The Why of Christian Discipleship
Last week and this week we’re looking at why disciples love in 4:7-21. We did verses 7-12 last week and we’ll do verses 13-21 today. Throughout this letter John has said true Christians believe certain things and love in a certain way. These are sometimes called the doctrinal and social tests. In 4:1-6, he exhorted the churches to not believe every spirit because everyone who claims to speak for God doesn’t actually speak for God. Then in 4:7-12, he exhorted us to love one another.
Then in the next section, 4:13-21, John takes his argument a step further and says that neither belief nor love are possible apart from the Holy Spirit. Specifically, he elaborates on the last two statements of verse 12, that “God abides in us,” and “his love is perfected in us,” saying that both are a result of the Spirit’s work in us. God living in us is elaborated in verses 13-16 and God’s love perfected in verses 17-21.
God Lives in Us
In verse 13-16, John says that we know God lives in us because of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit’s presence in our lives helps us know that we belong to God. Paul says it this way in Romans 8:16, “The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.”
In verse 13, John says that we can know we belong to God because God gave us his Spirit, but then in verses 14-16 he says we can know that he’s given us his Spirit if we have belief and if we have love, if we “confess that Jesus is the Son of God” (v. 15), and if we “live in love” (v. 16).
Faith a Result of the Spirit’s Work
First, we can know we have the Spirit if we have faith. Verse 15 says that if we “confess” that “Jesus is the Son of God,” then God lives in us. How does someone come to believe that Jesus is the Son of God? It starts by hearting the testimony of the apostles (v. 14), but their testimony doesn’t compel consent.
It’s only by the Spirit of God that anybody ever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God come in the flesh (4:2). Paul says it this way, “No one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except in the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor. 12:3).
Yes, we must hear the gospel in order to believe the gospel. After Jesus ascended back to heaven, God left a twofold testimony to him on the earth: the apostles and the Holy Spirit who confirms their witness in the hearts of believers.
To be a child of God, we need someone to tell us the testimony of the apostles, that Jesus is “the Savior of the world” (v. 14), and we need the Spirit to make that testimony look beautiful and compelling and true in our hearts.
We must understand that God doesn’t come to live in us because we believe. It’s the reverse. We believe because he’s come to live in us. We’re saved by grace, through faith, and “this is not our own doing; it is the gift of God” (Eph. 2:8).
What does all this mean? It means that no one becomes a Christian unless God works in their hearts, showing them the truth about Jesus. The spiritual blindness of our sin and unbelief are too great for us to overcome. God must give us new eyes to see Jesus for who he is.
This means that gratitude should pervade our lives. We’re products of grace, not work. So we’re thankful. It means that pride must go and humility must grow. It means that prayer is more important than we realize in our work for the Lord and in our own walk with the Lord. Only the Spirit can change people’s lives at the core, so we must ask him to do that work.
Love a Result of the Spirit’s Work
We can know we have the Spirit if we have faith in Jesus. Then in verse 16, John says we can know that we have the Spirit if we have love. “Whoever abides in love abides in God.” Living in love is proof of living in God, and God living in us. Love is the tangible proof that we live in God and God lives in us. In Galatians 5, the first “fruit of the Spirit” is love.
We must understand that God doesn’t come to live in us when we start to love. It’s the reverse. When we love, we reveal that God lives in us. In other words, belief and love aren’t what God is waiting for us to do before he’ll come into our lives. Rather, belief and love are the evidence that he has come into our lives. In verse 13, he doesn’t say, “By this we live in him.” He says, “By this we know that we live in him.”
Our believing and loving are a result of the Spirit’s work. Apart from the Spirit, our minds would stay dark and our hearts cold. Only the Spirit can enlighten our minds to believe in Jesus and warm our hearts to love God and others.
God’s Love Perfected
In verses 17-21, John elaborates on God’s love being perfected. The beginning of verse 17, “By this is love perfected with us,” links it back to the end of verse 12, where John says that God’s love is “perfected in us” when we love one another. “Perfected” means “completed.” This is a staggering statement. John is saying that God’s love for us is completed only when it’s reproduced in us, or among us in the church. Not loving the local church means you don’t have God’s love in you.
In verses 17-21, John moves from talking about the completion of God’s love in us to our love for God. He isn’t saying that our love for God in this life could ever be perfect, but that it can develop and mature. He gives us two marks of a maturing love for God, namely confidence before God in verses 17-18 and love for our brothers and sisters in 19-21.
Confidence Before God
In verses 17-18, he says that a mark of a growing love for God is a growing confidence as we approach the “day of judgment.” A lot of people don’t believe in a day when God will judge us, but why then do we all want justice to be done in the earth? We tend to think that other people need to be judged, but not us.
Suzy sent me an article this week about the increasing number of close calls in the airline industry.[1] Jim Dennison noted, “An American Airlines flight to Dallas was recently traveling more than 500 mph when a collision warning began blaring in the cockpit. An air traffic controller had mistakenly directed a United Airlines flight to fly dangerously close. The American pilot had to quickly yank the Airbus A321 up 700 feet to avoid a collision.” There were forty-six close calls involving commercial airlines last month.
Dennison then points out that we tend to think about these things as happening to someone else. He says, “If you’re like me, there’s a tiny voice in your mind assuring you that you’re somehow different. Airline crashes are extremely rare and happen to other people; the Maui wildfires and Ukrainian conflict are likely thousands of miles away.”
Don’t we do the same thing when we think about the day of judgment? We think it’s a day other people need to worry about. We’re upstanding citizens, we go to church, keep our nose clean, so we don’t need to worry about God’s judgment.
But this text says that the only thing that makes us confident for judgment day is the love of God (v. 18). When the love of God fills our hearts, we stop being afraid of meeting him on judgment day. His love teaches us that when we meet him, it’ll be like running into the arms of a Father with joy and relief, not cowering before a judge in shame and fear of punishment. Our confidence, like our obedience in 2:5, is a sign that our love for God is growing, or made complete.
Love and Fear
Love for God and fear of punishment are incompatible. Fear and love are as incompatible as oil and water. If we know that God loves us, then we never have to fear his punishment. As John Flavel said, “We lie too near his heart for him to hurt us.”[2] So when pain comes into our lives, it’s not God trying to hurt us or teach us a lesson, but rather the hand of a tender Father seeking to heal us.
The reason we don’t have to fear his punishment is because, as the end of verse 17 says, “as he is so also are we in this world.” We have a standing like Christ before God. We’re sons in and through the Son, objects of God’s love as he is. We can call God “Father” because Jesus calls him “Father.” We can have the kind of confidence that he has. The kind of assurance that God is for us, not against us, that he loves us and likes us. As Sam Allberry says, God not only made us, he thought up the idea of us, and he was having a good day when he did. He delights in us!
If we cower in fear before God, always wondering what he thinks of us, never sure of his delight in us, then the joyful abandon and relief that God has for us will remain distant. In this way, our unhealthy fear of God brings with it a type of punishment already.
Love for the Church
In verses 19-21, John gives us the second mark of a maturing love for God, one that he’s come back to repeatedly, namely, love for the church, or our brothers and sisters in Christ.
Verse 19 is a general affirmation about God’s people. The banner that flies over God’s people is love, not fear. This can’t be said about people worshipping other gods. They never know if they’re really accepted. They wonder if they’ve done enough. So they’re afraid.
Fear lives in all of us by nature. Starting in the Garden, because of sin, we all know that something is wrong with us and we’re all hiding from God because we’re afraid of being seen. We’re hiding behind our jobs, families, performance, looks, religion, or education.
But God comes to us in Jesus to drive this fear out and replace it with the peace of his love. Those who believe in Jesus know they don’t have to perform their way into God’s love. Love has set them free from fear. Are you free from being afraid of God? We can’t truly love the church as long as we’re cowering before God. His love sets us free to love.
In verse 20, John says that the perfect love that drives out fear drives out hatred too. John doesn’t mince words. If we say we love God but hate other Christians, we’re liars. You may say, “I don’t hate other believers.” But remember from last week that anger isn’t the opposite of love. Hate is, and the final form of hate is indifference. So before you say, “I don’t hate anyone in the church.” Think about how indifferent you may be to the needs of others. Are you moved by their suffering? Do you take practical steps to help? John says that our claim to love God is a delusion if it’s not accompanied by unselfish and practical love for other church members.
John says that loving others is the result of a maturing love for God. If we can’t love people we do see, how can we love someone we don’t see? Tangible love for God’s people is how we know our love for God is growing.
Then in verse 21, John says that love for God and love for each other are always connected. Loving God and loving the church are a single command (cf. 3:23). Jesus taught this when he united Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18 and said that all the Law and Prophets hung upon them (Mt. 22:37-40). We can’t separate what God has joined together.
We must love others if we claim to love God. Loving the church isn’t an optional part of following Jesus. How has your love for God’s people changed over the last few years?
“When He Tells Us to Love, He Gives Us the Love Itself”
Corrie Ten Boom worked against the Nazis in World War Two hiding Jews in her home. When she was caught, she was sent to a concentration camp where she saw her father and her sister Betsie die, and suffered more at the hands of other people than we could possibly imagine. But the Lord’s love for her worked miracles in her life. In her classic book The Hiding Place, she writes:
“It was at a church service in Munich that I saw him, the former S.S. man who had stood guard at the shower door in the processing center at Ravensbruck. He was the first of our actual jailers that I had seen since that time. And suddenly it was all there – the roomful of mocking men, the heaps of clothing, Betsie’s pain-blanched face.
He came up to me as the church was emptying, beaming and bowing. ‘How grateful I am for your message, Fraulein.’ He said. ‘To think that, as you say, He has washed my sins away!’
His hand was thrust out to shake mine. And I, who preached so often to the people in Bloemendaal the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side.
Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him.
I tried to smile, I struggled to raise my hand. I could not. I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity. And so again I breathed a silent prayer. Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me your forgiveness.
As I took his hand the most incredible thing happened. From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me.
And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on his. When he tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself.”[3]
We have the opportunity to participate in the love that Jesus extends to the world. Who is difficult to love in your life? This is as close to how God loves us. God loves us then gives us his Spirit to help us love others. “When he tells us to love, he gives us the love itself.”
[1]Airline close calls are more frequent than you may know (denisonforum.org)
[2]Quoted in Dane Ortlund, Deeper: Real Change for Real Sinners (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021), 132.
[3]The Forgiveness of Corrie Ten Boom – The Gospel Coalition | Canada