No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God remains in us, and His love is perfected in us.No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God remains in us, and his love has been perfected in us.No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.No man hath beheld God at any time: if we love one another, God abideth in us, and his love is perfected in us:
3 sermons cite this verse
… we also ought to love each other. No one has ever seen God, but if we love each other, God remains in us and his love is made perfect in us. I was listening to a story this week on the radio and it was on NPR and there was a man who was talking about, you know, his parents, his father, and he was talking about how his father had found religion and after his father found religion, things kind of went sideways in the family and there was, you know, his father began to believe in conspiracies and just things got hardened. And then there was somebody else who chimed in and they talked about, you know, a family member found religion and after they found religion, they were less loving, not more loving than they were before. And I thought, what a tragedy. Religion's not meant to make us, at least the Christian religion is not, I don't think any religion, is meant to make us less loving. …
And why does it matter? Because no one has ever seen God. but if we love one another God lives in us and his love is made complete in us your neighbor has never seen God and neither have you but your neighbor can see God by the way that you love them and that's going to happen proportionately I believe to your ability to love yourself and find yourself in the love of God. So you don't have to start today with, oh my goodness, this new commandment, I got to love God with all my heart, all my mind, and all my strength. Jesus is reaching back to Deuteronomy for that phrase. It's the Shema, the summation of faith to the Jewish mind found in Deuteronomy 6. Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your mind and all your strength. And another place in the Gospels adds to it another dimension as well. All your heart, all your mind, all your strength, all your hands, everything about you in life. Love God. …
… Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God abides enough in us, and His love is perfected in us. Again, you're never more like God than when you love sacrificially, unconditionally, and with forgiveness. And we have a model of that, a pattern. The plea is in verse 1, the pattern is in verse 2. And Christ, as we saw last week, is the One who loved us and gave Himself up for us as a satisfactory offering to God that arose from the cross as a sweet aroma. That's all so magnificent, so beautiful, so wondrous, so precious, that in a sense I hate to descend into verse 3, but necessarily must, because it starts to turn here, and it turns very darkly, and it's very ugly. But immorality or any impurity or greed must not even be named among you as is proper among saints. There is an antinomian's nightmare, that verse. …