Thursday 12/22/2022

Thursday 12/22/2022

1 John 4:7-16

God’s Love and Ours

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.

13 This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit. 14 And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. 15 If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God. 16 And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.

God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.

In this passage John repeated that “God IS love.” All of us love someone or something at times (some of us more than others!). But John’s thought reached beyond that to say that the very essence of God’s being is love. “And how do you know that?” someone might have asked John. Advent pointed to the answer. We know God is love, John said, because God sent his only Son into the world on a saving mission.