EVENING SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 2/16/2025 8:57 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-1 “Perfect Love and the Character of
God”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: 1 John 4:7-8
Message of the verses: “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.”
I was interested to find out how many times the word love
is used in all of John’s writings and so I did a word search of the word love
in each of the books that he wrote. The
gospel of John 20 times, 1John -3rd John 30 times, and Revelation 4
times. I would say that as I look at the
length of the different books that John wrote the highest number was in the
combination of 1st to 3rd John. The shortest was Revelation. In Revelation the word love is seen three
times in chapters 2-3, which are the letters to the churches, and the other is
in chapter twelve. In the gospel of John
the word love is kind of spread out throughout the entire gospel. Now in first John love is used the total is
24 times, in 2 John it is four times, which means that it is used 2 times in 3rd
John. In the entire New Testament love
is used 184 times so that means that love is used 130 times in all the books of
the New Testament that are not written by John.
Now in 1 John 4:7 John begins that verse with the word “beloved”
which is the Greek word (agapetoi
[divinely] loved ones.” These are the
ones who John urges to love one another.
MacArthur explains “Again, unlike emotional, physical, or friendship
love agape (love) is the love of
self-sacrificing service (Phil. 2:2-5; Col. 3:12-14; cf. Rom. 14:19; 1 Cor.
10:23-24; 13:4-7), the love granted to someone who needs to be loved (Heb.
6:10; 1 Peter 2:17; cf. Rom. 12:15), not necessarily to someone who is
attractive or lovable.”
When we look at the words love is from God we can learn
the first reason that believers are to extend such sacrificial love to one
another. Now looking at Psalm 36:9 we
learn “For with You is the fountain of life; In Your
light we see light,” we see that God is life, and so the source of eternal life
is God. So just as God is light He is also love. MacArthur writes that “Therefore, if believers posses
His life and walk in His light (righteousness and truth), they will also both
possess and manifest His love, since everyone who loves is born of God and
knows God. Because they are God’s
children, manifesting His nature, they will reflect His love to others.” Now that paragraph is something that I need
to look over and read over a few times in order to have it make spiritual sense
to me as there is a lot of things packed into it.
2/16/2025 9:26
PM
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