His Love Is Perfected In Us

Christmas and New Year is a season of giving and giving is one of many ways that we can express our love.

1 John 4:12 ~ No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwells in us, and His love is perfected in us.

I want to love others, and I long for others to love me too. The ability to love is inside every created things on earth. The desire to love is in man. Ever since I have become a believer, the felt of the need to love others become stronger because of the many verses stated in the Bible about love. Especially with the verses from 1 John chapter 4. I felt the need to love others more or at least, I was taught that this is the basic requirement from the Lord for a believer. From the way we used to read the Bible, we might conclude that loving others is also a sign to show that we are believers! Because of the way we are brought up in the Christian circle, we do not really know the true meaning of what is “we love because He first love us”.

After I have been enlightened by the grace of God, I gradually learn that we are actually the subject of His love and men are created for His love.  Men are created to be loved by Him and we are created to receive His love. Even though the teaching on the grace of God has overturned the inception that was rooted in me on how men should love each other, and even though I have been proclaiming the verse “we love because He first love us” over and over again, the Lord is still showing me through my circumstances that I still do not really know what is He trying to say...

It was after I have been led to learn on how to engage my heart to receive His revelation a few months ago; I started to receive new insight on what kind of love this really is. Incidentally, this revelation was immediately confirmed by a Christmas card given by a sister in which 1 John 4:12 was quoted: “No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwells in us, and His love is perfected in us.”

This kind of love is not our human kind of love. It is His love which perfected in us. We all know we have to love, but without knowing that when we are using our own effort in trying to love, we are doing it out of our flesh (brain), i.e. the dogs that God asked us to be aware of. At the end of the day, we murmur and we are not satisfied with others responses in respect of our “love” for them.  We have seen this over and over again and do not even realize that we are using our own effort to love each other. We did not love others out of the overflow of His love which is perfected in us.  We do not love others out of His love for us.

On the 31st of October last year, our church declared that, the church offering collection of that day would be used as a love gift to three of the churches in Israel . Through this event, the Lord revealed to me the meaning of “His love perfected in us”.

As believer, we have our Jewish brothers in the holy land. These are the kind of brothers that we never know of and we have never seen them before. But as we know more about the message of His grace, the desire of this kind of love to our Jewish brothers grow stronger each day. This is what we call the "supernatural love" from our Lord because our Jewish brothers are His chosen people and our Lord loves them very much. As such, this "supernatural love" is His love perfected in us.  If we have this kind of love towards our Jewish brothers, His love is already perfected in us! If we know that His love is perfected in us, we can rest assure that we can love and we shall love.

The only problem is on how are we going to dispense this perfect love to each other?  Perhaps the only solution to this problem is how much we can rest in Him. When we rest in Him, this perfect love shall flow in and through us. When this perfect love is flowing, we are in the flow of loving each other with the love that He perfected in us. And now, we love because He first loves us.

Understand that once we have put our faith in Him, His love is already perfected in us. Rest in Him and let this perfect love flow in and through you by His grace. After all, we love because His first loves us and only His grace can bring us there...