“GOD IS LOVE, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 John 4:16). This brings us to the very culmination of the revelation in Christ. God is identified as love. God is love, and to abide in love is to abide in God and God to abide in us. Nothing higher can be said of God.
When that phrase was about to be written, all heaven bent over in anticipation to see whether John would really write it, for it had never been said before in human history. When John did write it, heaven broke out in applause: “They’ve got it. They have really seen it—God is love.” That was the high-water mark in Revelation—nothing higher, for it revealed the very nature of God. God not only loves; He is love, and couldn’t do an unloving thing without violating His own nature. He loves us whether we are good, bad, or indifferent. He loves us. He loves us even though He cannot approve of us.
Then to abide in God and have Him abide in us is to love—to abide in love, not to be in love one moment and in temper the next moment, but to abide in love as our constant home and atmosphere and life attitude. Strangely enough, psychiatry would agree with this verse: “He who does not love remains in death” (1 John 3:14). Those who do not love remain in a living death—the hell of conflict and disruption and mental and emotional anguish. That verse about remaining in death if you do not love is the most widely corroborated verse in literature, corroborated from tens of thousands of doctors’ offices and psychiatric couches—and more, from the persons who walk around in a living death without love, living corpses. Everything is saying, “Love or perish.” Remember who first said it, and fall at His feet in surrender and submission.
Dear Lord, it is all so simple. Help me to abide in love in every situation, all the time. If I do, nothing else matters. This is the solution for everything! Then help me to make it my life rule. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: This is my religion simplified: abide in love and thus abide in God. Nothing simpler and nothing profounder.
