Love That Leads to Life: A summary of Sunday’s message from 1 John 4:9–12
If you were with us last week, you left with something specific. God has shown us what love is by sending His Son to bear the debt of our sin and give us life. Love is not a feeling. It is not whatever you want it to mean. It is an action that seeks the real good of another at great personal cost — and God himself is the one who defined that good as receiving life from Him, and the great cost was the sending of His only begotten Son into the world.
But last week’s definition was always leading somewhere. This week we followed it there.
Love had a destination all along.
Verse 9 is where everything opens up. John writes that God sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. That word “through” is carrying more weight than it might appear. John is not saying we receive life from Jesus and then go off and live it somewhere else. He is saying the life God intends for His people runs continuously through an ongoing relationship with the Son. Jesus is not merely the door you walk through to get to life. He is life itself.
And Jesus himself defines what that life looks like. In John 17:3 he says: this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and the one you have sent. Eternal life is not a destination you arrive at after you die. It is knowing God — present, active, relational, experiential knowing. The kind of knowing that changes you from the inside out.
To experience this love is to know God himself.
Here is where it gets staggering. John has already told us in verse 8 that God is love. Not that God is loving. Not that love is one of many qualities God possesses. God is love. Agape — that costly, purposeful, other-seeking action is part of the very character of God. It is who He is.
Which means when you encounter God’s agape love in its truest form, you are not encountering a quality that points back to God. You are encountering God himself. To experience the love revealed in the sending of the Son is to get to know God. The love and the Person cannot be separated.
This is also what makes John’s diagnostic in verse 8 so sharp. The one who does not love does not know God. Not because loving is a requirement you must meet to gain access. But because if you have truly encountered the God who is love, it is impossible to remain unchanged by it. The knowing and the loving are the same movement.
You are the beloved. Now go love.
In verse 11 John calls his readers beloved — those who have already been loved. The agape of God has already enacted itself toward you. In the sending of the Son. In paying the debt. In the opening of the way to life through Him. You are not waiting to be loved. You are already the beloved. That is settled.
And from that place John says: love one another.
But hear what this means. When you love one another the way God loved us — costly, purposeful, aimed at someone’s real good and their life in Christ — you are not simply being generous. You are participating in the very character of the God who is love. And in that participation, you are getting to know Him more deeply. The loving is the knowing. This is not love as a duty you perform from a distance. This is love as the ongoing means by which you know God himself.
This is why the Christian life cannot be lived alone. You need your brothers and sisters not merely for companionship but because it is in loving them in God’s agape that you are getting to know the God who is love. You cannot get there by yourself.
Where this love lands.
Verse 12 is where the whole passage arrives. No one has seen God. But when His people love one another in the same agape love that sent the Son into the world, the invisible God becomes visible. He abides in them. And His love is perfected — brought to its intended end, standing there complete.
God sent the Son so that we might live through Him. That life is found in knowing the Son and through the Son knowing the Father, who is love itself. As His people encounter that love, they know God. As they love one another in that same costly agape love, God is made manifest, made tangible, in them.
The love of God has a destination. It is working toward something. And that something is not finished until it is perfected in a community of people who are continuously, actively, and at real cost loving one another into life in Christ that makes God knowable in their fellowship.
When believers are continuously loving one another, God’s agape love is not just present among them. It has arrived at the very place it was always going. The life God sent the Son to give is actually being lived. In them. Through them. Together.
That is what love that leads to life looks like.