It should not be with our natural love that we love God and His children. On the contrary, our natural love needs to be put on the cross. We should love God and His children with the divine love, the love that is conveyed to us through the word of the Lord and that becomes our experience and enjoyment.
Many of today’s Christians understand the Bible in a natural, religious, or ethical way. This is true in particular concerning the requirement to love God, the brothers, and our neighbor. From the time I was a youth I heard about loving the brothers and loving our neighbor. Today Christians often talk about loving the brothers or about loving our neighbor. Once when I was in Houston for a conference, a lady came up to me after the meeting and said strongly, “People in this country don’t know to love others. You should travel to different places and teach Christians to love one another.”
Yes, the Bible does tell us that we should love one another and that we should love our neighbors as ourselves. However, it is not God’s intention to command us to love others with our natural love. Instead, God desires that we love Him and His children with the divine love which we have enjoyed.
This is the reason verse 5 says that the love of God has been perfected in us. On the one hand, this love is the love of God; on the other hand, this love, having been experienced and enjoyed by us, becomes our love for God and the brothers.
How can our love for God be called the love of God? It is because this love is not our love, but is God’s love. However, this is not the love of God as it is objectively; it is the love of God experienced by us subjectively. This is the love of God becoming our love through our experience and enjoyment of Him. This love then becomes our love for God and others.
God wants us to love Him with His love. He also wants us to love His children, and even the whole world, with His love. First we need to enjoy God’s love and experience His love to such an extent that it fills us, saturates us, and becomes our very essence, causing us to be permeated with the love of God. Then with this love we shall love God, we shall love God’s children, and we shall love all people. We do not love them with our natural love; we love them with the love of God we have experienced and enjoyed. Praise the Lord for such a wonderful love! This is the love revealed in the first Epistle of John.
This experience of the love of God is altogether a matter in the fellowship in the divine life. If we do not enjoy God in the fellowship of the divine life, we cannot have such a love.
If we experience the love of God, we shall have the deep realization that our natural love is one thing and that the love of God which becomes our love through experience is something very different. One difference between God’s love and our natural love is that it is very easy for our natural love to be offended.
When we love others, we become involved with them. For this reason, it is often the case that those we love in a natural way eventually become our enemies. Because natural love may have such a result, those who are wise in a human way are slow and careful in loving others. They realize that if you love others in a foolish way, sooner or later that love will cause trouble. Many divorces and separations are the result of a foolish natural love that is easily offended and leads to enmity. For example, a certain man and woman may know each other only for a short time. In a quick way they get married. Then after only a little time has gone by, they may separate or get a divorce. At first they loved each other, but not too long after they were married they became enemies. This is the result of loving each other in a natural way. If they had never loved one another in a natural way, they would not have become enemies.
It is not very likely that you will regard as your enemy a person unknown to you that you see walking on the street. Those who become your enemies are often those whom you love in a natural way. This is why some exercise their human wisdom to be very careful in loving others. They realize that loving others in a natural way leads to problems. In order to avoid these problems, they are very slow in loving others.
The point I am making here is that we need to be careful not to love others by our natural love. Rather, our natural love should be put on the cross. We need to love others by the love of God we have experienced and enjoyed. If we experience God’s love, we shall love God with this love. We shall also love the brothers with this same love. This kind of love does not cause trouble. May we all see that we need to love God and others with the divine love that has become our experience and enjoyment.
Thus far in these messages we have covered sixteen verses from 1 John, ten verses from chapter one and six verses from chapter two. In these verses we can see many items of John’s basic vocabulary: the Word, life, the Father, the Son, fellowship, joy, light, truth, the faithfulness of God, the righteousness of God, confessing, forgiveness, cleansing, and the blood. All these matters are positive. On the negative side, we have sin, sins, unrighteousness, darkness, and lie. All these terms are found in chapter one. In chapter two we have the Advocate, the propitiation, the word or the commandment, and love. I encourage you to pray-read all these terms. The more we pray-read them, the more we shall realize how rich they are. Praise the Lord for the blood, the faithfulness of God, the righteousness of God, His forgiveness, and His cleansing! Praise Him for the Word, the life, the fellowship, the joy, the light, and the truth! Praise Him also for the Advocate, the propitiation, the word as the commandment, and the love of God!