Love One Another

Anyone who watches young children at play soon notices how much they imitate their parents. Sons love to imitate their fathers, and daughters their mothers. From an early age, they carry their dolls and stuffed animals everywhere—feeding them, putting them to bed, and even disciplining them. In this way, they are rehearsing, without realizing it, for the day when they may be parents themselves.

If imitation is essential to a child’s growth toward maturity, we ought not to be surprised that it is essential to spiritual growth as well, for we bear God’s image (Gen. 1:27) and are being “renewed in the whole man after the image of God” (Westminster Shorter Catechism 35) in our sanctification. Indeed, the whole process of sanctification can be summed up in the imperative “imitate God” (see Eph. 5:1). Today’s passage contains the same idea: “If God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (1 John 4:11; see also 3:16).

In saying that we ought to love, John shows that nothing can substitute for love of the brethren. God dwells by His Spirit in every Christian (3:24) and works in us “to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:13). Because He is love (1 John 4:8), He is necessarily at work conforming us to His own loving character. If we really know God, we will really love one another.

In John’s day, many claimed to have seen God—perhaps in visions—while failing to love their brethren. John rules out the truth of such claims. In the first place, “No one has ever seen God” (v. 12). It is true that God has revealed Himself partly in theophanies, and that Moses even saw His “back” (Ex. 33:12–23). Yet no one has ever seen God as He is in Himself, in His own being.

Though no one has seen God, Jesus has made Him known (John 1:18), and His presence can be seen among us when we love one another. Our love for others makes clear that “God abides in us and his love is perfected in us” (1 John 4:12). This means that as we love one another, God’s love reaches its full effect in us and among us; it does not mean that He is perfected or that His love was ever lacking. His love works effectually in every believer, for He dwells in us, and we show that this love is at work by submitting to it, seeking to love one another as we work out our sanctification (Phil. 2:12–13).