Most Christians can quote John 3:16 from memory. Ask whether God loves them and they will say yes. But watch how they live after a bad week, a harsh word, or a private failure, and a different belief shows up: God loves me when I behave, and He is done with me when I don’t.
The apostle John wrote 1 John 4 for exactly that gap. His answer is simple and freeing: our doing flows from our believing.
The Bookends: What We Ought to Do
1 John 4:7-21 is bracketed by two commands. It opens with “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God” (1 John 4:7), and it closes by warning that anyone who says “I love God” but hates his brother “is a liar” (1 John 4:20).
On their own, those bookends sound a lot like law: if you don’t love people, you don’t love God. And they describe something real. Love for others is the behavior that ought to show up in the life of a follower of Christ.
To understand where real love comes from, look at what John places between the bookends. A helpful key: what Paul usually calls grace, John often calls love.
What the Love of God Actually Is
John defines the love of God in two sentences. “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him” (1 John 4:9). Then: “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10).
Love, in the Bible’s sense, does not start with our love for God. It starts with His love for us, shown in sending Jesus.
The word propitiation means satisfaction. Everything God requires in order to be satisfied with a person, He already has in His Son. If you are in Christ, God is not waiting for you to make up the difference. He is fully satisfied with you.
That matters, because no one will ever muster up a godly enough walk to earn God’s approval. No one loves God enough, loves people enough, or does good enough. Grace is not a small boost for people who almost made it. It is the full payment for people who were never close.
Why “Ought” Isn’t Enough
John goes on: “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (1 John 4:11). There are many things believers ought to do: gather with the church, give, forgive, love difficult people. The problem is that ought does not supply the power to do it.
That is why belief matters so much. Doing flows from believing.
How You Can Know You Are Saved
John wrote his gospel “so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God” (John 20:31). He wrote 1 John for people who had already believed: “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God that you may know that you have eternal life” (1 John 5:13).
So in 1 John 4 he gives believers solid ground. “By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit” (1 John 4:13). And “whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God” (1 John 4:15).
Many believers live with a “He loves me, He loves me not” faith, where every good day puts them back in God’s favor and every failure pushes them out. John says otherwise. When you believed, you “were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit” (Ephesians 1:13), who is “the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it” (Ephesians 1:14). A believer’s status does not change with every stumble.
Knowing Is Not the Same as Believing
Then comes the heart of the passage: “So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us” (1 John 4:16).
Knowing and believing are two different experiences. People are not spreadsheets. We like to think we believe what we know, but often we come to know what we already believe. Beliefs shape experiences more than experiences shape beliefs.
Consider a fever. In 1927, the Austrian psychiatrist Julius Wagner-Jauregg received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for treating neurosyphilis by giving patients malaria. The high fever helped fight an infection that could not otherwise be cured. Most people know that a fever is one of the ways the body fights illness. Yet the moment a fever starts, the first instinct is to make it stop. Knowing that the fever helps is one thing. Believing it while shivering and aching is another.
The love of God works the same way. It is possible to know that God loves you and still not believe it, because every mistake seems to say He has had enough. The way forward is not to look harder at yourself. It is to look to Jesus, the propitiation for our sins. Knowing and believing together is a revelation of grace.
Love Perfected With Us
“By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world” (1 John 4:17).
By what? By knowing and believing the love God has for us. That love is perfected with us, which means we need help from outside ourselves: Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the Word of God, and teaching that keeps pointing to the finished work of Christ.
The result is confidence. Believers do not have to approach the day of judgment wondering whether God loves them or loves them not. As He is, so are we. God “has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 1:3), and He “raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:6). Jesus’ standing has become our standing.
Paul describes the same reality: “we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Looking in the mirror at our own love for God produces doubt. Looking at God’s love for us produces confidence.
Perfect Love Casts Out Fear
“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). People often say the opposite of fear is faith, but fear cannot be beaten by self-effort. Fear is overcome by God’s love for you.
And that brings the passage back to its bookends: “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). When love for other people finally flows out of a believer, it is not because they mustered it up. It is because they have seen how much they are loved.
You can try to force yourself to change for God, or you can let God love you into change. Doing flows from believing. Start by believing the love God has for you.