Beloved, if God so loved us,
God loved us so much that he gave his only Son that the world might be saved through him. He did this while we were yet sinners, while we were by and large still living as committed enemies of God. Though it was humanity that turned its back on God it was nevertheless God who sought out and reconciled himself with fallen humanity.
we also must love one another.
Even before the fall of Adam and Eve in the garden we already were entirely indebted to God for our creation. We had nothing purely our own with which we could repay him. Indeed, as the liturgy says, "our thanksgiving is itself your gift, since our praises add nothing to your greatness but profit us for salvation through Christ our Lord". God, for his part stood in no need of anything we could offer. For our part, it was nevertheless right and just to offer our praise, our thanksgiving, and our first-fruits unto God. But even this was actually for our sake. It was part of the divine initiative of God communicating his goodness to us.
John taught that our expressions of love for God, as we attempted to reciprocate his own love for us, could not exclude the love of neighbor. Our brothers and sisters were created in God's image and Jesus himself deeply identified with the poor and neglected, with the lowest and least, and with the persecuted. Since God himself did not stand to gain from anything we could offer him he desired that we would love him in and through his creatures, creatures who could reap those benefits of which he himself had no need.
No one has ever seen God.
Yet, if we love one another, God remains in us,
and his love is brought to perfection in us.
If love would not reach out to sister and brother it could not be considered true love. Love that imagined it could reach out to God directly while ignoring the world was to misconstrue God himself, to set oneself at odds with God's own heart full of love for the world. Jesus himself was the paradigmatic case, as he perfectly honored and obeyed the Father while still perfectly and lavishly loving created men and woman by becoming an expiation for our sins.
This is how we know that we remain in him and he in us,
that he has given us of his Spirit.
Moreover, we have seen and testify
that the Father sent his Son as savior of the world.
That he has given us his Spirit, that his Son is savior- neither of these is merely a subjective feeling. These are rather than foundational truths of faith. It is because we have the grace of faith that these facts persuade us of just how much we are loved by God. It is a love so great that to merely acknowledge that Jesus is the Son of God is all it takes for God to come and dwell in our hearts. Indeed, it is as though he himself is so eager that he can hardly help himself once we give him even the slightest consent.
God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in him.
God's love is meant to be a virtuous cycle that draws us nearer to himself even as it overflows from us to others. His love is always the prime mover, whether in drawing us near to himself, or in empowering us to love others. The more we center our lives around the power of his love the more we can be sure he truly abides within us.
In this is love brought to perfection among us,
that we have confidence on the day of judgment
because as he is, so are we in this world.
There is such a thing as appropriate fear, fear that makes us prudent about the things of this world, or fear of the Lord that makes us treasure our relationship with God and fear offending him. But there is a fear in which we are not meant to live, fear that God does not love us, fear resulting from a lack of confidence that he is doing everything he can to bring us home to himself. Our motivation can be transformed from a fear of punishment to a desire to love and to please the One who loved us first.
But at once he spoke with them,
“Take courage, it is I, do not be afraid!”
When we encounter the winds of resistance in life we tend to lose sight of the shore, forget who Jesus has been for us, and forget about the bread from heaven with which he has even recently fed our souls. Jesus wants to remind us that winds and storms do not represent condemnation. They are rather an opportunity to learn to trust and believe the one who is able to come to us even in our distress. We are invited to recognize that Jesus is Lord regardless of the circumstances. When we truly believe this we know that we are loved, we lose our fear of condemnation, and even powerful winds lose their power over us.
He got into the boat with them and the wind died down.
They were completely astounded.
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