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LOVE

First up—love.

And that’s not surprising, really. Paul has already made the point that what really matters is “faith expressing itself through love” (Gal 5:6), and that we should be serving “one another humbly in love” (Gal 5:13), and that the whole Old Testament law is summed up in the commandment “love your neighbor as yourself” (Gal 5:14).

In putting love first, Paul is echoing Jesus. In the book of Matthew, when someone asked Jesus about the greatest commandment in the law, he responded with two, one from Deuteronomy and one from Leviticus:

Jesus replied: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments. (Mt 22:37-40, quoting Deut 6:5 and Lev 19:18)

Almost certainly, it is that second kind of love—neighbor love—that Paul means by the fruit of the Spirit here. That is, he means that the first fruit of the Spirit is not so much our love for God, but our love for one another as Christians—across all our differences and barriers. And Paul is talking about not just sentimental feelings of being nice, but real practical proof that we love and accept one another, in down-to-earth caring, providing, helping, encouraging, and supporting one another, even when it costs a lot or hurts a lot to do so. Love in action, in other words. Love that dissolves divisions. Love that brings together people who would otherwise hate, hurt, and even kill one another.

Just how important is loving one another in that way? Why is it very first in Paul’s list of the fruit of the Spirit? Paul himself had plenty to say about the importance of Christians loving one another, but it is John who emphasizes it more than any other New Testament writer.

So let’s turn to John as our guide for this first study. Three times in his Gospel, John records Jesus telling his disciples that he commanded them to love one another:

“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (Jn 13:34-35)

My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. (Jn 15:12)

This is my command: Love each other. (Jn 15:17)

Five times in his first letter, John reminds us that this is God’s command, and goes into a lot of detail about how we should love one another not just in words but also with actions and in truth:

For this is the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another. (1 Jn 3:11)

If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth. (1 Jn 3:17-18)

And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us. (1 Jn 3:23)

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. (1 Jn 4:7-8)

Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. (1 Jn 4:11-12)

So if anything can be said to be primary, central, and essential to being a Christian and becoming more like Jesus, it must be this. That is why Paul speaks of this kind of love as the first evidence that God is at work in our lives, the first fruit of the Spirit of God within us. John too sees such love as evidence. It proves something. In fact, love proves several things that we can look at together. When Christians love one another, says John, it is evidence of some very important realities: love is evidence of life, evidence of faith, evidence of God, and evidence for Jesus.

Love for One Another Is the Evidence of Life

John wants to reassure the church community he was writing to that they were true believers and that they shared the life of God, eternal life. So John takes his readers back to the very foundations of their faith to the teaching they heard from the very beginning, when they first heard the gospel and responded to it.

Twice John uses the words, “This is the message we [you] have heard.” The first time is in 1 John 1:5: “This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.”

Then, halfway through his letter, John repeats that phrase, links it to what he has just said about doing what is right, and then expands it with the command to love one another. “Anyone who does not do what is right is not God’s child, nor is anyone who does not love their brother and sister. For this is the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another” (1 Jn 3:10-11).

For John, walking in the light and walking in love were together the two most basic and essential parts of being a true Christian. They were part of the original message and teaching of Jesus himself (“from the beginning”). And they were part of the gospel that they had heard and believed.

But then John goes even further. He makes another of his frequent “we know” statements. John insists that we can and should know some very important things in our Christian life. And here is possibly the most important thing we can know. We can know that we have eternal life. We can be sure about that. In fact, John tells us that that is the prime reason why he wrote his Gospel (John 20:30-31), and also the reason why he wrote his letter (1 Jn 5:13).

So John wanted his readers to know for sure that they had eternal life. But how can you know you’ve got the life that God gives? When you see the evidence of the love that God produces in your life. “We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love each other. Anyone who does not love remains in death” (1 Jn 3:14).

Christian love is a matter of life and death. It’s as serious as that. It’s what proves you have passed from one to the other.

Now that verse (1 Jn 3:14) is very similar to something Jesus said: “Whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life” (Jn 5:24, emphasis mine). So it is when we respond to Jesus and put our faith in God through him that we receive eternal life (says Jesus). But it is when we love one another that we know we have passed from death to life, because we see the evidence (says John). Faith in God through Jesus and love for one another as Christians—these two hang together. Our eternal life is received by faith and demonstrated by love.

How do you know if a tree is alive? You look for the buds, the leaves, and then the fruit. The fruit is the evidence that the tree has life within it. Where there is fruit, there is life. But if there’s no fruit, the tree may be dead.

How do you know if a believer, or a church, is alive? Look for the love. Where there is love, there is life. When Christians truly put love into practice, it is evidence, assurance, that the life of God is present among them and in them. But when we don’t put love into practice, when we fight and squabble, divide and denounce each other . . . what does it say about us? If there’s no love, says John, we have not come to life at all; we “remain in death.”

Love is a life and death thing.

To reinforce how important this is, John gives us two examples—one on each side of his central point in 1 John 3:14.

The negative example: Cain (1 Jn 3:12, 15). Cain was filled with hatred, and hatred led to death. That is the way it goes. So verse 15 gives a very severe warning: hatred of a fellow Christian is like murder (again John is echoing Jesus from Mt 5:21-22). If people claim to be Christians, but their lives, attitudes, and words are filled with hatred of others, then John warns us that they may not even have eternal life at all, no matter what they claim.

The positive example: Christ (1 Jn 3:16). Christ was filled with love, and his love led him to give his life (not to take life, as Cain did). So the essence of love is self-sacrifice for others. That’s how Jesus himself described his coming death as the good shepherd (Jn 10:11, 15). And as Paul put it, “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8).

So, says John, don’t be like Cain (not even in your thoughts). Be like Christ (not only in your thoughts, but in practical life, 1 Jn 3:18).

And then, just in case we might imagine that the principle of self-sacrifice, of laying down our lives for others (1 Jn 3:16), is only for those rare and extreme moments when we might actually have to die for somebody else, John immediately illustrates what he means in verse 17. He’s talking about the simple, ordinary, everyday opportunities to show real practical generosity, care, and kindness. “If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person?” (1 Jn 3:17, emphasis mine). That’s a powerful rhetorical question, expecting the answer: “It can’t be—no matter what the person claims.” We can’t claim to love God, or that God’s love is within us, if we don’t help the needy when we have the ability to do so. Well, we may claim to love God, but it’s simply a lie—as John later says with devastating logic, “Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen” (1 Jn 4:20).

Love for One Another Is the Evidence of Faith

The point that John makes about love (that it needs to be proved in action) is very similar to what James says about faith in this familiar passage:

What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. (Jas 2:14-17)

John would have agreed, of course—and so would Paul. But John connects faith and love in a way that makes them just as inseparable as faith and good deeds. In fact, he puts them together as a single command: “And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us” (1 Jn 3:23).

Notice that John says, “This is his command (singular).” But then he goes on to state two things! We are commanded not only to believe in the name of God’s Son, Jesus Christ, but also to love one another—and together they are one integrated command. If you do the first (believe), you will do the second (love). If you aren’t doing the second (loving one another), you aren’t doing the first (believing in Jesus). Don’t try to split them, for they are both the single command of God: believe-in-Jesus-and-love-one-another. They go together.

So love for one another is not only the evidence of the life of God within us, it is also the evidence of the faith through which we came to receive that life in the first place. James said that faith without deeds is dead. John would agree by saying that faith without love (love that is proved in good deeds) is also dead—nothing but an empty claim. In fact, since “this is his command,” it follows that if we aren’t showing practical love for one another, we are simply disobeying the commands of the Jesus we say we believe in. And what kind of disciples are we then?

Love for One Another Is Evidence for God

One of the most famous verses in the Bible, after John 3:16, is “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8). As with all Bible verses, it’s important to read it in context. Here it is in a wonderfully rich passage about love and God:

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 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. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. (1 Jn 4:7-12, emphasis mine)

John says three main things in this passage.

God is the source of all love (1 Jn 4:7-8). “Love comes from God,” he says. All human love flows from God because God is the source of all true love, since love is his very nature and being. This tells us something about God. God is love through and through. All that God does or says is ultimately an expression of his love. When God acts in justice, it is the expression of God’s love. When God acts in anger, it is God’s love defending itself (and us) from everything that would spoil and destroy the world and the people he has made in love. God’s whole attitude and action towards his creation is love. Or as Psalm 145 puts it twice, the Lord “is loving toward everything he has made” (Ps 145:13, 17 NIRV). God’s love is the greatest reality in the universe, greater even than the universe itself.

So, yes, this passage tells us a glorious truth about God. But remember, John is primarily talking to his readers, and his main point is that whoever does not live in love with others is not connected to God, who is the source of love. Indeed, such a person does not really know God at all and is not a child of God.

God has given us the proof and model of his love (1 Jn 4:9-11). John comes back to the very heart of the gospel itself. How do we know that God loves us? Because God the Father gave his only Son, and God the Son willingly gave himself, to save us from eternal death and give us eternal life. The wonderful truth of the gospel of 1 John 3:16 is just beneath the surface of these verses.

The cross is the ultimate proof of God’s love—the love of the Father and of the Son. Notice the beautiful balance between 1 John 4:9-10, which speaks of the love of the Father in sending his Son, and 1 John 3:16, which speaks of the love of the Son in laying down his life for us. Paul makes exactly the same balanced point when he speaks of God the Father as the one “who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all” (Rom 8:32), and of “the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal 2:20).

But once again, remember the main point here. John is saying all this about God’s love not just to teach us good atonement theology. His big point is to motivate us to imitate the love of God the Father and God the Son by loving one another. And so that brings us to the climax of his argument: “Since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (1 Jn 4:11, emphasis mine). The cross is not just the means by which we are saved, but also the model for how we are to live.

Peter makes the same double point. Jesus, he says, “‘bore our sins’ in his body on the cross” (1 Pet 2:24). That is how our sins can be forgiven, because of the atoning death of Christ. But in the same passage he writes, “Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps. . . . He did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats” (1 Pet 2:21, 23). Similarly, says John, God’s love, proved on the cross, is a model and example for us to follow. “Since God . . . we ought . . . ” (1 Jn 4:11). It’s as simple as that.

So then, if you’re having a hard struggle to love other Christians (as often happens, for all kinds of reasons), there are two things you should do: first, go to the source of love, God himself, and ask for his divine love to fill you; and second, look at the model of love, the cross of Christ, and follow his example.

But then John goes one step further and makes an even more powerful statement about what happens when Christians love one another.

God becomes visible through our love for one another (1 Jn 4:12). “No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us” (1 Jn 4:12).

“No one has ever seen God.” But what about all those appearances of God in the Old Testament to people like Abraham and Moses? Well, yes, in a sense God did make himself visible to them in some temporary human form, or through an angel. Such events are called theophanies, from the Ancient Greek theophaneia meaning “appearance of a god.” When God wanted to say or do something particularly significant at a moment of history, he would appear to someone in the story. But even then, there was a caution about speaking about seeing God. They knew that God, as God really is in himself, is invisible. God is not part of the physical world that we live in and can see around us. God is not an object. God is Spirit, the creator of the universe, not a thing or body we can see with our physical eyes. So in that sense, John truthfully says, “No one has ever seen God” (1 Jn 4:12).

But this is actually the second time John has written those exact words. The first time is in his Gospel. Right at the beginning, when he is talking about the wonder of how the eternal Word of God has entered our world of space and time, John says this: “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in the closest relationship with the Father, has made him known” (Jn 1:18).

Jesus Christ, the Word who became flesh, has made God visible. God, in the person of Jesus Christ, was seen and heard and touched. In fact, John reminds the readers of his letter of this same point right at the start: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life” (1 Jn 1:1). So yes, God who is invisible in himself, was seen in the earthly life of Jesus of Nazareth. As Jesus himself put it, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn 14:9).

Well, we might say, that was all very well and good for those who did actually see Jesus when he was here living on earth. They had this wonderful opportunity of seeing the invisible God, made visible in the person and life of Jesus of Nazareth. Good for them. But what about the rest of us? What about the rest of the human race who never had the chance to see Jesus? Is there any way that God can be seen today?

Amazingly, John makes this second statement starting exactly the same way: “No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and God’s love is made complete in us” (1 Jn 4:12, emphasis mine). It seems that John is implying that our love for one another makes visible the love of God—which is another way of saying that God himself is seen, since God is love. When Christians love each other, in practical, sacrificial, costly, barrier-dissolving ways, then the love of God (or rather, the God who is love) can be seen. The world should be able to look at Christians and how they live together and love together and see something of the reality of God being demonstrated. The invisible God makes himself visible in the love that Christians have for one another.

Now of course, none of us is perfect, and all of us fail in all kinds of ways. That is why we often protect ourselves a bit when we say things like, “Don’t look at me, or don’t look at Christians; look at Jesus.” Well, yes, we should never boast. And yes, we do want people to focus on Christ, not on ourselves. But sometimes that kind of thinking and speaking can be an excuse for not even trying to obey Christ’s command to love one another. For, according to John, the world should be able to look at Christians and Christian churches and see something that demonstrates the reality of God. They should be able to see God in action.

And that is especially true when people who would otherwise hate and kill one another, such as people who come from nations that have a history of war with each other, can show that they love one another because of the love of God in Christ. During the Rwanda genocide in 1994, students in the IFES (International Fellowship of Evangelical Students) movement who came from the Hutu and Tutsi tribes were warned to separate from each other. But they stood in a circle, holding hands in prayer, saying, “We live together, united by Christ, and we will die together if necessary.” And many of them did die together. Only the gospel of the love of God could have unified them.

We see the gospel when a Messianic Jewish Israeli and a Palestinian Christian believer can stand and embrace one another on an international platform, as they did at the Lausanne Congress in Cape Town in 2010. God himself becomes visible when God’s children love one another, even though the world tells them to do the opposite.

Some years ago, the atheist societies in the UK paid for an ad to be placed on the famous red London buses. It said, “There probably is no God, so stop worrying and enjoy life.” There are many Christians in London. So in theory, a non-Christian reading that ad should be able to say: “That just can’t be true (that there is no God), because I know Sarah and Nirmala and Sam and Ajith, and they are Christians, and God is obviously real and living in them.”

We are supposed to be the living proof of the living God. No one can see God. But people can see us. And when we love one another, it is the love of God they see.

This might all sound very positive, and it is. But we do need to stop and think about the negative effects when the opposite is true—when Christians do not or will not love one another, and instead find all kinds of ways of excusing themselves from this command of Jesus, and show no evidence of this first fruit of the Spirit.

According to John, when people who claim to be Christians show no evidence of this kind of God-like, Christ-like, Spirit-produced love, then they call into question whether they are truly born again (1 Jn 4:7 ); they show that they don’t really know God (1 Jn 4:8); and they are despising the cross of Christ by refusing to live as if it has anything to teach us (1 Jn 4:9-10). But worst of all, they are keeping God invisible (1 Jn 4:12). They are hiding the love of God. They are concealing the God who is love, the God who cannot be seen in himself, but longs to be seen in and through us.

So for all those reasons, such people are actually frustrating God’s mission and hindering people from entering the kingdom of God, in the same way that those who resisted and rejected Jesus did in the Gospel stories.

When Christians do not love one another, it is not just tragic, it is toxic. It is poisonous and deadly. It frustrates the very reason for our existence. Our mission is to be disciples and make disciples, sharing and living the good news of the gospel of the love of God by showing how it transforms our own lives and relationships.

That all comes from the first letter of John. But we can go back to Jesus himself for our conclusion.

Love for One Another Is Evidence for Jesus

Jesus said, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (Jn 13:34-35).

When Christians love each other, it shows who they belong to. It points people to Jesus. Christian love is incredibly transforming, and in many contexts so surprising and countercultural that it can only be the work of Christ, the power of the gospel, the fruit of the Spirit.

What a vital fruit this kind of love is! It is absolutely first and foremost. When Christians love one another, it proves they have eternal life and a saving faith, it proves the reality of God, and it proves that they are true followers of Jesus. But when they don’t . . . well, what does that prove?

Questions

1. What Bible stories illustrate the theme of love?
2. What examples can you give from your own cultural context or history that illustrate the power of love to prove the truth of the gospel, for example, in the reconciling of enemies?
3. What evidence is there of either the presence or the absence of love as the fruit of God’s Spirit?

Watch a video from Chris about love at ivpress.com/cultivating-love.