Week 23
God Is Love
1 John 4:7–19
“God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.”
1 John 4:7–19 (NKJV)
John does not merely say God loves. He says God is love. Love is not a mood He enters or a response creatures awaken; it belongs eternally to who He is.
We know this love not through speculation but through the sending of the Son. God’s love takes historical, sacrificial form so that spiritually dead people might live through Christ.
The Son is the propitiation for our sins. Love does not deny guilt or wave away holiness. It bears the cost required to remove wrath and restore fellowship.
‘Not that we loved God, but that He loved us.’ Divine initiative overturns every spiritual performance. Our love is answer, never origin.
If God so loved us, we ought to love one another. The invisible God becomes perceptible through a community in which His received love matures into patient, truthful care.
Abiding matters because human affection is insufficient for this calling. We remain within God’s love through faith in Christ, and His Spirit supplies what resentment, fatigue, and fear cannot.
Perfect love casts out fear of punishment. Confidence for the day of judgment does not arise from our flawless record but from being held in the Beloved Son.
Let God define love at the cross. Receive it before trying to produce it, remain within it, and allow its holy generosity to move through you toward another person.
In Conversation with A. W. Tozer
Tozer understood God’s love as an eternal attribute, self-originating and perfectly consistent with holiness, justice, and wisdom.
First John gives that doctrine a visible center: God sends His Son. The cross defines love and creates a people able to love because they were loved first.
A Prayer
Holy God,
God who is love, free me from remaking love according to sentiment, fear, or self-interest.
Thank You for sending Your Son as the atoning sacrifice for my sins. Let His finished work give me confidence before You.
Keep me abiding in Your love until fear loosens and Your holy generosity becomes visible in my care for others. Amen.
Dwell This Week with God
Awaken to His presence.
Return often to 1 John 4:7–19. Read without hurry, and allow the truth of who God is to become larger than every lesser concern.