’s loving character, the more we realize that God in fact has done what John says here and Paul says in Ephesians 1:13-14: God has given the Holy Spirit as a seal and a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance as God’s children. Our changing character is evidence of this fact!

So we must lean into the Holy Spirit and allow Him to make us more loving. We say “yes” to opportunities to love, because that’s what God is doing in the world too, and He’s already loved us in the greatest imaginable way. His example is the most extreme example of self-giving love that we could possibly follow. 

We want to be known as a people who love.

That’s what it means to follow God: we love because He first loved us.