Love That Leads to Love

I enjoy hiking. I especially enjoy hiking when the trail follows a stream. There is a certain level of comfort in knowing that the water is consistently near. You'll not thirst. You'll not get too hot. You'll not lose your way. You may even make it to the source.

I found notes from a lesson I taught the youth earlier this year. The first line reads "God's love - the fountain of our love for Him." The basic idea is that God has communicated his love generally or widely through his care for and patience with man (Psalm 145:8-9; Luke 6:32-36; Acts 14:16-17), and specifically through His Son (Romans 5:8). We experience the reality of His love through the Spirit working in us (Romans 5:5, Ephesians 3:14-20). Having experienced the love of the Father in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit, we ought to be people filled with love. 1 John 4:7-11 says:

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be a propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

I owe many of the thoughts in my notes to Packer's chapter on the love of God in Knowing God. At the end of that chapter Packer asks a series of questions the last of which is the inspiration for this point. I'll close this post with Packer's words and ask you to consider how the love of God working through you serves as a stream refreshing, restoring, and leading others to rejoice and glory in the source of your love for others - God's perfect love.

John wrote that "God is love" in order to make an ethical point, "Since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another (1 Jn 4:11). Could an observer learn from the quality and degree of love that I show to others - my wife? my husband? my family? my neighbors? people at church? people at work? - anything about the greatness of God's love to me?
Meditate on these things. Examine yourself.