1 John 4:7–21

God’s Love Revealed

⁷Dear friends, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves has been fathered by God and knows God. ⁸The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love. ⁹By this the love of God is revealed in us: that God sent his one and only Son into the world in order that we may live through him. ¹⁰In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation^c for our sins.

¹¹Dear friends, if God loved us in this way, we also ought to love one another. ¹²No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God resides in us and his love is perfected in us. ¹³By this we know that we reside in him and he in us: that^d he has given us of his Spirit. ¹⁴And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son to be the Savior of the world.

¹⁵Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God resides in him and he in God. ¹⁶And we have come to know and have believed the love that God has in us. God is love, and the one who resides in love resides in God, and God resides in him. ¹⁷By this love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment, because just as that one is, so also are we in this world. ¹⁸There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear, because fear includes punishment, and the one who is afraid has not been perfected in love. ¹⁹We love, because he first loved us.

²⁰If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar, for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen is not able to love God whom he has not seen. ²¹And this is the commandment we have from him: that the one who loves God should love his brother also.