I. God is love. The text takes us up, as it were, above the veil; we are caught up through the door of this vision to the sanctuary of God's throne. We are suffered to know something, not of His working only, but of His being. We are led to the fountain of all good and joy. And that fountain is this, says St. John: "God is love." Is there not something to grasp, to embrace, in these words, "God is love," when within the glory of the Godhead we see the revealed love of God for God, the infinite, embosomed tenderness of the Eternal Son to the Eternal Father? Yes, there is something here which meets the human soul in its longings more lovingly, more warmly, than the God of mere philosophy, the God of mere Deism, the God of man's own inventing. In revealing the truth of the Trinity, God does much more than show to us an abstract doctrine: He unveils to us Himself.
II. God is love. Such is the fountain, worthy of its stream. This love of the being of God came forth unasked, unmerited, in the love of His actings. He, this God, loved the world, so loved it that He gave His only-begotten Son for the sinner's life. "Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another." Here is indeed the point of contact between the sublime truth of the Holy Trinity and the humblest, smallest, most trying claims which one poor, suffering human being may lay upon another, if this other is a Christian, a child and servant of this God. Here descends this great ladder of light from the throne above all heavens to the stones of the desert road. If God is this God, if this God hath thus loved us, then we cannot own His tenderness to us, we cannot see this glorious depth of lovableness in Himself, and yet remain cool, calculating, and selfish in our thoughts and wills towards our suffering brethren.
H. C. G. Moule, Christ is All,p. 151.
References: 1 John 4:10. C. Kingsley, Westminster Sermons,p. 15; Christian World Pulpit,vol. v., p. 268; R. Tuck, Ibid.,vol. xiii., p. 69. 1 John 4:10; 1 John 4:11. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxix., No. 1707.
I. God is love. "He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love." So we read in an earlier verse. It is worth noticing who it was through whom the Holy Spirit spoke these words. St. John is the writer in the New Testament to whom the Church gave the title by pre-eminence of the divine, the theologian, the Apostle in whose mind dwelt more than in others his Master's deeper sayings as to Divine things, who set forth the doctrinal aspect of the Christian revelation more than others. He understood and explained more clearly than others the true Divine nature of Christ. Theology is the knowledge if such a term is possible or lawful in such a relation the scientific knowledge that is, the methodised and exact knowledge of the things of God. It seems, it is often treated as, a matter purely for the intellect, for study, thought, and reading. The words of the greatest of theologians, of him to interpret whose words is the highest task of the greatest of uninspired theologians, give us a new view of the limits within which this is true: "He that loveth not knoweth not God." Surely that sentence is a key to a great deal. It makes us understand why St. John was the divine. The loving nature was the most receptive. The disciple whom Jesus loved was the one who loved Jesus; and, therefore, he understood his Master best.
II. "God is love; he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him." See the words once more as setting forth the Divine ideal of human life he that dwelleth in love, as in a home, as the atmosphere in which he can breathe and live, without which he would die. They describe in their full sense a few rare souls: the St. John of the apostolic age, the Francis of Assisi of the Middle Ages; but they describe also an ideal of life, a hope, a principle, not beyond the aspirations and efforts of all of us. Perhaps the "life of love" sounds to us too lofty and presumptuous a title. It seems to imply a fervour of feeling which we shrink from claiming for ourselves even in hope and aim. It is this instinct, not, surely, an improper one, which makes us prefer rather when we are speaking of our own ideal, and even of beautiful human lives that we have known, the phrase which I used just now: the unselfish life. It is a negative phrase, but as a moral guide it helps us even more than the positive one, for it suggests to us what it is that is the great drawback, the great rival, in the way of the life of love. Love is God's gift to us, to all of us; it springs spontaneously in every human heart; it is as natural to a child as to breathe. And God gives us objects for love, and He changes and widens them, leads us on from circle to circle, helping us at every stage at once to look further and to feel more deeply.
III. We are God's children; and He has given us of His Spirit, so that it comes naturally to us in a sense to love to love even as He loves, unselfishly, instinctively. It is not a new affection to be painfully won for ourselves, if such a thing were possible. Yet it must be cherished. The world kills it; it preaches selfishness to us in every form and through every channel, laughs at enthusiasm, bids us distrust, despair, think first of ourselves; and still more surely our own selfish nature would kill it. It is something, some help, to remember now and then what God has told us: how beautiful, how Divine, that simple affection of loving is, the best thing in life, the most like God, that which puts us at once in sympathy with Him, makes it possible for us to understand Him, makes a link between us and Him which no ignorance or mistake can wholly break. Every kind, thoughtful, affectionate act, every unselfish thought for others, is dear to God. "God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him." God make us all dwell in Him!
E. C. Wickham, Wellington College Sermons,p. 132.
The Soul Dwelling in God.
These words embody one of the manifold aspects of the Christian ideal. They suggest the inwardness and exaltation of the Christian life.
I. The love dwelling in which is one with dwelling in God is not any love; it is not all that passes by the name of love; it is that love only which has been poured forth in Christ for the salvation of the world. There rises overhead and around the Christian soul the vision, the thought and memory, of the love of God in Christ. It is a real home for the spirit, a real dwelling-place for thought. It is joy, strength, and new life to let the feelings of the heart flock to it.
II. The love in which in this way the soul finds a home is much more than an object of thought: it is life, power, law as well; it is the life that stirs at the heart of Providence, the power that causes all things to work together for good, the unseen law behind events which Christian faith searches for, and in which at last, in sunshine and cloud, it rests.
III. It is not enough to know that a soul, by meditation and trust, can dwell in love; how should its dwelling in love be at the same time a dwelling in God? The love is really God manifest; the love which is a wall of fire around us is nothing other than God. He that dwells in love dwells in that which is the life of God; he has come into a world whose sunlight is Divine, where Divine paths open before the feet, where Divine love breathes in the air and fills the hollows of life as a sea.
IV. The life we are called to imitate was the fulfilment of this very ideal. Christ dwelt in God. His earthly, human life was, so to speak, a life immersed in the life of God. It is to no unrealised ideal, therefore, that we are pointed when we are called to dwell in God.
V. The elements in Christ's life which reveal this dwelling of the soul in God are present, however dimly, in all Christian life. They are (1) insight and (2) power.
VI. The soul who is dwelling in love is, up to the measure of his indwelling, already in possession of the future. The blessedness which awaits us in the future is but the unfolding of the present life of the soul.
A. Macleod, Days of Heaven upon Earth,p. 240.
The Love of God in the Atonement.
I. The mission of Christ to redeem and save mankind is not indeed here for the first time connected with the love of the Triune God. It is uniformly in Scripture traced up to that principle as its supreme ultimate source. The Saviour's Passion is always declared to be a demonstration of the Father's charity to man, and the apprehension of it by faith is everywhere bound up with the shedding abroad of that love by the Holy Ghost in the heart. But the peculiarity of our text, the last revelation on the subject, is that these three are brought together in the most impressive and affecting manner. The Persons of the Holy Trinity shed their distinct mediatorial glory on the work of our salvation.
II. "We love Him because He first loved us." By constantly keeping alive in our hearts the memorials of Christ's dying charity, celebrating there an eternal sacrament, we must nourish our love to the God of all grace. There is no duty more binding, none that we so much forget. Here is the secret of all spiritual strength. "The love of Christ constraineth us," suppressing every alien affection and growing by its own internal constraining influence. The true Christian lives, and moves, and has his being in love, the love awakened by redemption.
III. God's love is the agent of our holiness, and makes us perfect in love. It is, in the administration of the Spirit, the energy that carries us onward to perfection; and all the glory is His. Thus the indwelling presence of the Spirit proves its power; the God of atoning charity perfects the operation of His love within us. It accomplishes all His will; it strengthens obedience unto perfection; it expels every sinful affection, rendering entire the consecration of the heart; and it raises the new nature to a full conformity to Christ and preparation for heaven.
W. B. Pope, Sermons and Charges,p. 193.
References: 1 John 4:16. G. Gilfillan, Christian World Pulpit,vol. ix., p. 4; W. M. Statham, Ibid.,vol. xi., p. 248; H. Goodwin, Church of England Pulpit,vol. iii., p. 329; S. Leathes, Ibid.,vol. ii., p. 80; Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. v., No. 253. 1 John 4:16-18. C. Kingsley, Town and Country Sermons,p. 341. 1 John 4:17. J. M. Neale, Sermons to Children,p. 148; Homilist,2nd series, vol. iv., p. 358.