This Is How We Know | Week Six

Dear friends, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his one and only Son into the world so that we might live through him.Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, if God loved us in this way, we also must love one another.  1 John 4:7-11 

Love of God and love for God are the foundation and motivation to love others.

Little children, let us not love in word or speech, but in action and in truth.  

1 John 3:18 

This is how we will know that we belong to the truth and will reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows all things.  1 John 3:19-20

Guard your heart above all else, for it is the source of life.  Proverbs 4:23

The heart is more deceitful than anything else, and incurable—who can understand it?  Jeremiah 17:9 

I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will place my Spirit within you and cause you to follow my statutes and carefully observe my ordinances.  Ezekiel 26:26-27

Dear friends, if our hearts don’t condemn us, we have confidence before God and receive whatever we ask from him because we keep his commands and do what is pleasing in his sight.   1 John 3:21-22

Now this is his command: that we believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and love one another as he commanded us. The one who keeps his commands remains in him, and he in him. And the way we know that he remains in us is from the Spirit he has given us.  1 John 3:23-24 

“Give me all of you. I don’t want so much of your time, so much of your talents and money, and so much of your work. I want you. All of you.  I have not come to torment or frustrate the natural man or woman, but to kill it. No half measures will do. I don’t want to only prune a branch here and a branch there; rather I want the whole tree out. Hand it over to me, the whole outfit, all of your desires, all of your wants and wishes and dreams. Turn them all over to me, give yourself to me and I will make of you a new self – in my image. Give me yourself and in exchange I will give you Myself. My will, shall become your will. My heart shall become your heart.” (CS Lewis, “Mere Christianity”)