Are You Relying on God’s Love?

And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him. (1 John 4:16)

When Jesus walked the earth in human form and began his three year ministry, many believed in him and followed him as disciples. Among those disciples, there were twelve that he chose at the beginning of his ministry. These twelve were with him during the entire three years his ministry lasted, up until his death and resurrection. Eleven of these twelve went on to become apostles and leaders in the early church. Out of those original twelve, he had an inner group of three that were closer to him than the rest: John, James, and Peter. Of those three, it seems apparent from the New Testament writings that John probably knew Jesus the best. Both John and Peter went on to become major leaders of the early church, while James (the brother of John) was executed early on in the beginning of the spread of the gospel message in Jerusalem.

In John’s biography of Jesus, which is unique and different from the other three biographies written (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), he never referred to himself by name in his writings. Instead, he usually referred to himself as “the disciple whom Jesus loved” (e.g. see John 20:2 and John 21:7). This man John, who was apparently the best friend of Jesus, defined his relationship to Jesus as “the one whom Jesus loved.” He had experienced that love first hand, and when you read his writings in the New Testament, it is the foundation for everything he wrote and taught – the foundation of truth itself.

The letter of 1 John is perhaps the greatest teaching ever written on the truth and meaning of love. The truth statement “God is love” is not simply an intellectual declaration. John knew God’s love. It was not simply the intellectual kind of knowledge where one examines all the evidence and then makes a decision, but the kind of knowledge that comes only through a relationship and subjective experience. John knew God’s love because he experienced it during his time with Jesus. His knowledge of God’s love moved far beyond intellectual understanding. He relied on that love as the basis for everything in his life.

As John came to experience and know God’s love, he realized that God is the source of true love, and that the only way we can love others, is to first receive the love that God has for us. We cannot give something to others that we ourselves do not possess. God gives it to us first, and then once we own it, we are free to give it to others.

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. (1 John 4:7-11)

God’s love is a free gift, packaged through the sacrifice that Jesus made when he shed his blood on the cross. There is nothing we can do to earn such love. We can only believe in it (intellectual knowledge), and then receive it (faith/action) and start relying on it. When we receive God’s love through Jesus, our sins are forgiven and we are born again spiritually. Once we are born of God spiritually, we possess his unlimited love, and can now love others with the same love.

The first person we should love with the same love that God loves us, is God! How do we love God? John wrote:

This is love for God: to obey his commands. And his commands are not burdensome, for everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith. (1 John 5:3-4)

The motivation for obeying God’s commands completely changes once we receive God’s love and are born again. Our motivation changes from a sense of obligation or fear in trying to earn God’s favor by obeying the law, to joyfully serving God and delighting in finding out what his plan is so we can obey it and show our love to him.

In the Old Testament there were laws regulating the use of slaves, and one part of the law allowed for a slave to willingly and joyfully stay with the master’s family because he (or she) loved them:

But if your servant says to you, "I do not want to leave you," because he loves you and your family and is well off with you, then take an awl and push it through his ear lobe into the door, and he will become your servant for life. Do the same for your maidservant. (Deuteronomy 15:16-17)

Obviously the motivation for a slave to obey his master because he was sold into slavery and had no choice, and the motivation for one that chooses to remain a servant voluntarily out of love for his master, is completely different. The work that needs to be done is the same, but the relationship is completely different. When we obey God after we are born again, it is like the servant in the Old Testament that voluntarily let their ear lobe be pierced, because they loved their master. The best way we can show our love to God is to offer ourselves back to him as a living sacrifice to do his will:

Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. (Romans 12:1-2)

We obey God out of love because we want to, not because we have to. But if our motivation to obey God is simply fear, then we do not yet know God’s love perfectly:

In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. (1 John 4:17-18)

And when we willingly offer ourselves to God to obey his commands, as John writes, we do so in faith, and our faith grants us access to God’s power which overcomes the world! (See 1 John 5:3-4 above.)

As to God’s commands, they are simple! Love one another with the same love God has loved us:

And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us. (1 John 3:23)

We love because he first loved us. 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. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother. (1 John 4:19-21)

Remember that “love” here is defined by God’s love for us. God is love, as John wrote, and the love that he has for us is an unconditional love via the sacrifice Jesus made for our sins. So it is not based in anything “loveable” about us, and it is not something we deserved or earned. It is given. We deserve death as a punishment for our sins, but Jesus took our place.

So now we are to love others the same way. This command is simple and easy to understand once you know God’s love personally. But implementing it is not so simple. It is not easy to love someone who is wrong, or has hurt us, or doesn’t deserve our love, or is just simply not “loveable” for a multitude of reasons. But that’s the way God loves, and it is the command we are to desire to follow. It takes God’s Spirit living inside us to be able to do this. That’s where the reliance comes in that John wrote about in the verse that we started with above:

And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him. (1 John 4:16)

We can’t rely on ourselves, and we can’t rely on others. We can only rely on God’s love. It is not enough to just simply know about God’s love intellectually. We have to have the kind of experience with God and his love where we rely upon it, because we are living inside God’s love, and his love is living inside of us through the Holy Spirit. That kind of experiential knowledge of God’s love will change our life, and the lives of those around us. Are you relying upon God’s love today?

This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. (1 John 4:10-11)

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The Healing Power of the Truth

This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin. If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word has no place in our lives. (1 John 1:5-10)

If one wants to live a truly healthy life, it is absolutely necessary to live in the truth. What is “truth”? Truth begins with the reality that there is a God who created all things, that he controls all the affairs of the universe, and that he knows who we are and why we exist:

LORD, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O LORD. You hem me in—behind and before; you have laid your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain. Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast. If I say, "Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me," even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you. For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. (words of King David in Psalms 139:1-16)

Starting with this foundational truth, we then understand that since there is a Creator who knows us and created us for a purpose which he established, our lives will experience the greatest health the closer we follow his plan for our lives. A perfect world would be one where everyone followed God’s plan. That is the condition of a place called heaven today, and at one time it was also the condition of the earth we live on. But when the created beings stopped following God’s plan and came up with their own plans instead, everything got messed up. This is what the Bible refers to as “sin.” There are many negative consequences to sin, including the decay of our bodies and physical death. Death was not part of the original plan, but God implemented it as a punishment for sin so that people who did not carry out his plan and purpose would not go on and live forever following their own ideas and plans.

So one would think that the solution is simply to get with the plan that God has for the human race, and start obeying him and living by his plan and purpose. And indeed that is what man has tried to do throughout much of history via religion. God appeared to Moses and the Israelites in Old Testament times, and gave them a system of laws that they could use to live their lives and judge others who did not live according to the plan. That system is still the basis of most legal systems throughout the world today.

There is a problem, however, with religion and laws and man’s attempts to get back with the plan and follow God’s purpose in life by following a system of rules and regulations. We can’t do it. We don’t have the power or strength to follow such a system perfectly. Our natural tendency is to do things our own way, rather than follow someone else’s rules and regulations. Especially in modern day American and western culture, we pride ourselves in being independent and subservient to no one. Modern culture is built upon a foundation that is a lie, evolution. It denies the spiritual realm and denies God’s existence, allowing man to set himself up as the one who establishes “truth.” But this whole system is a system built upon lies, and is not the truth. Following a system built upon a false foundation of lies results in poor health.

God, being the Creator and owner of all things, is certainly within his rights to exert himself through his superior power and strength, and force everyone to do his will. And we are told that one day he will indeed do that. But God did something that is absolutely incredible, and that separates him from all the religions of the world: he sent his son into the world as a perfect human being to show us the way to get back with his plan. Jesus carried out God’s plan and purpose perfectly and never committed any sin – the only human being to ever live a sinless life. He did not deserve the punishment of death for sins, but he ended up sacrificing his life for those of us who could not live sinless lives ourselves. He then broke the power of death by rising from the dead three days after he was killed.

So now there is a new plan in New Testament (or New Covenant) times, after the time period when Jesus died and rose from the dead. It replaces the old plan which was religion and a system of rules and regulations, and imperfect animal sacrifices that were intended to please God and have him forgive us for all the times we followed our own way and not his. The new plan acknowledges that Jesus Christ was the only human being who completely followed God’s plan and that now he alone is able to give eternal life to those who trust in him:

Jesus gave them this answer: “I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does. Yes, to your amazement he will show him even greater things than these. For just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son gives life to whom he is pleased to give it.” (John 5:19-21)

This is a very important truth about the new plan: real health and eternal life with a place in God’s Kingdom cannot be earned by religion or good works. It is something that Jesus gives to those whom he wants to give it to. Fortunately for us, he is the most generous and gracious person in the universe, and he wants to give it to everyone! It is a free gift, and it is available to anyone who wants it:

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast. (Ephesians 2:8-9)

This is the truth that trips up most people, because it is hard to believe that someone will actually give away something for absolutely free, especially something as valuable as real health and eternal life with a place in God’s kingdom. People don’t like charity. We’re too proud. We want to earn our way – we don’t want handouts. But that’s the new plan! The only condition is that you have to believe it is true, and you have to take it. Most don’t.

So as we have written previously, there currently exist two kingdoms on earth in the spiritual realm: the kingdom of darkness ruled by Satan who is called “the father of lies” in the Bible, and the Kingdom of Light ruled by Jesus. Everyone is in one or the other of these kingdoms spiritually. One kingdom is built upon a system of lies, while the other one is built upon a foundation of truth. We are all physically born into the kingdom of darkness, because we inherit the sin nature from our parents and are totally incapable of following God’s plan. We enter into the Kingdom of Light by receiving the free gift Jesus offers, and then we are re-born spiritually. The spiritual rebirth gives us a personal relationship with Jesus through his Holy Spirit. We are then capable of walking in the light, and following Jesus as his disciples (students), and learning directly from him what God’s personal plan is for our life. This is the truth that brings real health and sets us free from the sickness of sin:

To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, "If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free." (John 8:31-32)

Are you living in the light? Do you know the truth that transforms lives and brings perfect health? Are you following Jesus as one of his disciples? As the apostle John wrote above in the opening Bible passage, those who confess their sins come into the light and understand the truth, while those who deny they are sinners do not know the truth, and base their lives on lies (like evolution and the belief that God doesn’t exist or doesn’t care.) Some people come into the light and recognize the truth, but then wander back into the darkness still trying to follow either their own plan, or the first plan of religion and a system of rules and regulations. But to know the truth is to know the source of all truth, and that is Jesus Christ. Do you know him today? If not, accept his free gift of eternal life and invite him into your life right away! Then you will experience real health.

Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. (John 14:6)

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