It is not difficult to find in Saint John’s First Epistle a broad exposition on love from the perspective of our Lord and God. In 4.19-21 we read: We love because he first loved us. The only way by which we can know anything about love or loving another is directly rooted in the fact that God loved us first! It is not possible to love from the heart without taking this fact into account; that even our feeling of love is futile.

And yet the reality of why God loves us must be considered and put into practice in our relationships with those with whom we live in order that we realize God’s love of us: If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. Not to relate to others with the heart-love by which God demonstrates himself to us is to be a phony from the start, and to validate the truth that we do not know God at all by how we love!

It is a case of dealing with what is seen by us in the same way by which we relate to the unseen among us: For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. God came in the flesh through his son Jesus Christ in order that we might come to experience the unseen of God’s Kingdom on the earth—and in fact to present that unseen Kingdom to those around us.

Therefore we cannot be two-faced about our relationships with anyone—either God or human: And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother. So this is what being a ‘loving one’ is all about: we are to put flesh on God’s overwhelming love of us as we walk with others in life in order that they may come to know that same loving relationship with their God as we have known. YES!