Why You Cannot Love God without Loving His People
God Living in You: Part 5
1 John 4:18-5:1      12-28-2008

Summary: Having God’s love achieve its purpose in you (so that you love your brothers) is proof that God remains in you, and you use that proof to cast out the bad kind of fear (which drives you away from God) but not the good kind (which keeps you from sin).  Love for God and brother are inseparable because the source of love for both God and brother is the same, the only valid physical expression of love or God is to His people , the first and second commandment are one, and you cannot love the father without loving the child.

Loving God’s People = Proof You Love God
Review
You don’t feel guilty when you show love
But what about fearing God?
Casting out fear
But what if my repentance is in question?
Why are love for God and love for brother inseparable?
Empty claims
The idea that you can love God and not His people is common
1)	Because the source of love for God also produces love for brothers
2)	Because the only valid expression of love to God is love to His people
3)	Because the greatest and second commands are one command. 21
4)	Because you can’t love the Father without loving the child (5:1)
Family Resemblance
Devotionals

18 There is no fear in love. But accomplished love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not accomplished in love. 
19 We love because he first loved us. 20 If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. 21 And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.
5:1 Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves the father loves his child as well.

Loving God’s People = Proof You Love God
Review
We have been studying through the book of 1 John and are now approaching the end of chapter 4.  In this chapter John has been speaking about what he calls “accomplished love.”  Your translation probably says “perfect love,” but the word points to achieving a goal or accomplishing a purpose, more than being flawless or perfect.  The idea first came up back in verse 12.

12 No one has ever seen God; [but] if we love one another, God remains in us and his love is accomplished in us. 

God loves you for a purpose.  He has a goal in mind, and that goal, that objective is for his love to be received in your heart in such a way that it results in you loving His people.  If God is loving you and you are not loving His people then His love for you is not achieving its objective.  But if it is causing you to love His people then it is achieving its objective in your life.  And if that is the case, that eliminates fear of Judgment Day.  It shows that you are His child – just like Jesus is His child.  And if you are in the same category as Jesus in that way then you have no more damnation to fear on Judgment Day than Jesus does.

17 In this way, love achieves its goal among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him. 
18 There is no fear in love. But accomplished love (love that achieves its purpose in your life by causing you to love your brothers) casts out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not achieving the purpose of love.
You don’t feel guilty when you show love
There is no fear in love.  When you are on your way to the hospital to comfort a dying friend you don’t say, “Oh, I’m going to hell for this for sure!”  When your heart overflows with love toward someone because Christ loves that person, and you set aside your own freedoms and lay down your life for them, you never walk away with a guilty conscience thinking, “OK, now God’s really going to zap me for that.”
Now, hopefully you don’t say, “I’m going to heaven for this” either.  You do not earn your way to heaven by being a loving person.  Nobody goes to heaven because they deserve to go to heaven.  But if the love of God is flowing into your heart in such a way that it achieves its purposes and causes a great affection in your heart toward His people, that should make you say, “This love did not come from my own heart.  It could only come from God dwelling inside me, which means I am His child, and if I am His child then I am not condemned.”
But what about fearing God?
That is how love in your life casts out fear.  If you read that passage and think, “Wait a minute – I thought we were supposed to fear God” – you need to understand, there is a good kind of fear of God and a bad kind.  Love does not cast out the good kind – only the bad kind.  Exodus 20:20 speaks of both kinds of fear in the same verse.

Exodus 20:18 When the people saw the thunder and lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear. They stayed at a distance 9 and said to Moses, "Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die."

That was the bad kind of fear.  It pushed them away from God and estranged them from God.

20 Moses said to the people, "Do not be afraid. (in other words, don’t have that kind of fear) God has come to test you, so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning." (That’s the good kind of fear)
The good kind of fear of God increases your obedience and keeps you from sin, and the bad kind drives you away from intimacy with God.  That is how you can tell which kind of fear you have in your heart.  If your fear of God and fear of judgment makes you want to pray less, and it makes you shy away from approaching God and back away from fellowship with His people - if you have an expectation of punishment that is incompatible with intimacy; that is the kind of fear that needs to be cast out.
But if you tremble before God in worship and awe, and you take chastisement and the warnings in Scripture so seriously that it keeps you from sin, and it makes you want to avoid doing certain things and walking down certain paths because of what could happen on Judgment Day if you did; that is the good kind of fear that you should cultivate.
Casting out fear
The word translated “cast out” is a very active, vivid term.  And it is the activity of a Christian.  I do not think the point here is that unbelievers are afraid of Judgment Day and Christians are not.  That is how it should be, but that is not how it is.  Most unbelievers are oblivious to Judgment Day.  Deep down there is some fear of death there, but for the most part they could not care less about God’s Judgment.
But when we as Christians disobey God and fall short of love, suddenly our confidence in our salvation becomes questionable.  As God’s children we are exempted from condemnation on that day, but the more we fall into sin the more that bad kind of fear creeps back into our lives.  The accuser comes and beats us over the head with our guilt, and we just want to retreat from God and His Word and His Church and everything else.
And so the Christian life becomes a process of casting that fear out.  It sneaks in; you throw it out.  It sneaks back in; you throw it back out.  And the way you throw it out is not by clinging to some sentimental theorizing about how God is too nice to send anyone to hell.  Nor is it by clinging to the memory of your conversion or trying to figure out if it was genuine or not.  The way you cast out that fear is by repenting of your sin, doing everything you can to slam the door on access to that sin in the future, and turn to walk in obedience so that God’s love achieves its purpose in you.
But what if my repentance is in question?
 So you might be thinking, “Fine – I understand that if I live in love and repent of my failures to love that I can be assured that I am a child of God.  But what if my repentance is in question?  There are no tears where there should be total brokenness.  My prayers of repentance go for all of ten seconds and then my mind is off to something else.  The steps I’ve taken to make sure it doesn’t happen again have been a joke.”  If that is the case, then you really do have something to worry about.  Because if it is true that your repentance is not true repentance, then all bets are off.  None of the comforting words of John or any other book of the Bible apply to you.  Having questionable repentance is not something you want to mess with.
So if your repentance is questionable, ask yourself this – in the sin you are struggling with and that you keep on falling into over and over, is there any more drastic measure you could possibly take than what you have already done?  Like, for instance – confess it to your small group so you can get their help and prayers?  
Or set up a weekly or daily accountability relationship with someone?
Or cancel your cable or Internet completely?
Or do a Bible study on that topic?
Or quit your job 
Or come to the elders of the church for help?
Or give up your hobby or whatever?
If what you have been doing is not working and you can think of something more drastic – do it!  And if you are not willing to do it – you would rather just risk continuing to stumble in that sin than take drastic measures – that is not true repentance.  And I guarantee you, you do not want to be holding on to unrepentant sin when Jesus returns.
In our pride we do not want to do whatever it takes to cut off access to the sin because we think, “I want to just develop strong enough character to where I can resist the temptation.  If I just remove the temptation, that does not address the issue of my strength.  I want to be strong enough to overcome it.
That may sound like good reasoning, but it isn’t.  Jesus taught us to pray, “Lead us not into temptation” not “Give us the strength to resist temptation.”

Proverbs 5:8 Keep to a path far from her, do not go near the door of her house.

Learn from Cain – and Judas.  When God offers you a way out of your sin – take it!  Do not pass it up, or He may allow you to be overtaken by a far worse sin.  When Jesus said if your eye causes you to sin gouge it out, and when your hand causes you to sin, cut it off - the point He was making is that we need to not only take drastic measures, but we need to take measures that are so drastic that they seem far more drastic than what is necessary or reasonable. 

Why are love for God and love for brother inseparable? 
So, you know you have intimacy with God when you love your brother, and you repent of failures to love.  If there is one thing John has made crystal clear in this book it is that love for God and love for your brother are absolutely inseparable. 

20 If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar. 
Empty claims
That is the seventh time in this book that John has said, “If anyone says…”.  It is very important to John and to the Holy Spirit that we understand that religious claims, in themselves, mean nothing.  That is especially important in our day because there are literally millions of people around the world who think they are Christians simply because they claim to be Christians.  Claiming to be something makes you that thing when it comes to matters of affiliation, but not matters of nature.  If you register as a Republican that act makes you a Republican – that is your affiliation.
But if you claim to be one of the nine planets in our solar system, or a bicycle or a dog – that claim does not make it so.  Even if you go and register with the city as a German Shepherd, still that does not make you a dog if you were not born a dog.  Christianity is a matter of nature, not just affiliation.  If you are not actually born of God by the Holy Spirit, then claiming to be a Christian does not make you anything – except a liar.
So, if the claim by itself is not enough, what is the proof of true salvation?  It is God’s love accomplishing its purpose in your heart by causing you to respond to His love by loving the brothers.  And if that is not happening then even if the person swears up and down that he loves God, he is a liar.   (And for John there are only two possibilities – love or hate.  Nothing in the middle.  Any failure to love is the equivalent of hatred according to John.)
The idea that you can love God and not His people is common
So John wants us to understand that love for God and love for His people are inseparable - which is a news flash for a lot of folks.  I talk to people all the time who claim their relationship with God is going just fine, but they have dropped out of church or out of their small group because they cannot get along with people.  They are tired of getting hurt, tired of relational conflicts, tired of being let down or disappointed or offended or hurt or mistreated, and so they just throw up their hands and say – “I can’t take it anymore” and they drop out.  They do not want any organized religion.
[Of all the excuses for not coming to church I think that has to be the most ridiculous – being against organized religion.  They don’t mind organized golf – start on the first hole, wait your turn, always play the same direction, follow all the exact same rules every time.  They don’t mind an organized library or an organized Christmas party.  Organized movie theaters are OK – movies start at certain set times, and everyone sits facing the screen.  Organized television, organized neighborhoods, organized sports – all of that is fine.  But I can’t come to church – it’s too organized.]
The truth is those people stay away not because of the organization, but because of the people.  They want to worship God in private – just them and God.  They listen to preaching on TV or the radio, and sing along with a professional choir on a CD, and they have all the spiritual food they need.  And if you ask them about fellowship, they say, “Oh, I get plenty of fellowship.”  They bump into fellow Christians at the grocery store, and once in a while have some friends over for dinner, and they talk on the phone with their friends, and that is all the fellowship they need.  They do not mind a little relational interaction here and there as long as it is on their terms on their timetable in a safe context, and it is not too demanding, and there is no big risk of getting hurt or offended.
And if you say to them, “What about ministry?  What about dispensing God’s grace to the Church through your spiritual gifts?  What about all the “one another” commands in Scripture?  What about not forsaking the assembly?”  They will answer – “I’m not willing to do all that because people are just too hard to love.”  God is easy to love.  He never sins against you, never lies to you, never lets you down, is never unfaithful, always loves you perfectly, never makes a mistake.  Nothing about Him is ugly.  He is perfect in beauty and in everything else.  God I can love – but sinful, weak, disappointing, unreliable, offensive, immature, selfish, dishonest, needy people?  That is too hard.  Exposing my heart, making myself vulnerable, working to build friendships and relationships – it is too much work.  And it is too risky.  I have done it in the past and time after time I have gotten hurt.  So just let me love God in private from an isolated pew in the corner, or from the comfort of my living room, but do not ask me to lay down my life to love others.”
John says, “You’re a liar.”  John is not into subtleties.  He doesn’t say, “Well, I understand that you love God, but could I suggest the possibility that perhaps there might be one weak area in your love for God?”  He just says, “You claim to love God?  You’re a liar.”   Love for God and love for His people are inseparable.
But why?  Why is it so impossible to love God and not love His people?”  John gives us four reasons.
1)	Because the source of love for God also produces love for brothers
But before John can give us reason #1 he needs to explain to us how love works.

19 We love because he first loved us. 

The source of all our love is God.  The only way you can love God or people is if He first loves you.  Your heart is like a garden hose, and the water is love.  By itself the hose cannot do anything.  If it is not hooked up to the spigot, there is no water at all.  So the point of verse 19 is simply that in order for any water to come out of the hose, the hose has to be hooked up to the spigot.

19 We love because he first loved us. 

All our love comes from God.

20 If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar.

God designed us so at the end of the hose is a splitter, so every time you turn it on it sprays in two directions.  One part sprays up and the other sprays straight out.  If anyone claims to have water shooting straight up toward God, but there is no water shooting out toward people, that person is a liar, because if the hose is hooked up water will spray out both ways.  And if it is not shooting out one way, you know for sure it is not shooting out the other way.
And that is good to know because the part of the hose that is aimed upward is hidden from our view.  But the part that shoots out toward people – that part we can see.  So if nothing is shooting outward then you know nothing is shooting upward.
So why can you not love God without loving His Church?  Because of the way love works.  Love does not originate in your heart.  It originates in heaven, flows down to you, and, if it penetrates to your heart, produces a certain effect.  And that effect is love flowing out of your heart in two directions – up and out.  And so if there is nothing going out toward people then there is nothing going up toward God.  The reason you cannot love God if you do not love His people is because if you do not love His people that proves there is no love in your heart.  There is no water flowing through the hose at all.  You cannot love God, because there is nothing there to love Him with.
2)	Because the only valid expression of love to God is love to His people

Reason #2 why you cannot love God without also loving His people:

20 …For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.

What is John saying there?  I have always taken that to mean it is easier to love people than to love God – because it is hard to love someone who is invisible.  If you cannot do the easier thing of loving people, then you really will not be able to do the much harder thing of loving God.  That seems to be John’s logic.  Otherwise, why mention the seeing and not seeing?  Why didn’t John just say, “Anyone who does not love his brother cannot love God?”  Why bring up the fact that you can see your neighbor and you cannot see God?
But there are some problems with that interpretation.  It seems to me the fact that I can see my brother – that person in the church that I have such a hard time loving – the fact that I can see him is the whole problem!  It would be a whole lot easier to love him if he would just disappear!  The fact that I can see him makes it so I can see his faults, I can see what is ugly about him, what is sinful about him, what is unlovely about him.  And all that makes him harder to love.  So what is it that John is getting at here with the seeing and not seeing?
As I wrestled with that this week, it occurred to me that this is not the first time John has talked about God’s invisibility.  He mentioned that back in verse 12 – remember?

12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love achieves its goal in us.

When we studied that verse we found that John was acknowledging the fact God is invisible, but then he went on to contradict the Gnostic idea that God is therefore unknowable.   Yes, God is invisible.  It is true that He cannot be seen, however that is not to say that God is unknowable.  That is not to say that you can have no personal, love relationship with God.  You can!
But how?  If you cannot know God in the normal way that you know a human being that you can see and hear and touch, then how can you carry on a relationship with Him?  John’s answer is in verse 12.
 
12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love achieves its goal in us.

What is the substitute for seeing God? -  Having His love flow through you to others, so that His purposes in loving you are realized by you loving your brother.  When that happens, God remains in you and you in Him.  That is how you carry on a personal relationship with an invisible God.  He loves you; He loves you with a purpose in mind; and you receive that love and it has an effect in your heart that causes you to love your brother.  That is what it means to be in a love relationship with the invisible God, whom you have not seen.  Loving your brother is the substitute for seeing and feeling and hearing and touching God.  You cannot see Him, but in place of seeing Him you love your brother.
Now with that in mind, let’s look at verse 20 again.  If you do not love your brother, obviously you are not in a love relationship with the invisible God, because being in a love relationship with the invisible God causes you to love your brother.  That is why John says if you do not love your brother you cannot love God, who is unseen.  If you say, “I do not love God by loving His people – I love Him in some other way,” John will answer, “No, there is no other way to love the invisible God.”
Love is a feeling that compels action.  If you claim to love your wife but there are absolutely no actions that express that love, then your love is imagined and not real.  Love drives you to act.  Love demands to be expressed.  Love is a feeling (it involves desire and delight), but it is not just a feeling.  Love is something that rises from your entire being.  If you force the actions without any feeling there in your heart, that is not love.  But nor is it love if you claim to have the feeling, but there is no action.  Love is a feeling that compels action.
So when you love an invisible God, what is the action?  My love for my wife compels me and drives me to give her hugs and kisses and to serve her and provide for her and protect her and show compassion and all kinds of other things.  What does my love for God compel me to do?  I cannot see Him.  I cannot touch him.  I cannot give Him anything – if I take some money and throw it up toward heaven it does not make it.  It just falls back down on my face.  If I put a gift for him on a rocket ship it will be lucky if it makes it as far as the moon, but it will never reach heaven.  So I cannot really give Him anything.
Can I help Him?  No.  Can I protect Him?  No.  Can I hug Him?  No.  Can I teach Him something?  No.  Can I feed Him, clothe Him, show compassion toward Him, have mercy on Him, forgive Him?  No.  If I have true love for the Lord Jesus Christ in my heart it will compel me to express that love in my actions, and the only object that can receive the physical expressions of my physical body is His Body – the Church.  And so if I do not love His body I do not love Him.
You cannot love the invisible part of a person while hating the part you can see.  What would you think of your husband if he beat you up and then claimed there was nothing wrong with his love for you?  He says, “Look honey, it was just your body that I punched and kicked – but what I love is your soul.  I don’t love your body, just your soul.  The part of you I can see and touch - I hate.  But what I don’t see, that’s the part I love.”   Would you say, “Well, at least you are half way there”?  No, you would say, “There is no love in your heart for me at all.”
Love is a feeling that compels action, and demands to be expressed in actions, and the invisible, transcendent God cannot be served with human hands as if He needed anything, and so the only way to express the actions of love is to His body - His people.
And if someone says, “But wait a minute – I express love for God with my mouth.  I am not really involved in any ministry to His people, but I worship Him and praise Him and pray to Him and sing to Him with my mouth.”  What does John say about love that comes out of your mouth but does not find its way into your actions?  If anyone claims to love God while failing to love his neighbor whom he can see – that person is a liar.  If it comes out of your mouth but not your actions, it is not love, it is a lie.
3)	Because the greatest and second commands are one command. 
So the first reason why love for God and love for His people cannot be separated is because of the way love works.  It comes from God and shoots out through you upward and outward.  And so where there is nothing shooting outward there is nothing going upward.  And the second reason why love for God and love for people cannot be separated is because God is invisible and transcendent, and so the only way love for Him can be expressed in your actions is by loving people.  And then in verse 21 John gives us a third reason.

21 And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.

John states the great commandment here in a unique way.  It is not “Love God and love your neighbor,” but “Whoever loves God must love his neighbor.”  Saying it that way binds the two together.  The point is that the greatest commandment and the second commandment are not two commandments.  They are two sides of the same coin.  When the man asked Jesus, “What is the greatest commandment?” Jesus gave him #1 and #2.  Why?  They guy did not ask for #2, just #1.  Jesus gave him 1 and 2 because they go together, and they can never be split apart.  And they have to be mentioned together, because the human heart and false religion are constantly trying to pry them apart.  We want to think we can have one without the other.  But if you have one without the other then you do not have the one – you have nothing.  
When John speaks of “His command” here, most likely he is talking about the new commandment that Jesus gave in the Gospel of John.

John 13:34 A new command I give you: Love one another.

The command to love your neighbor was an old command, but the command to love one another – followers of Christ – that was new.  Jesus commanded us to have a special love for His followers, and to love them because He loved them and to love them in the way He loved them.  That is what completely sets our love apart from the world’s natural love.  People in the world have some love.  But they do not have special love for the followers of Christ because they are followers of Christ.  And they certainly do not follow Jesus’ example of love – laying down your life in order to bring more abundant spiritual life in Christ to others.
That was Jesus’ command.  And He said, “If you love me you will do what I command.”  And so again, if we claim to love Him and do not obey His command to love His people with His love because they are His people, then we are liars.
4)	Because you cannot love the Father without loving the child (5:1)
So you cannot separate love for God and love for people because
•	Where there is no love for people there is no love at all
•	The only way to express the actions of love for God is to people
•	Jesus commanded us to love His people and said if we love Him we will obey that command
•	And one more…

5:1 Every one who believes that Jesus is the Christ is a child of God, and every one who loves the parent loves the child. 

If you love someone you will love the people who are most beloved to them.  If someone in your family or some dear friend has a baby, you have a special love for that child – more so than some random child you happen to see in the grocery store or something.  Love is like that – it spills out all over everyone nearby.  If you are into sports, you might find yourself rooting for a certain team just because someone you love is from that city.  Tracy roots for the Denver Nuggets for one reason and one reason only – because she loves…me!  If Tracy didn’t love me as much as she does she would not care if the Nuggets lost every game by 100 points.  When you really love someone your heart opens up toward what they love and who they love.
And that is especially true when their father is also your father.  We are siblings.  One of the evidences of genuine faith in your heart is when you feel an affinity toward brothers and sisters in Christ with whom you have nothing in common outside of your love for the Lord.  There might be two sisters who are completely different in just about every way, and yet they are best friends just because they are sisters.  If they were not related to each other they probably never would have been friends at all.  That is the way it is in God’s family as well.  If you only have love in your heart toward those to whom you would naturally be attracted in the world, you have reason to question your faith.  But if you find love in your heart for certain Christians just because they are Christians that is evidence that you are related as siblings.
And the converse of that is true as well – there is a certain distance between you and unbelievers.  You might have some level of friendship with them, and you show kindness to them, but they will never be like the family of God is to you.

Family Resemblance
When your friends’ kids get older you love them even more, because as their personalities develop they start to develop the same characteristics that you so love.  Think of everything John has said so far in this book about children of God.  
Those who are born of God are purified from all sin (1:7).
Instead of lying about their sins they confess their sins and are purified from all unrighteousness (1:9).
They do not continue in unrepentant sin (3:6, 9).
They keep His Word (love it, guard it, and obey it) (2:5) and do what is righteous just as He is righteous (2:29, 3:7, 9). 
They walk as Jesus walked (2:6).
They love the brothers and live in the light (2:10, 3:10, 14).
They are generous (3:17).
They know the Father (2:13).
They have overcome the evil one (2:13, 14) and the world (4:4).
They do the will of God (2:17).
They know the truth (2:20), the anointing remains in them (2:27), and they listen to the Word of God (4:6).
They wholeheartedly and genuinely confess Christ (2:23) and believe the truth about Him and entrust their lives to Him (3:23).
They remain faithful to the gospel, and they remain in the Father and the Father remains in them (2:24) and His love accomplishes its purpose in them (4:12).
They are purifying themselves through the hope of seeing Christ as He is (3:3).
They have the Holy Spirit (3:24).
How could you love God and not love people like that?
We say it is easier to love God than people because God is perfectly good, but the truth is, our sinful hearts do not love what is good like they should.  Our hearts should be thrilled beyond words at the goodness of God, but so often we are indifferent toward it.  We read a Psalm that celebrates 15 different attributes of God, putting His goodness on display in marvelous fashion, and we are bored by it.  So we probably tend to give ourselves a little more credit than we deserve when we think God is easy to love because He is so good.  If we really took delight in the goodness of God as we should then we would have greater love for those who have traces of His attributes in their character – which ALL Christians do.
And you might be thinking, “The people I have a hard time loving – it is not their resemblance to God’s character that bothers me; it is the areas where they fall short of that.  It is the areas where they do not resemble Jesus Christ that bother me, and that make them hard to love.”  We certainly should not love the sin in people, right?  It would be a bad thing if you were attracted to what is sinful in them.  So how do you love sinful people?  How do you love people whose actions are not as righteous as they should be?
How does God do it?  He has higher standards for righteous behavior than you, right?  So how does a holy God who can tolerate no evil manage to take delight in His children who sin every day?  We get the answer to that question in the very first book of the Bible.

Genesis 15:6 Abram believed in Yahweh, and he credited it to him as righteousness.

When a person has true, saving faith – they believe God’s Word, and they trust Him so much they are willing to entrust their lives to Him and follow Him without reservation, when God sees that kind of faith in your heart He credits it to your account is if it were righteousness - perfectly righteous behavior.  Because of the price Jesus paid for our sins, and because of His perfect righteousness, God is able to look at a person who sins and then repents and put him in the category of someone who does not sin.  He can do that because Jesus’ sacrifice was enough to satisfy Him.  So the question is, is it enough to satisfy you?  This person you cannot seem to love – are their sins so great that not even the death of Jesus in their place is enough to satisfy you?  
In our flesh we want to overlook their righteousness and focus on their sin.  But if we love God we will overlook their sin and focus on their righteousness.  And when their sin cannot be overlooked because there is no repentance, we confront them with church discipline.  We reprove them with the goal of bringing about repentance so we can love them with unhindered love.
Let’s learn to take delight in the righteousness we see around us.  Set aside the things your husband or wife does that irritate you for a moment, and consider their righteousness (if your spouse is a believer).   That person in the church you struggle to love, give some careful, prolonged consideration to the righteousness that is in their lives, and think about where that came from.  Spend more time thinking about the delight God takes in that person, and on the price Jesus paid to cover his or her sins.  Think about how much your Father in heaven desires that person to be loved by you.  Consider how closely your love for God is connected to your love for that person.  And contemplate more deeply the way in which God loves you so that His love will achieve its goal in your heart through love for others.  And then you will know that God is remaining in you and you are remaining in Him in close, sweet fellowship.

Benediction: Acts 20:32 Now I commit you to God and to the word of his grace, which can build you up and give you an inheritance among all those who are sanctified.

Devotionals
Day 1 
In this chapter John has been speaking about what he calls “accomplished love.”  The idea first came up back in verse 12.

12 No one has ever seen God; [but] if we love one another, God remains in us and his love is accomplished in us. 

God loves you for a purpose.  He has a goal in mind, and that goal, that objective is for his love to be received in your heart in such a way that it results in you loving His people.  If God is loving you and you are not loving His people then His love for you is not achieving its objective.  But if it is causing you to love His people then it is achieving its objective in your life.  And if that is the case, that eliminates fear of Judgment Day.  It shows that you are His child – just like Jesus is His child.  And if you are in the same category as Jesus in that way then you have no more damnation to fear on Judgment Day than Jesus does.

17 In this way, love achieves its goal among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him. 
18 There is no fear in love. But accomplished love (love that achieves its purpose in your life by causing you to love your brothers) casts out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not achieving the purpose of love.

There is no fear in love.  When you are on your way to the hospital to comfort a dying friend you don’t say, “Oh, I’m going to hell for this for sure!”  When your heart overflows with love toward someone because Christ loves that person, and you set aside your own freedoms and lay down your life for them, you never walk away with a guilty conscience thinking, “OK, now God’s really going to zap me for that.”
Now, hopefully you don’t say, “I’m going to heaven for this” either.  You do not earn your way to heaven by being a loving person.  Nobody goes to heaven because they deserve to go to heaven.  But if the love of God is flowing into your heart in such a way that it achieves its purposes and causes a great affection in your heart toward His people, that should make you say, “This love didn’t come from my own heart.  It could only come from God dwelling inside me, which means I am His child, and if I am His child then I am not condemned.”
That is how love in your life casts out fear.  If you read that passage and think, “Wait a minute – I thought we were supposed to fear God” – you need to understand, there is a good kind of fear of God and a bad kind.  Love does not cast out the good kind – only the bad kind.  Exodus 20:20 speaks of both kinds of fear in the same verse.

Exodus 20:18 When the people saw the thunder and lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear. They stayed at a distance 9 and said to Moses, "Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die."

That was the bad kind of fear.  It pushed them away from God and estranged them from God.

20 Moses said to the people, "Do not be afraid. (in other words, don’t have that kind of fear) God has come to test you, so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning." (That is the good kind of fear.)

The good kind of fear of God increases your obedience and keeps you from sin, and the bad kind drives you away from intimacy with God.  That is how you can tell which kind of fear you have in your heart.  If your fear of God and fear of judgment makes you want to pray less, and it makes you shy away from approaching God and back away from fellowship with His people - if you have an expectation of punishment that is incompatible with intimacy; that is the kind of fear that needs to be cast out.
But if you tremble before God in worship and awe, and you take chastisement and the warnings in Scripture so seriously that it keeps you from sin, and it makes you want to avoid doing certain things and walking down certain paths because of what could happen on Judgment Day if you did; that is the good kind of fear that you should cultivate.
The word translated “cast out” is a very active, vivid term.  And it is the activity of a Christian.  I don’t think the point here is that unbelievers are afraid of Judgment Day and Christians are not.  That is how it should be, but that is not how it is.  Most unbelievers are oblivious to Judgment Day.  Deep down there is some fear of death there, but for the most part they could not care less about God’s Judgment.
But when we as Christians disobey God and fall short of love, suddenly our confidence in our salvation becomes questionable.  As God’s children we are exempted from condemnation on that day, but the more we fall into sin the more that bad kind of fear creeps back into our lives.  The accuser comes and beats us over the head with our guilt, and we just want to retreat from God and His Word and His Church and everything else.  
And so the Christian life becomes a process of casting that fear out.  It sneaks in; you throw it out.  It sneaks back in; you throw it back out.  And the way you throw it out is not by clinging to some sentimental theorizing about how God is too nice to send anyone to hell.  Nor is it by clinging to the memory of your conversion or trying to figure out if it was genuine or not.  The way you cast out that fear is by repenting of your sin, doing everything you can to slam the door on access to that sin in the future, and turn to walk in obedience so that God’s love achieves its purpose in you.

Day 2 Why are love for God love for brother inseparable? 

So John wants us to understand that love for God and love for His people are inseparable – which is a news flash for a lot of folks.  I talk to people all the time who claim their relationship with God is going just fine, but they have dropped out of church or out of their small group because they cannot get along with people.  They are tired of getting hurt, tired of relational conflicts, tired of being let down or disappointed or offended or hurt or mistreated, and so they just throw up their hands and say – “I can’t take it anymore” and they drop out.  They do not want any organized religion.  John says, “You’re a liar.”  John is not into subtleties.  He doesn’t say, “Well, I understand that you love God, but could I suggest the possibility that perhaps there might be one weak area in your love for God?”  He just says, “You claim to love God?  You are a liar.”  Love for God and love for His people are inseparable.
But why?  Why is it so impossible to love God and not love His people?”  John gives us four reasons.  But before John can give us reason #1 he needs to explain to us how love works.

19 We love because he first loved us. 

The source of all our love is God.  The only way you can love God or people is if He first loves you.  Your heart is like a garden hose, and the water is love.  By itself the hose cannot do anything.  If it is not hooked up to the spigot, there is no water at all.  So the point of verse 19 is simply that in order for any water to come out of the hose, the hose has to be hooked up to the spigot.

19 We love because he first loved us. 

All our love comes from God.

20 If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar.

God designed us so at the end of the hose is a splitter, so every time you turn it on it sprays in two directions.   One part sprays up and the other sprays straight out.  If anyone claims to have water shooting straight up toward God, but there isn’t any shooting out toward people, that person is a liar, because if the hose is hooked up water will spray out both ways.  And if it is not shooting out one way, you know for sure it is not shooting out the other way.
And that is good to know because the part of the hose that is aimed upward is hidden from our view.  But the part that shoots out toward people – that part we can see.  So if nothing is shooting outward then you know nothing is shooting upward.
So why can’t you love God without loving His Church?  Because of the way love works.  Love does not originate in your heart.  It originates in heaven, flows down to you, and, if it penetrates to your heart, produces a certain effect.  And that effect is love flowing out of your heart in two directions – up and out.  And so if there is nothing going out toward people then there is nothing going up toward God.  The reason you cannot love God if you do not love His people is because if you don’t love His people that proves there is no love in your heart.  There is no water flowing through the hose at all.  You cannot love God, because there is nothing there to love Him with.

Day 3 Because the only valid expression of love to God is love to His people
Reason #2 why you cannot love God without also loving His people:

20 …For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.

What is John saying there?  I have always taken that to mean it is easier to love people than to love God – because it is hard to love someone who is invisible.  If you cannot do the easier thing of loving people, then you really will not be able to do the much harder thing of loving God.  That seems to be John’s logic.  Otherwise, why mention the seeing and not seeing?  Why didn’t John just say, “Anyone who does not love his brother cannot love God?”  Why bring up the fact that you can see your neighbor and you cannot see God?
But there are some problems with that interpretation.  It seems to me the fact that I can see my brother – that person in the church that I have such a hard time loving – the fact that I can see him is the whole problem!  It would be a whole lot easier to love him if he would just disappear!  The fact that I can see him makes it so I can see his faults, I can see what is ugly about him, what is sinful about him, what is unlovely about him.  And all that makes him harder to love.  So what is it that John is getting at here with the seeing and not seeing?
As I wrestled with that this week, it occurred to me that this is not the first time John has talked about God’s invisibility.  He mentioned that back in verse 12 – remember?

12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love achieves its goal in us.

When we studied that verse we found that John was acknowledging the fact God is invisible, but then he went on to contradict the Gnostic idea that God is therefore unknowable.  Yes, God is invisible.  It is true that He cannot be seen, however that is not to say that God is unknowable.  That is not to say that you can have no personal, love relationship with God.  You can!
But how?  If you cannot know God in the normal way that you know a human being that you can see and hear and touch, then how can you carry on a relationship with Him?  John’s answer is in verse 12. 

12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love achieves its goal in us.

What’s the substitute for seeing God? - Having His love flow through you to others, so that His purposes in loving you are realized by you loving your brother.  When that happens, God remains in you and you in Him.  That is how you carry on a personal relationship with an invisible God.  He loves you; He loves you with a purpose in mind; and you receive that love and it has an effect in your heart that causes you to love your brother.  That is what it means to be in a love relationship with the invisible God, whom you have not seen.  Loving your brother is the substitute for seeing and feeling and hearing and touching God.  You cannot see Him, but in place of seeing Him you love your brother.
Now with that in mind, let’s look at verse 20 again.  If you do not love your brother, obviously you are not in a love relationship with the invisible God, because being in a love relationship with the invisible God causes you to love your brother.  That is why John says if you do not love your brother you cannot love God, who is unseen.  If you say, “I do not love God by loving His people – I love Him in some other way,” John will answer, “No, there is no other way to love the invisible God.”
Love is a feeling that compels action.  If you claim to love your wife but there are absolutely no actions that express that love, then your love is imagined and not real.
Love drives you to act.
Love demands to be expressed.
Love is a feeling (it involves desire and delight), but it is not just a feeling.
Love is something that rises from your entire being.
If you force the actions without any feeling there in your heart, that is not love.
But nor is it love if you claim to have the feeling, but there is no action.
Love is a feeling that compels action.
So when you love an invisible God, what is the action?  My love for my wife compels me and drives me to give her hugs and kisses and to serve her and provide for her and protect her and show compassion and all kinds of other things.  What does my love for God compel me to do?  I cannot see Him.  I cannot touch him.  I cannot give Him anything – if I take some money and throw it up toward heaven it does not make it.  It just falls back down on my face.  If I put a gift for him on a rocket ship it will be lucky if it makes it as far as the moon, but it will never reach heaven.  So I cannot really give Him anything.
Can I help Him?  No.  Can I protect Him?  No.  Can I hug Him?  No.  Can I teach Him something?  No.  Can I feed Him, clothe Him, show compassion toward Him, have mercy on Him, forgive Him?  No.  If I have true love for the Lord Jesus Christ in my heart it will compel me to express that love in my actions, and the only object that can receive the physical expressions of my physical body is His Body – the Church.  And so if I do not love His body I do not love Him.
You cannot love the invisible part of a person while hating the part you can see.  What would you think of your husband if he beat you up and then claimed there was nothing wrong with his love for you?  He says, “Look honey, it was just your body that I punched and kicked – but what I love is your soul.  I don’t love your body, just your soul.  The part of you I can see and touch - I hate.  But what I don’t see, that’s the part I love.”  Would you say, “Well, at least you’re half way there”?  No, you would say, “There is no love in your heart for me at all.”
Love is a feeling that compels action, and demands to be expressed in actions and the invisible, transcendent God cannot be served with human hands as if He needed anything, and so the only way to express the actions of love is to His body - His people.
And if someone says, “But wait a minute – I express love for God with my mouth.  I am not really involved in any ministry to His people, but I worship Him and praise Him and pray to Him and sing to Him with my mouth.”  What does John say about love that comes out of your mouth but does not find its way into your actions?  If anyone claims to love God while failing to love his neighbor whom he can see – that person is a liar.  If it comes out of your mouth but not your actions it’s not love, it’s a lie.

Day 4 Because the greatest and second commands are one command.
So the first reason why love for God and love for His people cannot be separated is because of the way love works.  It comes from God and shoots out through you upward and outward.  And so where there is nothing shooting outward there is nothing going upward.  And the second reason why love for God and love for people cannot be separated is because God is invisible and transcendent, and so the only way love for Him can be expressed in your actions is by loving people.  And then in verse 21 John gives us a third reason.

21 And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.

John states the great commandment here in a unique way.  It is not “Love God and love your neighbor,” but “Whoever loves God must love his neighbor.”  Saying it that way binds the two together.  The point is that the greatest commandment and the second commandment are not two commandments.  They are two sides of the same coin.  When the man asked Jesus, “What is the greatest commandment?” Jesus gave him #1 and #2.  Why?  They guy didn’t ask for #2, just #1.  Jesus gave him 1 and 2 because they go together, and they can never be split apart.  And they have to be mentioned together, because the human heart and false religion are constantly trying to pry them apart.  We want to think we can have one without the other.  But if you have one without the other then you do not have the one – you have nothing.
When John speaks of “His command” here most likely he is talking about the new commandment that Jesus gave in the Gospel of John.

John 13:34 A new command I give you: Love one another.

The command to love your neighbor was an old command, but the command to love one another – followers of Christ – that was new.  Jesus commanded us to have a special love for His followers, and to love them because He loved them and to love them in the way He loved them.  That is what completely sets our love apart from the world’s natural love.  People in the world have some love.  But they do not have special love for the followers of Christ because they are followers of Christ.  And they certainly do not follow Jesus’ example of love – laying down your life in order to bring more abundant spiritual life in Christ to others.
That was Jesus’ command.  And He said, “If you love me you will do what I command.”  And so again, if we claim to love Him and do not obey His command to love His people with His love because they are His people, then we are liars.

Day 5 Because you cannot love the Father without loving the child 
So you cannot separate love for God and love for people because
Where there is no love for people there is no love at all
The only way to express the actions of love for God is to people
Jesus commanded us to love His people and said if we love Him we will obey that command
And one more…

5:1 Every one who believes that Jesus is the Christ is a child of God, and every one who loves the parent loves the child. 

If you love someone you will love the people who are most beloved to them.  If someone in your family or some dear friend has a baby, you have a special love for that child – more so than some random child you happen to see in the grocery store or something.  Love is like that – it spills out all over everyone nearby.  If you are into sports, you might find yourself rooting for a certain team just because someone you love is from that city.  Tracy roots for the Denver Nuggets for one reason and one reason only – because she loves…me!  If Tracy didn’t love me as much as she does she would not care if the Nuggets lost every game by 100 points.  When you really love someone your heart opens up toward what they love and who they love.
And that is especially true when their father is also your father.  We are siblings.  One of the evidences of genuine faith in your heart is when you feel an affinity toward brothers and sisters in Christ with whom you have nothing in common outside of your love for the Lord.  There might be two sisters who are completely different in just about every way, and yet they are best friends just because they are sisters.  If they were not related to each other they probably never would have been friends at all.  That is the way it is in God’s family as well.  If you only have love in your heart toward those to whom you would naturally be attracted in the world, you have reason to question your faith.  But if you find love in your heart for certain Christians just because they are Christians that is evidence that you are related as siblings.
And the converse of that is true as well – there is a certain distance between you and unbelievers.  You might have some level of friendship with them, and you show kindness to them, but they will never be like the family of God is to you.
When your friends’ kids get older you love them even more, because as their personalities develop they start to develop the same characteristics that you so love.  Think of everything John has said so far in this book about children of God.
Those who are born of God are purified from all sin (1:7).
Instead of lying about their sins they confess their sins and are purified from all unrighteousness (1:9).
They do not continue in unrepentant sin (3:6, 9).
They keep His Word (love it, guard it, and obey it) (2:5) and do what is righteous just as He is righteous (2:29, 3:7, 9).
They walk as Jesus walked (2:6).
They love the brothers and live in the light (2:10, 3:10, 14).
They are generous (3:17).
They know the Father (2:13).
They have overcome the evil one (2:13, 14) and the world (4:4).
They do the will of God (2:17).
They know the truth (2:20), the anointing remains in them (2:27), and they listen to the Word of God (4:6).
They wholeheartedly and genuinely confess Christ (2:23) and believe the truth about Him and entrust their lives to Him (3:23).
They remain faithful to the gospel, and they remain in the Father and the Father remains in them (2:24) and His love accomplishes its purpose in them (4:12).
They are purifying themselves through the hope of seeing Christ as He is (3:3).
They have the Holy Spirit (3:24).
How could you love God and not love people like that?
We say it is easier to love God than people because God is perfectly good, but the truth is, our sinful hearts do not love what is good like they should.  Our hearts should be thrilled beyond words at the goodness of God, but so often we are indifferent toward it.  We read a Psalm that celebrates 15 different attributes of God, putting His goodness on display in marvelous fashion, and we are bored by it.  So we probably tend to give ourselves a little more credit than we deserve when we think God is easy to love because He is so good.  If we really took delight in the goodness of God as we should then we would have greater love for those who have traces of His attributes in their character – which ALL Christians do.
And you might be thinking, “The people I have a hard time loving – it is not their resemblance to God’s character that bothers me; it is the areas where they fall short of that.  It is the areas where they do not resemble Jesus Christ that bother me, and that make them hard to love.”  We certainly should not love the sin in people, right?  It would be a bad thing if you were attracted to what is sinful in them.  So how do you love sinful people?  How do you love people whose actions are not as righteous as they should be?
How does God do it?  He has higher standards for righteous behavior than you, right?  So how does a holy God who can tolerate no evil manage to take delight in His children who sin every day?  We get the answer to that question in the very first book of the Bible.

Genesis 15:6 Abram believed in Yahweh, and he credited it to him as righteousness.

When a person has true, saving faith – they believe God’s Word, and they trust Him so much they are willing to entrust their lives to Him and follow Him without reservation, when God sees that kind of faith in your heart He credits it to your account is if it were righteousness - perfectly righteous behavior.  Because of the price Jesus paid for our sins, and because of His perfect righteousness, God is able to look at a person who sins and then repents and put him in the category of someone who doesn’t sin.  He can do that because Jesus’ sacrifice was enough to satisfy Him.  So the question is, is it enough to satisfy you?  This person you cannot seem to love – are their sins so great that not even the death of Jesus in their place is enough to satisfy you?
In our flesh we want to overlook their righteousness and focus on their sin.  But if we love God we will overlook their sin and focus on their righteousness.  And when their sin cannot be overlooked because there is no repentance, we confront them with church discipline.  We reprove them with the goal of bringing about repentance so we can love them with unhindered love.
Let’s learn to take delight in the righteousness we see around us.  Set aside the things your husband or wife does that irritate you for a moment, and consider their righteousness (if your spouse is a believer).  That person in the church you struggle to love, give some careful, prolonged consideration to the righteousness that is in their lives, and think about where that came from.  Spend more time thinking about the delight God takes in that person, and on the price Jesus paid to cover his or her sins.  Think about how much your Father in heaven desires that person to be loved by you.  Consider how closely your love for God is connected to your love for that person.  And contemplate more deeply the way in which God loves you so that His love will achieve its goal in your heart through love for others.  And then you will know that God is remaining in you and you are remaining in Him in close, sweet fellowship.