IF GOD IS LOVE

How is this for a direct statement, "The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love" (I John 4:8)?  Period, exclamation point, end debate.  Well, almost.  John's thinking is rooted in a great, cosmic size reality that says, "In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation (an atoning sacrifice) for our sins" (I John 4:10).  Then the great conclusion, "Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another" (I John 4:11). 

Here is the reasoning.  If God is love and loved us so much that He sent His Son, Jesus the Messiah, into the world to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins, then it is unthinkable that to really know this God one would live in a way contrary to what has been revealed in God's loving actions.  Therefore the conclusion, "The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love" (I John 4:8).

To take it a step further, how do we know we really are of God?  John gives us the answer.  He writes, "Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God.  We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us.  God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in Him" (I John 4:15-16). 

There is no doubt about it.  Acts that do not reflect the love of God are not of God, no matter how loudly one may protest that he does in fact love God.  To quote another source,

If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing" (I Corinthians 13:1-3).