Love each other – Intro
John 13v34+35: 34“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. 35By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” This is the Scripture that we are going to focus on for the next few weeks, the main topic surrounding it is the whole idea of loving other Christians.
“Christians should love each other.” Is this true? And if it is true, why should Christians love each other?
If we begin in John 13v34 we see that Jesus said; “A new command I give you: Love one another…” So obviously it is true that as Christians we must love other Christians. The question then remains; Why should we love each other?
Simplicity would tell us that we must love each other because Jesus told us to, but we are given more motivation than that in the Bible, let’s have a look at some of the reasons that we as Christians should love one another.
The first and primary reason that we love each other is because we are loved. Understand this, make sure that this makes sense to you, your whole Christian life very well depends on you understanding this fact: God loves you.
1John 3v1: How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know Him.
1John 4v10: This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
God loves you; in the cross we learn many things, one of these things that we learn is that we are loved by God. If God never loved us He would never have sent His Son to die for us. If you ever doubt that you are truly loved, look to the cross; see how much you really are loved. God loves you!
Only once you understand and believe that you are loved by God can you ever hope to begin to love others. We do not love other Christians so that God will love us, we know that God loves us therefore we love other Christians.
1John 4v11+12: 11Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.
So therefore the answer to the question why should we love each other is this; we should love each other because we are loved by God.
1John 4v19→21: 19We love because He first loved us. 20If 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. 21And He has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.
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