AP

1 John 4:19-21  We love because he first loved us.  Whoever claims to love God yet hates his brother is a liar.  For whoever does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.  And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love his brother.

There are several Greek words that could all be translated into English as ‘love’, but the one John uses throughout his Epistles is ‘agapao’ – the self-giving, other-person-centred, sacrificial love that God so clearly demonstrated to the world in the giving of his own Son (as with the ‘so loved’ of John 3:16 – “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life”).

The nature of this ‘love’ is such that it is totally beyond the reach of our fallen, sinful nature, so that the word ‘agapao’ had very little currency in the Greek-speaking world before Jesus came to put ‘flesh’ on it.  This is why John is stressing throughout this chapter that ‘we [can only] love God because he first loved us’, and to show this love in our lives we must be ‘born [again] of God’ (7), and we must ‘live in him and he in us’ in the power of ‘his Spirit’ (13).  And, obviously, this truth must work both ways: if these things must be true in our lives for us to demonstrate this love to each other, then our ‘agapao’ for each other will be the necessary practical evidence that we are among God’s redeemed people.

Not surprisingly therefore, according to the Apostle Paul, this ‘agapao’ love will be the primary ‘fruit of the Spirit’, along with joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, etc (Galatians 5:22), and this is why Paul goes to such great pains (in 1 Corinthians 13) to spell out the real nature of ‘agapao’ to the Corinthian Christians who were so influenced by their humanistic, man-centred, ‘wise’ culture!  It is quite easy for me to claim that to have love (‘agapao’) for God, but if such ‘love’ isn’t clearly demonstated in my attitude to, and my interaction with, all the people in my church fellowship, then John doesn’t ‘pull any punches’ – I am nothing short of a liar.

John also points out that the living out of this love in practice isn’t an ‘add-on’ to my salvation, but a necessary part and demonstration of it, because Jesus himself commands it.  When a Pharisees asked Jesus, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”, he answered, quoting Deuteronomy 6:5, “Love (agapao) the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”, and then took this one step further by pointing out to the enquiring Pharisee that ‘loving his neighbour as himself’ was a necessary outworking of this love. (Mark 12:29).  Yes, “We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord, and they’ll know we are Christians by our love”!

– Bruce Christian