God Is Love

⁷ Dear friends, let us love one another, because love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. ⁸ The one who does not love has not known God, because God is love. ⁹ This is how God’s love for us was revealed: God has sent his only-begotten Son into the world so that we may live through him. ¹⁰ This is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. ¹¹ Dear friends, if God loved us so much, we also should love one another.

¹⁹ We love^[a] because he first loved us. ²⁰ If anyone says, “I love God,” but hates his brother, he is a liar. For how can anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen,^[b] love God, whom he has not seen? ²¹ This then is the command we have from him: The one who loves God should also love his brother.

⁹ “As the Father has loved me, so also I have loved you. Remain in my love. ¹⁰ If you hold on to my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have held on to my Father’s commands and remain in his love. ¹¹ I have told you these things so that my joy would continue to be in you and that your joy would be complete.

¹² “This is my command: Love one another as I have loved you. ¹³ No one has greater love than this: that someone lays down his life for his friends. ¹⁴ You are my friends if you continue to do the things I instruct you. ¹⁵ I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know what his master is doing. But I have called you friends, because everything that I heard from my Father, I have made known to you. ¹⁶ You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will endure, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. ¹⁷ These things I am instructing you, so that you love one another.