God Is Love
1 John 4:7–10
Beloved, let’s love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. He who doesn’t love doesn’t know God, for God is love. By this God’s love was revealed in us, that God has sent his only born Son into the world that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.
World English Bible
Follow any river far enough upstream and you reach its source. John invites us to do that with love. Trace every act of genuine love in the world (a mother up at 3 a.m., a friend who stays, a stranger's unrequired kindness) back and back and further back, and you arrive at a spring that never began: "love is of God." Then John says it even more starkly. Not "God is loving," as if love were one of His moods. "God is love." It is not something He does on good days. It is what He is, eternally, before there was anyone else to love.
But John will not let us keep that as a greeting-card sentiment. He immediately defines love with a body and a cross: "God has sent his only born Son into the world that we might live through him." Love, in John's vocabulary, is not a feeling that happens to you. It is a sending. A costly, deliberate, flesh-and-blood movement toward people who weren't asking for it. And the destination of that sending was an "atoning sacrifice for our sins": Jesus absorbing in Himself everything our rebellion deserved, so that nothing stands between us and the Father. Strip the cross out of the sentence "God is love" and you have sentimentality. Keep it in and you have a gospel.
Then comes the line that quietly demolishes our pride: "not that we loved God, but that he loved us." The arrow points one direction first. We were not reaching for Him; He reached for us. Love did not respond to our loveliness. It created it.
This is why John can say that everyone who loves "has been born of God." Real love is not a personality trait some people are issued at birth. It is family resemblance. It shows up in people who have been loved first, the way warmth shows up in stones that have sat in the sun. You cannot manufacture this love by trying harder. You become loving the way you become warm: by staying close to the source.
Reflect
- When I'm honest, do I treat God's love as something I'm still trying to earn, or as the thing that found me before I ever moved toward Him?
- Where has my definition of love drifted toward feeling and away from sacrifice? What would cross-shaped love look like in my closest relationship right now?
- If people traced the river of my daily actions upstream, would they find the love of God at the source, or mostly self-protection?
Pray
Sit quietly with the words "not that we loved God, but that he loved us," and thank Him for loving you first, before you were lovely. Confess where you have reduced love to sentiment and avoided its cost. Ask God to keep you close to the source today, so that His love warms you into someone who loves.