The Manifest Love of God

Ikthus Dumaguete

Ikthus Daily Word | November 11, 2023 | Saturday

1 John 4:9-10 “In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”

The apostle is anxious to remind us that God is actually manifesting that essential nature of His. He is love, but mercifully for us He has “manifested” that love, He has made it unmistakably plain and clear. So we can put John’s immediate argument like this: “If only you really understood this love, if only you knew something about it, then most of your problems and difficulties would immediately vanish.” So he proceeds to tell us something further about this great and wondrous and glorious love of God.

Surely we all must agree that this is something that is equally true of us. The more I study the New Testament and live the Christian life, the more convinced I am that our fundamental difficulty, our fundamental lack, is the lack of seeing the love of God. It is not so much our knowledge that is defective but our vision of the love of God. Thus our greatest object and endeavor should be to know Him better, and thus we will love Him more truly. Now John’s object is to help these first Christians to whom he writes in just this way, because he is quite sure that once they love God, they will love one another.

This is something we find running right through the Bible; the second commandment follows the first. The first commandment is, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. . . . And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (Matthew 22:37, 39). But you will never do the second until you have done the first; so we must start with the love of God.

A Thought to Ponder: It is not so much our knowledge that is defective but our vision of the love of God.

Devotional Source: Walking with God Day By Day

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