Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.

IjOHN 4:7-8

God Exemplifies Perfect Love. We often allow non-Christian ideas to shape our vision for love, don’t we? Romantic comedies, romance stories, and similar narratives give us plenty of false ideas, but the Bible lays out the truest example of perfect love. 1 John 4 gives us a picture of how God exemplified His love by giving His son to die for us. “The love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him”(1 John 4:9). God sacrificed. He suffered for our sake, and now we can live through Him. “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” ― A.W. Tozer

  Love (agape) is unconditional, sacrificial love and biblically refers to a love that God is (1Jn 4:8,16), that God shows (Jn 3:16, 1Jn 4:9) and that God gives as a manifestation of His Spirit’s bearing fruit in the heart of a yielded saint. Biblical agape love is the love of choice, the love of serving with humility, the highest kind of love, the noblest kind of devotion, the love of the will (intentional, a conscious choice) and not motivated by superficial appearance, emotional attraction, or sentimental relationship. Agape is not based on pleasant emotions or good feelings that might result from a physical attraction or a familial bond. Agape chooses as an act of self-sacrifice to serve the recipient. From all of the descriptions of agape love, it is clear that true agape love is a sure mark of salvation. Agape is volitional. Phileo is emotional.

Love-Agape (Greek Word Study).

This sacrificial, selfless demonstration helps us see what true love looks like, and the greatest part is that because of His sacrificial love, we get to live through Him. In verse 8, John tells us that God is love, so knowing God allows us to know the truest form of love.

Notice the order of love in verse 10: “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” The greatest demonstration of love is that Christ loved us first. Paul highlights this even more in Romans 5:6-9 when he reminds us that Christ died for us while we were still sinners. We did not deserve the love and sacrifice of God, but He gave it to us anyway in a beautiful act of grace. “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” ― A.W. Tozer

 The Spirit of God is the Spirit of love. He that does not love the image of God in his people, has no saving knowledge of God. For it is God’s nature to be kind, and to give happiness. The law of God is love; and all would have been perfectly happy, had all obeyed it. The provision of the gospel, for the forgiveness of sin, and the salvation of sinners, consistently with God’s glory and justice, shows that God is love. 

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