This is how we know what Love is: Jesus Christ laid down His life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers [and sisters].
John called himself, "the one Jesus loved." He was so vitally aware of how Jesus loved him beyond his understanding, he never got "over" it, but continued to focus on Love in his writings.
Love is more than a mere feeling: it's a passion so deep that we will do anything, pay any cost, for the benefit of the one loved. Like God loves us.
This is not "laying down our lives" if we cannot even share our temporary material possessions with one another.
Little children, let us not love [only] with word or with tongue, but in deed and Truth.
To say loving words is not enough. Our tongue and words should always reflect the love we have for one another, but it should never stop there.
This then is how we know that we belong to the Truth, and how we set our minds at rest in His presence whenever our hearts condemn us.
When "our hearts condemn us" is when we experience a guilty conscience. Knowing how much God loves us, to have given us His most precious, His Son, to die, taking our place in death to pay our debt of sin; then forgiving all our sins, and putting His righteousness upon us, washing us as white as snow, as though we never sinned at all because He never sinned.
For God is greater than our hearts, and He knows everything.
If you think your own heart is more powerful than God to let it condemn you when God forgives you, then you have another think coming.
He has already thought through all the ramifications of every evil that has ever or will ever be perpetrated against His good, and has already taken care of it all, from beginning to end. And has given us the choice to repent and turn to Him.
As we live through Time, we are experiencing the working out of His Plan of the Ages; as He works through every scenario, ties up every loose end, and completes every story of every person He made.
He loves everything and everyone He made, and has gone to every extreme end to show us His love.
Only when we decide to reject His love and goodness to us is when we find ourselves on the wrong path, the road to ruin. God doesn't desire our ruin, but He will not violate the freedom of the will that He granted us so we could choose Him.
So let us love one another as our Father has loved us. Let us always consider other before our own benefit, and be deeply passionate in our care for one another. Anything shallower than that is not God's love for us, so must also be how we see one another. With His eyes.
O my Father, You are Love. You love each one of us as passionately as a newlywed groom is enamoured with his new bride. So You made us the Bride of Christ, to show us how and how much You love us.
Father, help us to love one another as You have loved us. Teach us how to love You and others. You have shown us in what You have already accomplished for us, all written in Your Word.
Help me, Father, to respond to Your Love, Your lovingkindness to me, with the love that will show the World that I am Your disciple (John 13:34-35). Teach me how to see the needs of others that You have enabled me to meet, and give me Your loving words to share with everyone in my world how much You also love them.
Even so, come, Lord Jesus!
