Tuesday 2 April 2013

For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen cannot love God. Whom he has not seen.


Read 1 John 4
“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 gives us this command: 
Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”
                                                                                           1John 4:19-21
Once again John emphasises love. The love of our brother.
Who is our brother? The people that are around us are our brothers.
We must treat all people around us as brothers and sisters. If we don’t how can we rescue them.
We need to in love go to these people and say God loves you. We need to in word and in deed show the love of God the father to our brothers and sisters in the world.
If we don’t have love enough to show to the neighbour next door, or the people we work with then how can we express our love to God.
The love God showed to us through Christ is a sacrificial love. Jesus gave his life for us while we were still sinners.
This is the kind of love we must be willing to show to the world. We must be willing to sacrifice the relationships we have with people for the love of the gospel.
We must in love be able to go to our friends and present the Gospel and if necessary face their rejection.
We must let them see that we are doing it out of love for them.
We must present the Gospel in a way that lets our friends family and acquaintances know we love them.
All to many Christians try to force the gospel on people.  Like wise all to many ‘Christians’ try to place a guilt trip on people. They point out the persons sins. They even go as far as pointing out so called ‘special sins’ as if one sin is worse than another.   I’ve even heard people point out sins that are not sins according to scripture. Such sins are only sins because someone has misinterpreted scripture.
We must avoid all of this.
We must simply present the gospel and leave it for the person to accept or reject.
That is why we must be presenting it in love. In doing so we will given them pause to think and have done our duty to God. It’s that simple.

Something to think about
The lyrics from a Beatles song that states “Love, Love, Love all you really need is Love.”  is the truth.
We need to have the love of God so strong in us that we will be willing to approach even our worst enemy with the love of God and not give him any reason to hate us.
Think about it.


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