May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. NIVUK

Through ”the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ” we come to experience ”the love of God”.

”God is love” (1 John 4:16). This is always true, but we only come to know it truly and deeply – to experience it – through God’s grace in Jesus. As John writes in the first part of this oh so famous verse: ”And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.” If we take account of the wider context, from verse 7 onwards, we inevitably see that Jesus and His Cross (His grace) are fundamental to our coming to a subjective awareness of God’s love.

Tom Wright says that love ‘…is the very heart, the essence of who God is…And it is noticeable that the Jewish and Christian declaration of belief in a God of love stands out a mile from most other views of God ancient or modern.’

He adds that the ancient world was ‘…full of the anxiety that comes from a fear of superhuman forces that are precisely not loving, but are instead capricious, malevolent, and needing to be pacified or placated. None of the multiple options in that most pluralist of religious worlds spoke of a single God whose innermost nature was love.’

However, for the early Christians, ‘…gazing upon that loving God, and learning to love and trust him in return’ they ‘found themselves embraced in a new kind of spirituality, an intimacy of trust like of children with a father, a warm security of knowing that they were loved with an everlasting love.’

Of course, it is one thing to know the love of God, but quite another to share it. So, for a church which was fragile, in danger of being ripped apart by divisions, Paul prays for the continuing manifestation of God’s love among them. May they (and we!) know this love not only as a theological proposition, but as a practical reality.