Good morning everyone and welcome back to the newsletter!

A while ago my boyfriend and I did committed to learning a couple of memory verses together. Our main verse was 1 John 4:10 and we spent some time meditating on and studying the passage of this scripture together. I came across the blog post I had written for The Growing Seed (before it became a newsletter) this morning and wanted to share it with you. I would encourage you to read through 1 John 4 and the beginning of 1 John 5 before reading this devotional. Here is a link to the 1 John 4. I hope you enjoy!

Throughout our study, we kept coming back to the dynamic of love being an ecosystem of us, God and each other.  The Bible Project says the following:

We noticed 3 directions of love in this ecosystem through the passage and that is what I want to share with you today:

Our memory verse encapsulates God's love for us quite well. He loved us before we loved Him. God loved us by sacrificing his Son for our benefit while we still hated him. We struggle to simply extend a helping hand or offer kindness to someone who dislikes us, never mind sacrificing something we love or value for their sake. But this is what God did. This is the foundation of the Gospel and the clearest representation of how faithfully God loves us - to the extent of laying his own Son's life down for us. But there is another way in which God loves us...

Verse 18 mentions that "There is no fear in love". We spend some time trying to understand what this verse means and the relationship between love and fear. Our conclusion was that God's love is an active love. God is willing to make sacrifices for us, but He is also willing to protect us. My boyfriend told a story of when he was little and there was a big storm while him and his family were out of their boat. His mother sat embracing him to comfort and protect him. This was an act of love from his mother. As we envision this scene of a little child, wrapped up in loving arms, we can understand that love brings comfort and a sense of security. Similarly, God is always lovingly protecting us and actively bringing goodness and grace into our lives. His love is able to surround us so sufficiently that there is no space for fear to get near.

We are not able to love God without his grace. Thankfully we have generously been gifted His Holy Spirit so that "we [may] remain in Him and He in us" (4:13). By God's Spirit we have the ability to love God. This is a humbling reminder of how incapable we are without God. We need Him in order for us to be able to love Him. This is always important to remember as we walk with the Lord. But how do we honour this ability that we have been given?

Two ways in which we can directly love God are through confession and through submission. Verse 15 explains that confessing that Jesus is the Son of God results in a relationship with God. God wants to be near to us and by acknowledging Jesus is Lord we bring God into our lives. We can love God by recognising who He is and opening up ourselves to recieve everything from Him. Similarly, chapter 5:3 reads "For this is what love for God is: to keep His commands...". This clearly indicates that by obeying God's instructions we can love him. I recently listened to a podcastthat touched on the fact that we obey God's commands because we love him, but I think the relationship between the two are reliant on each other. As an act of love we obey the commands of the God who loves us more than we will ever know and will do anything to reconcile us to him. We love God through our obedience. Yet, because of the love that we have for the Lord, we want to please him just as a little child wants to please their parents. We also obey God as a result of our love for him. Our love for God and obedience towards Him depend on each other and cannot be separated.

Because love is an ecosystem there is a complex dynamic between all three of these entities. How we love God flows into how we love others and how God loves us as individuals includes how God loves us as a people. I will break this section into three again to touch on a couple of the ways in which we love others:

I have realised it is very hard to love others when my cup is not full. We are not always capable of being loving by our own strength. We see that the reason for this is because "love is from God" (verse 7). So how are we supposed to be loving if we don’t know the source of love? Without knowing God we can't love others well because we won't know whatlove truly is.

Yet, without loving others we won't know how love looks. Verse 12 says that "no one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God remains in us and His love is made complete in us." God works through our love for others to reveal to us a deeper understanding of what love is. So, we love each other in order to understand love.

Finally, we love others in order to know who love is. As seen so far, we can only truly love others when God is involved. Just as any ecosystem will flourishes when there is a natural balance, when we commit to our relationship with God He fills our life with a natural balance of love that can radiate to others. This is why it is so important to love God. We can also love others through our love for the Lord with confession and submission. When we confess the love of God we give people the opportunity to feel that love and encounter God. Leading others to God is the most loving thing we can do. God’s law also calls us to “love [our] neighbour as [ourselves]” (mark 12:31). As we love God by submitting to His law, we learn how to love others better.

By God’s love we have the ability to love God, love others and most importantly experience the indescribable love of God.

I pray that this newsletter will remind you of how great God’s love is and I hope you have an amazing weekend!

We’ll chat again soon, love Cailyn x

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