God’s love for us is perfect and complete. However, our love for Him is not. Our love for God grows. It grows as we yield to His love. It grows as we learn to trust Him more.

So here we see what Jesus said to a lawyer ask what he should do to inherit eternal life. Well, Jesus actually answers his question with a question and puts it back on the lawyer.

This kind of love however is not in our natural ability but is the supernatural love of God birthed in us by receiving the love that God has for us. We love because He first loved us.

Again, we love because God first loved us. This must be understood. We don’t love because we are good people. The kind of love we can muster up on our own goes right out the window the minute someone hurts us or betrays us. Only the God kind of love, agape love, can teach us how to truly love one another. But we must first receive the love God has for us. This opens the door for us to love.

We cannot truly love without first receiving the love of God.

John makes some hard statements about love here. He writes that for us to say we love God, all the while hating others, proves us to be liars. That may be a hard statement for us to take in. We often seem to want to justify our hatred of someone by exclaiming all they did to us. We make excuses because of the level of hurt or betrayal that someone issued to us.

But we find no loophole here for hatred. Now one could argue here that he is speaking of the brethren, our brothers and sisters in Christ, knowing that Jesus said it was our love for one another that would be the sign to the world that we were Christ-followers. But the only problem is that Jesus went beyond just loving each other and commanded us to love even our enemies.

This is a whole new level of love! We are commanded to love even our enemies and to do good to those who hate us! And when someone curses us, we are to bless them. When they abuse us, we are to pray for them!

I do not believe this can be done in human strength or with simple resolve to be a good person. This has to be an overflow of the love of God in our hearts!

In 1 John 4, John says to keep God’s commandments. I suppose one could say that this is the 10 commandments, but we know the words of Jesus when he told us that all the commandments were summed up in a new one that he was giving us, basically an 11th commandment–LOVE! Jesus said all of the law and the prophets hang on that commandment. He indicates if we would learn to love God with all of our being and let the love of God flow through us, we would thereby be fulfilling the commandments.

And we know that we have God’s love in us: