Monday Devotional: April 22, 2024

Bible Reading: 1 John 4:7-21 (CEB)

⁷ Dear friends, let’s love each other, because love is from God, and everyone who loves is born from God and knows God. ⁸ The person who doesn’t love does not know God, because God is love. ⁹ This is how the love of God is revealed to us: God has sent his only Son into the world so that we can live through him. ¹⁰ This is love: it is not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son as the sacrifice that deals with our sins. ¹¹ Dear friends, if God loved us this way, we also ought to love each other. ¹² No one has ever seen God. If we love each other, God remains in us and his love is made perfect in us. ¹³ This is how we know we remain in him and he remains in us, because he has given us a measure of his Spirit. ¹⁴ We have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son to be the savior of the world. ¹⁵ If any of us confess that Jesus is God’s Son, God remains in us and we remain in God. ¹⁶ We have known and have believed the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who remain in love remain in God and God remains in them. ¹⁷ This is how love has been perfected in us, so that we can have confidence on the Judgment Day, because we are exactly the same as God is in this world. ¹⁸ There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear, because fear expects punishment. The person who is afraid has not been made perfect in love. ¹⁹ We love because God first loved us. ²⁰ Those who say, “I love God” and hate their brothers or sisters are liars. After all, those who don’t love their brothers or sisters whom they have seen can hardly love God whom they have not seen! ²¹ This commandment we have from him: Those who claim to love God ought to love their brother and sister also.

God is love and those who abide in love abide in God and God abides in them.” We don’t use the word abide very often anymore, it seems. But this passage of scripture calls to our minds the power of abiding—dwelling, standing, enduring, and remaining in God’s love.

Over and over again, this scripture tells us to dwell, to abide in God’s love. We are to remain in the pattern of love that begins with God and moves vertically between us and God and horizontally between us and our neighbors. (Go ahead and trace that in the air. Yes, it forms a cross. That’s God’s love.) We embrace this pattern even when it gets difficult, and we don’t really want to love those around us. But loving God means loving our neighbors.

“Love, love, love, that’s what it’s all about,” sing the Sunday school children. “Because God loves us, we love each other …” Maybe it sounds simple when we’re six or seven, but the words of this scripture-based song should stay with us as we grow and struggle into relationships that need God’s love more than anything. When that melody abides with us, we carry God’s love into the deepest corners of our lives.

God calls us to abide in God. To remain. To stand. To endure. In God’s grace and mercy and word. How do we do this? We worship in a community that proclaims God’s love and mercy. We look to see God in our neighbors, and we love them as God loves us. We first remember that God loves us—a perfect love without fear.

Prayer

God of love, remind me today to abide in your love and your word. Help me to love my brothers and sisters as you have loved me. Amen.

By Jennifer Moland-Kovash, The Upper Room Disciplines 2015, page 132.

Bible Study

Abiding in God

Bible Readings: Psalm 22:25-31, 1 John 4:7-21

ZOOM Session

Monday, April 22, 2024, 6:00 pm to 7:00 pm.
For Zoom Link, send email to [email protected]

IN PERSON Session

Wednesday, April 24, 2024, 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm
Conference Room, McGee Building