We Should Also Love Our Brothers

1 John 4:20-21

August 17, 2003

            As we come to the end of chapter 4 this morning, one thing we have seen from the Apostle John is that theology and practice are intimately related. Theology is intensely practical. The Apostle throughout this text on loving the brethren has intermixed theology and practice time and again. For example, in verses 9 and 10 the Apostle explains the heart of the Gospel message: God demonstrated His own love among us by sending His only Son into this sin-filled world so that we, people who are by nature spiritually dead and unable to please God, might live through Christ, God’s Son. It wasn’t that we deserved this help, this great salvation, or that we earned it, but it was only because God loved us that He sent His Son. We did not love God, but rather He loved us, and He sent His Son to die for our sins and to satisfy the justice that is demanded because of our sins. The theology of verses 9 and 10 is profound, as it deals with the nature of the atonement, the love of God, the sinfulness of man, and the self-motivated, self-generated love that God displayed on our behalf of His own free will.

            As we dealt with these fascinating and thrilling doctrines, what did we find was the Apostle’s conclusion, having thought through these amazing truths? He says it clearly in verse 11: Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. If this is how God has treated you, says the Apostle, then you yourself must take action. You must not just sit and contemplate these truths by yourself and only make them an intellectual matter. You must get up, and you must start loving one another because of this great love of God shown to you. The theology of verses 9 and 10 is not merely for intellectual discussion or for academic show; rather, it is there so that we might know how we ought to live this life before God and man.

            Last week we looked at a verse very similar to verses 9 and 10. In verse 19 the Apostle told us, We love, because He first loved us. Here John is once again being very theological. He is dealing here in the realm of what we believe, how we think, how we understand our own salvation and our God. We are not to think too highly of ourselves, or to have arrogance, thinking that we have received salvation because of anything in us. We are to be humble and dependent upon God, because it is only by His love toward us that we are saved. If He had not loved us, we would never have loved at all.

This verse is one of those verses that should and must impact your mind, but that is not all that it should impact. Verse 19 should impact your life, not just your mind. It should not merely change your understanding of God and of yourself, but it should change your relationships with other people as well.

            In verses 20 and 21 the Apostle goes on to show the ramifications of his theology. What exactly should our understanding of God’s love toward us do to us? How should it change us? How should it shape our lives? The Apostle is clear throughout this section that, as Christians, we are to love one another. Whatever he has written from verse 7 until now has been for the purpose of moving us to obedience to this exhortation to love one another. This has been his theme. And now in verses 20 and 21 it is no different. The theology of verse 19 is meant to bring us back to this great theme of his – that we must love one another.

            Before we begin to look at verses 20 and 21, I want to show you how they relate to verse 19, and what the connection is between verses 19 and 20. Verse 19, you will notice, is very general about our love. It simply says, We love. It does not say who we love; it merely states the fact that our lives are characterized by love because of God’s love toward us. Now, though, the Apostle is anxious to be even more specific, because he knows that there are people who will claim to live a life of love toward God, but yet they will show no love whatsoever to their neighbor, even to their neighbors who are Christians.

This has been a problem throughout all ages. Men have often claimed to love God, and at the same time they have treated others who also claimed to love God in horrendous ways. To see the proof of this all you need to do is to look at the book of Acts. See how the unbelieving Jews treated the Apostles. The Jews certainly claimed to love God, yet they persecuted and murdered God’s children, even their own countrymen. Certainly no upstanding Jew of the first century would have denied loving God with his lips, but with his life, love was completely absent if he was not a believer in Christ. And so we have this problem, that men will often claim to love God, and they will say they live a life of love, and that love is directed toward God, yet they do not love one another.

What is the answer to this? How do we deal with this issue? The Apostle wanted us to understand that the love he is talking about in verse 19 is not just love in general, and it is not only love to God. To the contrary, it is a very specific love directed toward specific, real individuals. It is not mere theory or speculation. It is not mysticism or having visions of God and personal emotions and revelations. It is something intensely practical and beneficial to the world in which we live. It is observable. In these 2 verses before us this morning, the Apostle is telling us this: Anyone who does not love his brother does not love God. That is his message to us today in this text. Anyone who does not love his brother does not, indeed cannot, love God. It is impossible. It is inconceivable that a hateful person should love God. It is folly to believe that you can live your life loving God and not reaching out in love to one another. You must love other Christians, which is what the Apostle means by brother, if you are to love God in truth. If you want to sum up these two verses, that is how to sum them up. But the Apostle does not simply sum them up, he gives his arguments and his reasons for what he says. He wants us to understand why this is true, and so in verses 20 and 21 he gives us two reasons why anyone who does not love his brother cannot not love God. There are two reasons why a person who does not love his brother cannot love God.

The Logical Reason (v. 20)

            The first reason is given in verse 20, and let’s call it the logical reason. The logical reason. Look at verse 20. John writes, If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. In this verse the Apostle gives us a logical reason why we cannot love God if we do not love our brother. The reason he gives is this: We have seen our brother, but we have not seen God. We have seen our brother, but we have not seen God. That is his logic. Let’s unfold what he’s arguing here.

            He begins with a false claim, and we see that at the beginning of the verse. The Apostle writes, If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar. Here is the false claim. This person claims to love God. If you have a NASB you will notice that the words I love God are in quotes, which is a good work of translation. The Apostle is discussing what someone says, and he is giving a hypothetical quote. This person makes a verbal claim to love God. They say with their mouths, “I love God.”

At the same time this same person hates his brother. We have here very strong words contrasted: love and hate. What does it mean to hate our brother? Don’t think this may be an escape hatch for you. Don’t say to yourself, “Well, hate is a strong word. I don’t hate anyone. I may dislike some people, but hatred, well, that’s not me.” What is hate? Hate is the opposite of love, right? What is love? We get a pretty good description of it in 1 Corinthians 13. Love is patient (v. 4). Ever treated someone with impatience? Have you ever not been as patient as God is with you? Most of us, if not all of us, fail on the first point. Love is kind and is not jealous (v. 4). Are you always kind with your words? What about with your thoughts? Have you ever been jealous of anyone’s success? Have you ever been happy at someone else’s failure? That’s just jealousy going backward. We don’t get such a precise list describing hatred as we do love in the Bible, but all we have to do to figure out what hatred is, is to compare it with what the Bible says about love. Whatever the opposite of love is, that’s hate. This person that the Apostle is describing, then, is a person who claims to love God, yet at the same time habitually lives a life of impatience, unkindness, jealousy, enmity, arrogance, pride, or whatever else is contrary to love. What are we to make of such a walking contradiction?

The Apostle says it as strongly as he possibly can: he is a liar. The person who does not love his brother does not love God. He cannot love God. He is a liar if he claims to love God while he is living this life of hatred toward other Christians. What the Apostle means is that this person is not saved. He is not a Christian at all. A person who is a liar, who lives a life that is one big lie, is not a Christian. It is not possible. Why does the Apostle say this? Why such strong language?

Look at the reasoning at the end of the verse. For (or because) the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. I want to explain this reasoning, because to many this does not seem like good reasoning on the Apostle’s part. But I think it is profound reasoning. And I want to show you why I think it is profound reasoning.

First, many have struggled with this reasoning because it seems, if we only think superficially, that loving God would be easier than loving our brother. After all, our brother has faults, our brother sins, our brother has personality traits that we find irritating and sometimes even annoying. Our brother is not perfect by any means, and loving him may be hard work. But God is perfect. God never offends us. God never does anything wrong to us. God has no annoying personality traits. It may seem that loving God is easier than loving another person. Many people have stumbled at this point, and had trouble with this text because of this seemingly illogical proposition by the Apostle John.

I want to try and explain to you why this is solid logic and not faulty logic. To see the logic you have to understand that our brother is like us, but God is unlike us. You see this contrast in verse 20. The Apostle says, for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. Our brother is someone we can see; he is flesh and blood, and we are both on the same level. God is not someone we can see; He is spirit, and we are not even close to the same level. We know from experience that it is much easier to love someone who is like us than it is to love someone who is unlike us. There are very few people who are racist against their own race. But sadly there are many people racist against those who are unlike them, those of other races. Why? Because people naturally love others who are like them. We most easily love those we can relate to at our level. Humans and God are not alike. Humans are sinful; God is holy. Humans are foolish; God is wise. Humans are unjust; God is just. Humans lie; God cannot lie. Humans fail; God never fails. Humans are born and they die; God is eternal. Humans are finite; God is infinite. Humans are physical beings that can be seen; God is spirit and cannot be seen. Because we can see our brother, and because he is like us in these many ways, it is easier to relate to and love our brother.

Many times people think they relate well to God, but they have made God into their own image. It is very hard for us to keep God as God, and not to bring Him down to our level in our thinking. When we really begin to see God as He is, our natural response is alienation because He is so unlike us. “If you cannot even love someone you see, how can you love someone you cannot see?” the Apostle argues. How can you love the invisible God who is so utterly unlike you if you cannot even get along with and love your brother, who is just like you? God is unlike us in that we cannot see Him (v. 12), but our brother is just like us, and we can see Him. It is less difficult in reality to love our brother than to love the invisible, holy God, so that if we do not even love our brother, we certainly cannot love God.

The Apostle, then, argues that since it is easier to love our brother, who is very much like us, than it is to love God, who is completely unlike us, then if we cannot even love our brother, how can we even think we love God? If we think we love God yet hate our brother, then what we have done is we have made our own god. We have created a god in our own image, rather than loving our brothers, who are created in the image of God. Anyone who says that he loves God but hates is brother is a liar, because God is unseen, and how can we love the God who is unseen if we can’t even love our brother who is seen? It is absurd and complete folly to think we love God if we hate our brother. We are only deceiving ourselves, and we are liars if this is our condition.

Anyone who does not love his brother cannot love God. It is impossible. And the Apostle has given us a logical reason: God is unseen, but we see our brother and understand perfectly how to relate to him as a human being. If we cannot love our brother, how can we love the invisible God? It is, as I have said, impossible.

The Legal Reason (v. 21)

            The second reason the Apostle gives to prove that anyone who does not love his brother cannot love God is what we will call the legal reason. The legal reason. There is the logical reason and the legal reason. The legal reason is found in verse 21, where the Apostle says, And this commandment we have from Him, that the one who loves God should love his brother also. Here is a command, even a law of God and of Christ. This is the law of love. If we love God, then it follows that we must love our brother, because God has commanded us to do it. It is His command to us. This is the legal reason. If you say you love God, you must love your brother also.

            The nature of the command is twofold: We are commanded to love God, and we are commanded to love our neighbor. These are commands that go back to the Old Testament. These are not New Testament novelties. Where do we find this command given? God gave us this command in Leviticus 19:18 and Deuteronomy 6:5. In Leviticus 19:18 we read, You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am the Lord. Here is the part of the command to love our neighbor, or, as John has it for us in 1 John 4:21, to love our brother. The second part of the command Moses gave the people of Israel in Deuteronomy 6:5. He said, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. Here is the part of the command about loving God. You are to love God so that it is the one consuming passion of your life. You are to love God with everything that is in you. He is to have first place in everything in your life.

            Jesus put these two commandments together in Matthew 22:37-39. Having been asked what commandment was the greatest commandment, Jesus responded, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” These two commandments are the two great commandments, and Jesus went on to say that the whole law and the prophets depended on these commandments. They all were definitions and explanations of these two great commandments.

            Many times we think of love and we have our own definitions of it. We sentimentalize it. We make it mean something easy, something emotional, something that comes and goes depending on our moods. So God, knowing this about us, gave us the Law and the Prophets to explain to us in great detail what it means to love God and to love one another. He knew just leaving it at love would not get across the point to us. We would trivialize it. We would misunderstand it. We would miss the meaning of it. And so the Old Testament Law and the Old Testament prophets were given so that we could know exactly how to love God, and exactly how to love our neighbor.

            The New Testament picks up on this theme as well. The epistles are the apostles’ teaching and doctrine, and their doctrine always comes with practical ramifications. One great ramification is love. In fact, the Apostle Paul so strongly emphasized love that he made this statement in Galatians 5:6: For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything, but faith working through love. The only thing that matters is faith working through love. In 1 Corinthians 13:13 Paul went further to define the importance of love, saying, But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love. In Christ the thing that matters is faith working through love, and the greatest of these is love. We must realize, then, that the Apostle’s teaching was always leading toward this love.

Whenever the Apostles taught doctrine it was to teach us how to love God and how to love our brothers. In fact, that is the very point that the Apostle John has come to in his exposition of loving one another in 1 John 4:21. Love God, love your brother. He wrote, the one who loves God should love his brother also. The word should has been supplied by the translators to try to make the sentence smoother, and it could be understood as “must” or it could be omitted altogether. The Apostles John is giving a mild form of a command here. It is not a command strictly speaking, but the grammatical construction he uses is a way to gently tell someone to do something. If you love God, love your brother. If you love God, which is most difficult, do the easier part and love your brother. Now, as I said, How should we do this? We don’t want to trivialize it, or sentimentalize it. I want to give you a few Scriptures in closing to make this command concrete and practical in your life.

The first aspect of loving one another in this way can be said like this: Harm no one. Don’t take advantage of your brother. Don’t do anything to cause him hurt or damage. Do not harm him in any way. Don’t wrong him. And the Apostle Paul puts this forward as the meaning of loving one another in Romans 13:10. Turn there with me. Romans 13:10. Here the Apostle writes, Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfillment of the Law. What does he mean? Well, he has just listed 4 of the 10 commandments in verse 9, all of which have to do with harming another person in ways such as stealing from him, murdering him, sleeping with his wife, or lusting after and desiring the things he has. Being jealous of him. Do you know that being jealous of someone and coveting what they have in life is harmful? It does wrong to your neighbor. And Paul’s command is that in our love toward one another we do not harm each other. We don’t wrong each other by stealing what belongs to each other, or by hating and killing one another, or by coveting one another’s things. This is inappropriate behavior, and it is not love. Love can be seen as the absence of harm toward our neighbor. We do not hurt him. How do we know what will hurt him? The Law guides us and shows us, especially these commandments that have to do with how we interact with others.

I want to submit to you, though, that love is not only negative, but it is positive as well. Love is not merely avoiding harming our brother, but it is also doing something positive toward him also. Loving one another means being devoted to one another. Look with me back a chapter in Romans to Romans 12:10. Here Paul defines brotherly love further, and this time as a positive action. He says, Be devoted to one another in brotherly love; give preference to one another in honor. Love, then, is not merely avoiding harming our brother, it is also being devoted to our brother. It is being devoted to loving him. It means setting ourselves apart for the purpose of love. Our life aim and goal is loving our brother. Our devotion is not toward ourselves, but it is toward the other person, our brother. We are to give him preference in honor. We are to defer our rights and our desires for his well-being because we love him and are devoted to him. We are members of one another, we are one body, and we are devoted to seeing that body grow and develop, and so we love one another by willingly sacrificing what we might want to do to build up the body, to love our brother. Our devotion is not to our own pursuits or pleasures that are confined merely to ourselves. Our greatest joy and greatest duty must be to be devoted to each other. To be devoted to one another in brotherly love, honoring each other, and giving preference to each other. Love is commitment. Love is dedication. Love is devotion. So love is both refraining from harming our brother and it is passionately pursuing his best interest.

The last thing this morning I want to bring to bear about loving our brothers and sisters is in 1 Peter 4:8. 1 Peter 4:8. This verse is about love and forgiveness. Peter writes, Above all, keep fervent in your love for one another, because love covers a multitude of sins. Fervently love one another. Keep fervent, passionate, in your love for one another. Why? Because love covers a multitude of sins. Love forgives. As fallen human beings who have not yet been glorified, if we don’t forgive one another, we might as well end and sever all of our relationships right now. Forgiveness is the only way we will ever get along with each other in this world. God has forgiven us. He has shown great love toward us and forgiven us ten thousand times more, infinitely more, than we will or ever could forgive anyone else. You say, “Well, you don’t know how they treated me. You don’t know what they did to me.” Whatever they did to you, they did to God, and to sin against God is the greatest, most horrific thing a person can do. And whatever they did to you they probably did to someone else, and that also was against God. Anything you have to forgive is microscopic in light of what God has forgiven you. So love one another. Keep fervent in your love for one another, because love will allow for forgiveness. Love will cover sins. It will forgive others. When someone does you wrong, or when someone is not devoted to you, love is what keeps you from harming them or from withdrawing your devotion to them. Love is what covers a multitude of sins. These, then, are three concrete ways that we love one another.

How are we doing this morning? We just sang a song called “I Love You, Lord.” We just said with our lips, “I love God.” What are our lives saying? Are we loving one another? Or are we deceiving ourselves, and are we liars? The Apostle John this morning in this text has made it plain that to love one another is the concrete, tangible evidence that we truly love God. If we love God, we are to love one another. In fact, if we do not love one another, we cannot love God, no matter what sentiment we may feel or what emotions we may have when we sing worship songs or pray or attend church. Anyone who does not love his brother cannot love God. It is illogical, and it violates the command of the God we claim to love and serve. The one who loves God must love his brother. And the one who does not love his brother cannot love God. Let us, then, since we claim to love God, leave this place and, by faith, love one another. Let’s pray.

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