1 John 4:12

No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

I will admit I am a skeptic when people, in the modern age, say they have seen angels, or been to heaven and back. I very much believe in the supernatural world, and I also believe it is within God’s power to take someone to heaven and back, or send angels to earth. All of that is to say we learn in the bible that we don’t need to see supernatural things to see supernatural things. And more importantly we don’t need to be a supernatural being to live supernaturally. When we are born again (that is accept Jesus as our Lord and Saviour), we are endowed with the Holy Spirit (see the rest of 1 John 4). As verse 12 says, if we want to see a glimpse of God, we need to only look at Christians loving one another. We, as Christians, need to love non-Christians so that they have the opportunity to see only a morsel of God’s infinitely larger Love waiting for them.

At the end of verse 12, John writes that ‘his love is made complete in us’. Surely God’s love doesn’t end with us? Well in verse 17, John explains this point:

1 John 4:17

 This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus.

We are not like Jesus, as in Jesus is part of the holy trinity and the Son of God. We are like Jesus in that we are going to suffer in this world. People are going to criticize and possibly even crucify us for what we do and preach in throughput of God’s love. But like Jesus, our earthly goal is to spread God’s love. That is how his love is made complete in us; the whole point of God’s love is to reach non-Christians and Christians alike, and a method in which he does that is through us fulfilling the command to love one another.

Isn’t it amazing that we can be the ones that show God to others? We can enable others to see God through our actions. If that doesn’t prove that our lives are not our own, I don’t know what does.