First, love is of God—He is its Source. There is—there must be—in it some great, deep heart of sympathy, the infinite counterpart of our faint and feeble human love; for we could not be so moved and awed by unreality and deadness; and till we feel this—till we feel that the holy tenderness which comes over us at the sight of boundless oceans or setting suns or starry skies, that the strong sympathies which seize us when we think of human sufferings and wrongs, and will not let us rest till we have done our utmost to relieve and redress them, cannot be explained by any curious network of nerves and fibres, by any laws of chemistry or mechanics, but is a living breath from the Omnipresent Love, working unseen but ever active beneath the material veil of things—we do not truly believe; the cold inference of reason is not yet quickened into a living faith; God is still a name rather than a power, a force than an agent, an operation than a person.There is a gem which is called the flystone gem.

When we truly love, we show all these virtues in their lustre.3. (2) Love is of God because it is His gift. No, answers the agnostic; God may exist, but we cannot know Him, for we cannot see Him, and knowledge is of the senses. (3)it assimilates us to God, or makes us more and more like him.What is here said by the apostle is based on the truth of what he elsewhere affirms, Here, of course, is another test, the love of "one another," such love being of God himself. It is not given to falsehood, to fault-finding, to suspicion. I cannot resist the conviction that there is something more in the world than Nature. John states (4:7) that, “love is from God,” and then he goes farther and states (4:8) that, “God is love.”. He is a living, dynamic, and powerful Being whose personality has multiple facets. But as the babe opens its eyes, and sees the mother smiling upon it, it returns the smiles, and stretches forth its arms to embrace the bending cheek; so when the eyes of the soul are opened to see the smiling face of Jesus stooping to imprint a kiss of love, or drop some sweet word into the heart, and there is a flowing forth toward him of love and affection—this is the power of love. To report dead links, typos, or html errors or suggestions about making these resources more useful use our convenient Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and everyone that loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth God.Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole BibleII. Yet, we cannot have that love until we first come to know Him. We are in fellowship with Him and can begin to give that love back to Him. God is a loving God!This does not mean that loving is one of God's activities, but that every activity of God is loving. Both the little hands of the white babe on Love’s lap are outstretched to draw to itself the little black boy’s face and impress upon it a kiss. But all this is done only as a means to an end; it is to move the heart, to draw the soul away from things of sense and sin, to introduce it into the love and fellowship of God, and to produce in it that holy sympathy with the Divine nature which shall cause it to dwell in love as it dwells in God.2. To her, life and death are the same. 107 (Holland).Churchman’s Pulpit: First Sunday after Trinity, 450 (Farquhar), 454 (Lawrence), 456 (Taylor).Contemporary Pulpit, 2nd Ser., vii. The faculties whose business it is to manufacture ideas are not yet fairly at work in him. (3) Love is of God because it is an emanation always flowing. God is not just an abstraction like love. Essentially and eternally, all love is of God, and all God is love. To-morrow it will be better than to-day. It is a pure and holy affection, a controlling principle of action, a consuming, abiding life. It was undoubtedly the loving nature of St. John that drew towards him the sympathetic affection of Jesus Christ. “God is not any one of these things, nor the sum of all, nor the mere maker of all”—God is love, and he that loveth, to the extent that he loveth, knoweth God.The light and love of God.1 [Note: J. M. Gibbon, The Gospel of Fatherhood, 27.] It may lie dormant; it does lie dormant. St. John expresses his deduction from this foundation fact in a fourfold form.III. If He were not the primary One sustaining it, we would not have enough love to continue the relationship. Some perhaps will scarcely believe that a child of God can feel enmity against Christ; but his carnal mind is unmitigated enmity against him. That was the root of his life, and the life of all his effort. In fact, if we study the world's most common usages and descriptions of love,we find that they have little or nothing in common with the divine nature of our Creator. But to Bishop Montgomery flashed back from the bereaved parents this inspiring answer: “We have another son to send.” Love counts no gift too great to give to the God who is Love.’7 Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.I. The apostle having finished what he proposed to say concerning the trying of spirits, returns to his former exhortation to brotherly love, and which comes with fresh force and strength; for since worldly men follow, hear, embrace, and cleave to the false teachers; such as are of God, and on the side of truth, should love one another, and their faithful ministers, and … Only a year before his death, after nearly twenty years of misunderstandings and estrangement, W. G. Ward told the present biographer of a dream he had had—how he found himself at a dinner party next to a veiled lady, who charmed him more and more as they talked. 1 John 4:7 New International Version (NIV) God’s Love and Ours. By trying to love our relations and friends, by submitting to their wishes, though contrary to our own, by bearing with their infirmities, by overcoming their occasional waywardness by kindness, by dwelling on their excellences and trying to copy them—thus it is that we form in our hearts that root of charity which, though small at first, may, like the mustard seed, at last even overshadow the earth.II. I dare say this is quite true of our physical organization, and it is true of our spiritual organization too. At Love’s feet a little Chinese and a little Indian child are playing together.