7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 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. 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. 11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 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. (1 John 4:7-12)
Three times in these verses John repeats "love one another". This kind of love is "from God." I think of that great quote from Thomas Merton, “the beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.” Of course, God's love is not like this, but for us humans, it is so important that we view this command to "love one another" through this quote from Thomas Merton.
Now, this kind of love is "from God." This means that at the root of all God does is love. Even his judgments, his condemnations, arrive from love. Our problem is this: we do not recognize love in its fullest. Look at v.9-10.
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. 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. (1 John 4:9-10)
In his book, Ragamuffin Gospel, Brennan Manning writes, "God loves in a manner that defies human comprehension and escapes human IMITATION. God loves us unconditionally, as we are and not as we should be, because nobody is as they should be."
In v.10, John writes, "This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins." The Lord Jesus came to make it possible for you and me right with God without lowering God's standard. He came to satisfy justice, to meet the demands of a broken Law, to pay the full debt, to satisfy the penalty.
Then notice v.11-12 where we read, "11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 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 reminding us that the source of our ability to love others gets back to relationship with this one who is characterized most by love. Of course, our ability to love is lacking. But, as our understanding of love grows in the context of our authentic relationship with the LORD, we will grow in our ability to love.
This kind of love shows up in the world with a variety of expressions. One such expression came from a group of children in a small village. An anthropologist was winding up several months of research in that
small village, the story is told. While waiting for a ride to the
airport for his return flight home, he decided to pass the time by
making up a game for some children. His idea was to create a race for a
basket of fruit and candy that he placed near a tree. But when he gave
the signal to run, no one made a dash for the finish line. Instead the
children joined hands and ran together to the tree. When asked why they chose to run as a group rather than each
racing for the prize, a little girl spoke up and said: “How could one of
us be happy when all of the others are sad?”
