Hello, saints.
We are in 1 John again, for the seventh time in this way. As usual, we are going step by step through a lot of verses. This is a message, though, and not just a Bible study. What we are trying to do in going inch by inch along is catch the very burden from that spot. In a sense, we are trying to catch the message from the book and enter into that aspect of it.
This time we are moving into a new section on loving one another—a new section of fellowship in 1 John.
I want to begin by reading a key verse that I absolutely love. Someone prayed this verse this morning when we were breaking bread. If you can remember a verse from this area that we will be in, this is a good one to remember: 1 John 4:19.
We love, because He first loved us.
It is pretty simple to memorize: We love because He first loved us. If we can keep this and hold it in our hearts, we will course through these verses together with that.
Lord, we trust in You, and we trust this time into Your hands. We thank You for surrounding us with Your love this morning when we break bread. When we remember You, Lord, and we see Your love in the saints, and we see how You have loved us all, Lord, we worship You.
Thank You for drawing us near to You, Lord. We are just so touched in our hearts by this deep, deep love of Jesus. Lord, we pray that You would enlighten us in Your Word; that You would speak as we read the text from the pages; that it would be that living Word that comes through as a loving sword to divide in our hearts and separate our souls from our spirits.
Lord, reveal the intentions of our hearts and draw us to have the same intentions as You. Lord, fill us with Your love right now. In Jesus’ name, amen.
The section we will be in starts in 1 John 4:7 and goes through 1 John 5:3. If you have your Bibles, it is great to open up to 1 John. It is right at the end of the Bible, right before the book of Revelation.
The burden of this book is fellowship, based on how we received eternal life. We have talked about fellowshipping in light and in righteousness. This time, we are looking at how fellowship works in this area of love, specifically the experience of loving one another.
These major sections in 1 John tell us that God is something. God is light. He is righteous. And now, God is love.
Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth God.
He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.—1 John 4:7-8
There is a relationship between the fact of God being love and our call to love one another. What we are not hearing in 1 John is a charge to love one another disconnected from being filled with the love of God.
Sometimes the Bible can feel like it is merely saying, “You ought to do the right thing. You ought to do good.” But this does not even have that sense. Instead, it is more of a discovery of how to do this.
We all know the command from the very beginning: to love God and to love one another. These major commandments were broken at the beginning of Genesis. First, humanity broke the command to love God. Then, in Cain and Abel, we saw the massive sin of hating one’s brother.
So we know this command. What we are going to look at is how this works and how to enjoy loving one another—even the unlovely ones. We love not because we merely ought to, but because God is love.
Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
—1 John 4:11
God has so loved us. It is almost like that stirs inside of us and fills us. “Oh, the deep, deep love of Jesus”—we are surrounded with it. But we realize that we are surrounded with it by the other believers too, as we sing this together.
Why ought we to love one another? Because God has so loved us. We are filled with the love of God. We are in fellowship with Him. He has also loved these others. So we join Him in fellowship, and we love one another.
We love, because He first loved us.
—1 John 4:19
This correlation between God’s love and our loving one another is massively emphasized in 1 John. It is the point. If you catch this point, you understand how this works.
Every bit of trying to love has to begin with receiving love first.
This type of love is not merely the feeling of love. You may feel that some people are lovely, and you may feel filled with love sometimes. That is a blessing from God when you are really filled with His love. But the love of chocolate is different. I love chocolate because it tastes good.
The love where someone is lovely is not necessarily the love of God. God loved us before we were lovely. While we were sinners, while we were enemies, He loved us. He has also loved the unlovely people on the earth. Whoever you think is unlovely—He loved them and died for them.
This is the love of God. We love in that way because He first loved us. It has to be that way.
Love is of God; and every one that loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth God.
—1 John 4:7
Last time, when we were sharing about how God is righteous and we practice righteousness, we saw that everyone begotten of Him practices righteousness. Now, in this section on loving one another, it has to do with everyone being begotten of God.
A proof of your being begotten is that you love one another. Or perhaps another way of saying it is that an experience of being begotten, of being born again, is to love one another.
We are born again when we believe in the Lord Jesus. By being born again, our spirits have received eternal life. To experience that life is to love one another.
Now, remember: the Apostle John is not teaching us about salvation in such a balanced way that we will never get confused. This is one of the most confusing letters in the New Testament, I think. He talks to believers and gets swept up into fellowship. Everything is fellowship. You are either in it or out of it.
His stark contrasts are: “You are distant from God right now,” or, “You are close to God right now.”
He is not saying that if you have a moment when you do not love the brethren, you are no longer born again. There is no way he is saying that. Even if you have a moment of sinning, according to 1 John 1, you confess your sins, get cleansed, and come back to the Lord.
There is no issue with being born again as far as eternity is concerned. But there is an issue with being in the good of your born-againness. There is an issue of knowing God—not merely, “Have I known Him? Have I met Him? Do I have a testimony of salvation?”—but, “Do I know Him right now?”
When I love the brethren, I know Him right now. When I love the brethren, I have tapped into that eternal life with which I have been born again.
He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.
—1 John 4:8
Again, this is the Apostle John’s way of speaking. If you have a moment when you say, “I do not love this person. I just cannot do it,” does that mean you have never known God? No. But it means that right now, you do not know God in fellowship.
It does not mean technically that you have never known God, or that you will not be in the New Jerusalem. But in this moment, He could say, “I do not know you. This is not Me. That is something else. That is your carnality. That is what you have inherited from the sinful nature.”
The opposite is also true: as we love one another, we know God. Right now, I know Him. This is not merely the pursuit of knowing Him. It is the moment of knowing Him right now.
If I have something before me concerning a brother or sister—whether I need to forgive them, I am bothered with them, or I need to help them—and I am not willing to do it, then when I turn my face to God for fellowship, all that is between me and God is an issue where I am not like God.
It is an issue of love. I am not loving my brethren. It is as though I cannot see Him face to face. I cannot really know Him right now. Something is blocking the way, similar to how sin blocks the way.
When we sin, our consciences speak more loudly to us. We do not see the face of God; we see the sin blocking the way like a wall, and we are convicted by it. It is that same experience.
After we catch this concept, we have to be swept up into the love of God. It is not enough for us to stand here today and say, “Yes, we should love one another.” To be brought into this experience, we need to be brought into the deep, deep love of Jesus. We must be surrounded by that. It is our only way. Everything is too hard. It is way too difficult. We have to draw our source from the love of God.
Herein was manifested the love of God in us, that God hath sent His only begotten Son into the world that we might live through Him.
Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son a propitiation for our sins.—1 John 4:9-10
Here is how the love of God showed up: God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him.
God sent His only begotten Son into the world that we might have eternal life and live forever. Yes. That sweeps us up into it. But that we might live through Him is another layer of this.
This is like when the Apostle Paul, in 2 Corinthians 5, talks about the love of Christ constraining us. One died for all; therefore all died. But then he goes on to share that Christ died for all so that we should no longer live to ourselves.
There is more than the reaction, “I am saved, and I praise Him.” The love fills me, and now I must do. I must do love. I must live through Him.
For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that One died for all, therefore all died;
and He died for all, that they that live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto Him Who for their sakes died and rose again.—2 Corinthians 5:14-15
As soon as you behold Him and His love, you realize, “Oh, I must live this way by His love.”
The word propitiation is important. Some translations say “atoning sacrifice.” It means something that settles the issue of our sins and shame. It is not a common word, but it is a good Bible word.
If I am going to love one another, the first step is that I have to get to that propitiation moment. I have to stare at how He died for me. I have to fix my eyes on Jesus, Who is full of love and actually died for me while I did not love God.
When I am struggling to love you, the first helpful thing is, “Ah, but You loved me.” There is something for us to begin with. If you are stuck, stumbled, and just cannot do it, fix your eyes on Jesus, Who loved us first. Before we loved Him, He died for us and loved us.
Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
—1 John 4:11
This is our call. Notice that it is the reaction to this: if He did this, then I am going to do it.
This is not merely a method, but it is a way. It is a path of love. The path is selfless, and it is God’s path. We draw from that eternal life that He has placed within us, especially when approaching someone whom we find difficult to love.
“If God has so loved us” needs to make some noise in our hearts. We need this reasoning because, as we struggle to love one another, we become unreasonable. We reason away the need to love people. We turn them into monsters in our own hearts.
Some people may seem like monsters, but these are the people for whom God died. These are the people for whom the Lord Jesus died. We need to renew our minds. “It is not that we loved God. It is that God sent His Son as a propitiation for our sins. If God has so loved us, we also ought to love this person.”
This is reasonable. He has loved us and filled us with His love. We have eternal life, and now it is time to fellowship with eternal life, to fellowship with love, and to experience it with this person.
No man hath beheld God at any time: if we love one another, God abideth in us, and His love is perfected in us.
—1 John 4:12
No one has seen God at any time. But when we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us. God is going to show up through us when we do this. This is how God is seen on earth right now.
We will see words like perfection, made perfect, and perfect love. This is an important phrase to remember.
God’s love being perfected in us means that love is completed. It is not merely about how mature I am as a Christian. It means that love finds its completion when it is moving through us.
One way that love is perfected is that God loves us and we love Him back. Another way that the cycle of love is completed is that God loves us and we love someone else with God’s love.
If God loves us and it just sits there, then His love is not perfected in us. We have received it, but only enough for ourselves. That is not God’s intention. The love of Christ constrains us so that it would be completed and actually go forth from us.
Hereby know we that we abide in Him and He in us, because He hath given us of His Spirit.
—1 John 4:13
In this experience, you are not alone. You are not called to love somebody by yourself. He is abiding in you. You grab hold of His love, and you go for it. There is the Holy Spirit.
As I open my mouth, do my deed, forgive the person, or do whatever the Lord leads me to do, the love of God expands in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. We realize that we are not in this by ourselves. The Holy Spirit is there.
We may know in our minds, “I have the Holy Spirit because God saved me and sealed me with the Holy Spirit.” But we may not know it experientially: “I am with Him right now, and He is doing this.” Yet when we abide in Him and He in us, and when love is perfected as it flows through us, we know it.
And we have beheld and bear witness that the Father hath sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world.
—1 John 4:14
What are we back to? We are back to the propitiation. We are back to seeing His love.
The Father sent His Son, the Saviour of the world. We are surrounded by this. As He abides in me and I abide in Him, and as I love somebody and the Holy Spirit rises up to do this, I am brought again to see that God sent His Son into this world.
You do not walk away from loving the brethren saying, “I am really good at loving people.” There are people who are good at loving people to a certain degree. But they have their limits too.
When the love of God flows through you, what you walk away with is, “Wow, I just saw that God sent His Son and loved the world. I just saw it in my moment.” God has sent me with the Spirit of His Son, crying, “Abba, Father.” I just experienced the love of God doing that thing where He dies for sinners and loves the world.
Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God abideth in him, and he in God.
And we know and have believed the love which God hath in us. God is love; and he that abideth in love abideth in God, and God abideth in him.—1 John 4:15-16
This is very beautiful. We confess with our mouth that Jesus is the Son of God, and in doing that, God abides in us, and we abide in Him.
As we know this, and we know that God is love, we find ourselves abiding in love, and we find that His love is abiding in us.
All believers have probably made the good confession that Jesus is the Son of God. But when we take this stance in fellowship and confess, “Jesus is the Son of God,” we are brought into amazement at the love of God.
Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called children of God.
—1 John 3:1
As I confess that Jesus is the Son of God, I also realize that He has called us into sonship. What manner of love is this that the Father has given us, that we are also the children of God?
Make your home right there. Squat right there in that house where God is the One Who has loved. Stay right there.
It is like a swimming pool of love, like that deep, deep ocean. As you are in the home of God’s love, His love fills you. The food that you eat is the love of God, and you are full of it.
As you make your home there and stay right there, then you can go forth and discover the perfecting of love—the completing of love. But what must be emphasized is that we have to abide in His love.
When we run into a problem, our first reaction should be, “Lord, show me Your love.” When we are bothered by somebody: “Lord, show me Your love.”
Then, in that house of love, next to you is someone else who has confessed that Jesus is the Son of God—perhaps that very person you do not love right now. The place where you are abiding is the place where God has loved that soul.
You look next to you and say, “Oh, He loves this person. He loves them before they are lovable. He loves them before they loved Him. Oh, how He loves them.”
God is love, and I am abiding in Him. His love is right there. On the couch next to me is this person whom God has placed in my life on purpose so that I can experience how He loves this person right now.
This is why we abide in His love. Even if we do not understand how it works, or what we are going to do or say, once we catch this, we can smile a little bit. We can realize: they are loved. These souls are loved.
He that abideth in love abideth in God, and God abideth in him.
—1 John 4:16
Herein is love made perfect with us, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment; because as He is, even so are we in this world.
—1 John 4:17
Here is how love is completed. We have been in the house of love. We sense that God loves that person. Now it is time for God to work in us.
There is a call to boldness in the day of judgment. When we were talking about righteousness, we saw that we purify ourselves and experience Him in this world by practicing righteousness. Then the day of judgment is not scary because we know that when we see Him, we will be like Him.
Here is a similar concept. As I am in this and in the good of this, the future judgment—even the judgment seat of Christ—fades into the background. There are times when we need exhortation: “Run your race because there is a judgment coming. Get right with the Lord.” But John has already shared those things. He has brought us to this point.
As I am in this moment of fellowship, judgment fades into the background because we are experiencing the love of God right now on this earth. As He is, we also are in this world.
Instead of concern about the judgment seat of Christ, there is a yearning for the Lord’s return. When you hear about the Lord’s return and feel afraid, there may be a reason for that. Get right with the Lord and be consecrated. But when you are in fellowship with Him, you can find that prayer by the Holy Spirit: “Come, Lord Jesus.”
There is no fear in love: but perfect love casteth out fear, because fear hath punishment; and he that feareth is not made perfect in love.
—1 John 4:18
When we have that sense of fear, something in the cycle of love is not happening with us. Something is missing. Fear has to do with the judgment that you are going to receive.
But when you are experiencing the love flowing through you, you are not concerned about that. Instead, you are experiencing Christ on this earth right now. The cry in your heart becomes, “Come, Lord Jesus. Do what I am doing, but do it better, and fill the whole earth with Your righteousness.”
Jesus said:
Judge not, that ye be not judged.
For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured unto you.—Matthew 7:1-2
If we are judging others, then yes, we should be afraid of judgment. This is for believers. We should have the fear of the judgment seat of Christ. But when you love others rather than judge others, that fear fades into the background.
As you are filled with mercy and forgiveness, the more you see God’s people—even those who are real problems, causing issues, or doing the same thing repeatedly—and as you have mercy on them, the love of God abides in you.
When you judge people, get mad at somebody, refuse to forgive, or do not love, you begin to feel in your heart, “I am going to be judged too. Something is wrong. I am not ready to meet the Lord face to face.”
But there is no fear in love. Perfect love casts it out.
Perfect love is not sinless perfection. It means that I am made complete by love. God loved me, and now I love one another. The cycle is not stunted by me stopping it.
If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, cannot love God Whom he hath not seen.
And this commandment have we from Him, that he who loveth God love his brother also.—1 John 4:20-21
The place to love God is not in the third heaven, in a way. God is so lovable. What can we do? How can we experience His selfless, dying-before-someone-loves-Him type of love if we are merely loving God back?
If we are just going to love God, He has already loved us. We cannot do the same thing He did for us. But He has given us some humans to do it with. He has given us people through whom the love of God can flow.
Someone may genuinely say, “I love God.” They are not being fake. They really love God. But they may also have a moment of hating their brother or sister. We have probably all done this. We still sing worship songs and read our Bibles, but something feels wrong.
The proof of love is with the believers. Show me that you love God by loving one of His people—by loving those with whom you spend time, even the ones from whom you try to hide.
The proof is not in how you feel toward those people. You do not have to love them with a feeling. You have to love them with the love of God.
You can prove that you love God not by having warm, fuzzy feelings toward people, though that may occasionally happen, but mainly by dying for them. God gives you something to do to prove your love. That is why He gave us the commandment to love our brother.
Every one that believeth that Jesus is the Christ is begotten of God: and every one that loveth Him that begat loveth him also that is begotten of Him.
—1 John 5:1
Everyone who believes Jesus is the Christ is born of God. That includes the people you are struggling to love. Have they believed that Jesus is the Christ? Then they are born of God. That is super important.
If you love the One Who begets, you love the ones who are begotten. If you love the Father Who makes people children of God, then you love the children also.
You can find God in every believer. You can find some presence of God, even if it is covered with a lot of dirt. There is gold underneath there. There is the life of God there.
God is saying, “Yes, you love Me. It seems I am very far away from you. But I have put a gold portion of My life right here next to you, and I want you to find it. If you love Me, search for it, just as I searched for you. I dug in this earth, even to the grave, and I found you. I pulled out eternal life for you.”
That is what we have to do with each other as we love one another. Find the gold with each other.
Hereby we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and do His commandments.
For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments: and His commandments are not grievous.—1 John 5:2-3
We turn our eyes to the Lord: “Lord, I love You. Command me. Show me the way.”
Of course, His great commandment is to love the brethren. But within that, He gives us little commands—perhaps, “Start to say hello to them,” or, “Start to pray for them,” or, “Do something.”
You cannot merely pretend to love somebody. You cannot just decide to love them. We must go and love God, receive His commands, and let Him direct us.
One example of loving one another is when you are bitter or unforgiving.
He that loveth his brother abideth in the light, and there is no occasion of stumbling in him.
But he that hateth his brother is in the darkness.—1 John 2:10-11
One reason we sometimes hate our brethren is that they have sinned. They are walking in darkness, and we become bitter toward that. We remember their sin, especially if it was committed against us.
Peter asked the Lord how many times he should forgive someone who sinned against him. He had done it seven times. The Lord told him:
I say not unto thee, Until seven times; but, Until seventy times seven.
—Matthew 18:22
When someone sins against you, really affects you, or hurts people you care about, you can become bitter. You remember them and their sins as one thing. You struggle.
The Lord renewed the mind in Matthew 18 by telling the story of the servant who had been forgiven much by the king, but then refused to forgive someone who owed him a little. We need that renewed mind.
Someone sinned against me. I want to love one another. I have to love because He first loved us. How has He first loved me? He has forgiven me.
I see that He forgave me—probably recently. When was the last time you confessed your sins? If you are walking with the Lord, it may be pretty often. He forgave me recently.
As I remember that, Jesus renews my mind: “I have forgiven you so much. Now turn to your brother.” I see that He has forgiven me, even recently, so I recently forgive this person.
I turn to them in my heart and forgive them. I let that go.
Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
—Matthew 6:12
If we do not forgive others, we get stuck because we are not letting the love flow.
The important thing is that forgiveness has to happen before they repent, before they apologize, and before they are lovable. It is easy to forgive somebody when they apologize, especially if they do it with tears. But when they are still bad, this is when God loved them and died for them.
Behold the propitiation. Let Him perfect His love through you. Prove your love by forgiving them before they apologize. Some people may never even know that they sinned against you. Some of it may have been accidental.
Another example is when you are bothered inwardly by somebody.
This is the message which ye heard from the beginning, that we should love one another: not as Cain was of the evil one, and slew his brother.
—1 John 3:11-12
Cain seems to have been jealous of his brother Abel because Abel’s worship was accepted. Sometimes jealousy happens in the church because somebody is walking well with the Lord. For whatever reason, you act Cain-like. You are bothered. It is not necessarily that they sinned against you; you just do not like them.
Sometimes a person may be beautiful, gifted, spiritually fruitful, or able to do something you have not thought of before. If it is truly the Lord, do you get bothered by it inwardly? That is a Cain-type jealousy.
If that happens, go to the Lord. Ask, “Lord, are You bothered?” God was pleased with Abel. He accepted Abel’s worship. Cain could have asked, “God, if You are pleased with Abel, why?” Then Cain could have learned and grown. He could have realized, “I need the blood. I need that kind of sacrifice.”
It is possible to grow from the people you are bothered by—whether because of jealousy, personality, temperament, culture, age, or background.
I remember, when I was younger, attending a megachurch. There was a great older preacher who loved the Lord and loved everybody. His sermons were good to listen to, and everybody loved him.
Then a young man came in from the mission field and began preaching. His sermons were fine, but he had all of his verses memorized. The older preacher had not really done that. He would say, “Let’s turn here,” and read the passage. But this young man would quote an entire chapter and then preach from it.
The congregation was impressed. The Word flowed out of him.
What I noticed was that the older preacher did not get bothered or jealous. Instead, we saw the love of God through him. The next time he preached, he stood there and quoted his Scripture from memory. You could see him struggling. It was awkward and not natural. But he said, “My younger brother is quoting the Word from his heart. I saw it, and I said, ‘That is of God, and I am going to learn from him.’”
He did it, and the love of God touched all the saints. There was no jealousy. He could have set that young man aside; he was in charge of the speaking schedule. He could have said, “You are not speaking anymore because you make me look bad.” But instead, he loved by the love of God.
When you are bothered inwardly, ask the Lord, “Are You bothered, Lord?” If He is not, then love them. Let go of your botheredness, whether it is jealousy or simply difference.
This is similar to Romans 14: receive whoever the Lord has received. Do not question their culture, age, or background. Is the Lord okay with them? Then I am okay.
Another example is when you are bothered outwardly—when somebody needs something from you.
But whoso hath the world’s goods, and beholdeth his brother in need, and shutteth up his compassion from him, how doth the love of God abide in him?
—1 John 3:17
Here is somebody who needs something. Perhaps they need a coat, a meal, or some other physical provision. These things can bother us because they take up our finances, our possessions, or, perhaps more often, our time.
I remember being in high school and needing a ride all the time. I needed a ride to everything I did for a while, and I bothered a lot of people. During that time, I said, “When I grow up, I want to be able to give rides to people.”
So, as soon as I could drive, instead of getting a cool car, I got a van—a minivan.
We have a young brother here who drives a minivan and picks up many people. Last night, he went to pick up some teenagers. The love of God touched my heart as I saw it. There was a need for rides, and he was willing just to say, “I will pick them up.”
It is not a big deal, but it is time and gas money. Sometimes you are bothered outwardly by having to pick somebody up. “I can do it if you are around the corner, but not if you are twenty minutes away. I lose my time.”
But when it is from God, the love of God fills your heart. You abide in the Lord, and everyone is touched by the love of God.
We have to be wise. Sometimes you do not give somebody a dollar; you give them a burger, because they may use the dollar wrongly. Sometimes they do not need the help you first thought they needed. They need another kind of help.
But we need this mindset. When we have a conference or another gathering, everybody may be bothered outwardly, yet there can be almost no flinching. It is like, “I am ready to die. This is the week where I die.”
The love of God creates character within us. At the beginning, we may need to get the love from the Lord in order to be bothered and do all these things. Then, in certain areas of life, a character develops, and we naturally respond with the love of God. That is a good thing.
Yet there is always a limit. The Lord pushes us beyond our limit. He may ask us to host someone, call someone, give something, or sacrifice time.
At that point, go to the Lord and ask, “Lord, do You want to give them something? Lord, do You want to give them my time?”
Then the love of God comes to you, and you do it. Do not merely act because you know you ought to. Go to the Lord. He will remind you, “I gave My life for you. What are you going to do for Me right now?”
If you have the sensing, “I should do this,” then lay down your life. Do not love your life even unto death. There can be joy in it. It is pleasing to the Lord and a wonderful experience.
We love because He first loved us. This is not a challenge merely saying, “We really need to start doing something.” It is more of a discovery.
Every one of us has people in our lives whom the Lord will call us to love, probably this week, in major and minor ways. The reason we have gone through this is to see how we are going to do it.
First, we gain our love from the Lord. We behold Him and the propitiation—the provision of all His love. Then we let it work in us and go forth from us, and be perfected.
Abide in His love. Notice the people next to you. Then His love can flow forth from us. He will give us tangible proofs of His love, things we can actually do.
It is so good to be in the church, where we have people with whom to experience this. When you break bread and look around the room, it is such a joy to say, “The Lord loves all of these people—every one of them. By His grace, we learn this lesson, and by God’s grace, we love them all too. We love one another.”
Lord, we worship You. We love that You have called us to do this because we can experience Your love. We can know Your love, and we can actually do this.
Your commands to us are not grievous. You have given us the victory. You have filled us with Your love. Lord, we thank You, and we ask You to command us this week. Give us some specifics so that we may prove our love to You, Lord.
As we cast our lives before You, we give ourselves to You, Lord. Show us what You would have us do. Put people in our hearts to pray for and care for.
Give us Your commands, Lord, that we can show You how we love You because You first loved us. In Jesus’ name, amen.