Love’s World-changing power
Daily Scripture
1 John 4:7-12
1 John 4:7-12
7 Dear friends, let’s love each other, because love is from God, and everyone who loves is born from God and knows God. 8 The person who doesn’t love does not know God, because God is love. 9 This is how the love of God is revealed to us: God has sent his only Son into the world so that we can live through him. 10 This is love: it is not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son as the sacrifice that deals with our sins.
11 Dear friends, if God loved us this way, we also ought to love each other. 12 No one has ever seen God. If we love each other, God remains in us and his love is made perfect in us.
Daily Reflection & Prayer
This passage declared definitively that loving one another grows from identifying with the heart of the God of the universe. It isn’t just that God loves us, John wrote—God IS love. If the creator’s love is the ultimate source of our life, then, as Episcopal Bishop Michael Curry put it, “There’s power in love to help and heal when nothing else can. There’s power in love to lift up and liberate when nothing else will. There’s power in love to show us the way to live.” *
- As one scholar noted, “‘God is love’ does not mean love is one of God’s many activities. It means that all God’s activity is loving activity. Whether creating or ruling or judging, God does so in love.” ** Verse 11 called all of God’s children to grow toward loving as God loves. What helps you grow toward having everything you do be an expression of love? What practices or habits most help you stay rooted in God’s love so it can flow through you?
- The Greek word agape wasn’t the emotional “luv” of pop culture, which can be temporary or conditional. Agape was a chosen attitude. As one scholar noted, believers “are not to think that brotherly love automatically goes on and on…. Love makes allowances. Love tries to help. Love looks at the good people do in preference to dwelling on their defects.” *** How can you choose to love in that robust, tough-minded way—especially toward a difficult or imperfect person?”
Prayer
Dear God, you ARE love—what a mind-stretching truth. You know it’s not quite as natural for me to love. Please keep loving me as you stretch my ability to reflect your love to others. Amen.
GPS Insights
Ginny Howell
Ginny Howell serves as the Worship Experience Director for Resurrection, leading the church’s efforts to provide radical hospitality and an excellent worship experience across all of our locations. She’s a mom to three, g-momma to one sweet little boy, and shares much of her time with her closest companion, a rescued Pit Bull named Lola.
The best conversations with kids almost always happen in the car. Sometimes they surprise you with what’s on their mind, and you get a fun little chat you didn’t expect that day. Other times, I have learned, the car conversation can be a valuable tool, maybe better phrased as a strategic tactical maneuver, where you can address something while a kid is quite literally strapped in and can’t weasel out of the conversation.
I specifically remember a great minivan conversation with one of my daughters when she was in fourth grade, and I know she’s got a great memory of it as well. She shared her outrage that a friend had to walk laps on the playground at recess because he was using “made up” words. After some more conversation, we identified that the words in question weren’t actually made up, they just weren’t part of my daughter’s (mostly) G-rated vocabulary yet. After a very direct conversation about the meaning of those PG-13 words, her outrage diminished and I think we were both pleased to have had the conversation in the car where we couldn’t see the look on the other person’s face.
Last week, my grandson asked me a series of rapid-fire questions from his booster seat in the back of my SUV, and I was reminded of the value of the car conversation.
“G-mama, can you see God?”
“G-mama, can you touch God?”
“G-mama, can you hear God?”
Driving on 69 Highway and trying to thoughtfully respond in a way that fully represents my thoughts on God was a fun Tuesday afternoon challenge. My initial answers were all no, but then I had to share some additional thoughts because that felt like an incomplete answer for a curious 6-year-old.
I went on to explain that we see God in each other, when we do kind things for people and when they do kind things for us. I shared that while I can’t touch God, I feel God’s presence when he hugs me or gives me a gentle head squeeze, the same way his teacher at daycare does when he needs some help calming his body. I shared that while I don’t know that I have ever specifically heard the actual voice of God, I do believe that when we listen to each other, God shines through us and the words of encouragement we share with others.
He remained quiet for my sermonette from the front seat, and then very matter-of-factly said, “yup, so God is real.” My heart smiled when I heard him say those words, and my brain relaxed a bit because I thought we might be going in a different direction that I was not prepared to defend at 65mph.
My sweet grandson didn’t need my sermonette, he already knew his position before he asked the questions, and isn’t that how we all hope to be? So sure of God and God’s love that we know it no matter what anyone else says?
© 2026 Resurrection: A United Methodist Church. All Rights Reserved.
Scripture quotations are taken from The Common English Bible ©2011. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
References
* Curry, Bishop Michael. The Power of Love (p. 8). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
** C. Haas, M. De Jonge, and J. L. Swellengrebel, A Handbook on the First Letter of John. New York: United Bible Societies, 1972, p. 121.
*** L. L. Morris, article “Love” in Dictionary of the Later New Testament & Its Developments. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997, pp. 697-698.
