1 John 4:7-21

Be still: Pause... and take a moment to become aware of God’s gaze of love upon you.

Read: 1 John 4:7-21

‘God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.’ (v16)

Encounter: Now we reach the core of John’s letter, as he returns from his warnings about false prophets to what he really wants us to understand. If you’ve already forgotten, there’s a clue – the word ‘love’ appears no fewer than twenty-seven times in these fifteen verses! Love has been described as ‘the oxygen of the Kingdom’ – with no oxygen, there’s no human life, and John wants us to understand that love is as essential, and as life-giving, as our breathing.

This is John the Apostle, the ‘beloved disciple’ of Jesus. He would have been an eyewitness to the exchange between Jesus and one of the scribes, when Jesus made it abundantly clear that all the law and the prophets, important as they were, were just footnotes to the first and second great commandments, to love God and to love our neighbour. John was there at the Last Supper when Jesus gave an even stronger commandment to his disciples to ‘love one another as I have loved you’(!). He may have seen Chapter 13 of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, where all the gifts of the Spirit – tongues, prophecy, faith – are counted as nothing beside love.

And John doesn’t mince his words: speaking to his fellow Christians, he uses the strongest language he can. ‘Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love’; ‘Whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen’. For John, and for Paul, and for Jesus, love is the core and substance of our faith.

Apply: Recall Jesus’ words in John 13:35 ‘By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love one for another.’ So our love for one another, and for our neighbours, is our evangelism! Do you have someone who needs your love today, or a relationship in need of repair? Ask the Spirit to nudge you in the right direction.

Devote: Lord, I find it hard to love. Please show me how, and what that means for what I do today.