From the New International Version

My thoughts and comments.

7a. Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God.

God is the source of true love.

7. Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God.  Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.

If God is love and we are born of His Spirit then we become love.  We of course then know the source of that love (The one and only Righteous God).

8. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.

If one is not born of God, they can not know love because love comes from God and only one born of God's Spirit can be filled with and moved by that pure and true love.

This does not mean that man can not love.  It means that the love man experiences without God is not complete and compared to the love given by God is a faulty love.  Only God's love is pure and absolute.  Does one love his spouse, or child or Girl or boyfriend?  If that person knows God, the human knowledge of love is replaced by the love God has to give and makes the love man knows complete or whole and perfect.

9. This is how God showed his love among us; He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.

10. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

God's love freed us by way of Christ's death before we even knew such love existed.  God's sacrifice of His Son was specifically for our salvation.  It was not some accident of fate nor can that sacrifice fit any other shoebox description of God that man can come up.  God loved us so much that the sacrifice he made was extended beyond the time of the sacrifice to encompass all mankind.  If God had required that we know Him first we would never have had an opportunity to be saved.  Fortunately, He loved us so much that in His understanding of us He knew we needed the love first, not after the fact.

11. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

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

13. We know that we live in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.

Does it not stand to reason that if God loves us and fills us with His love that we will in fact become love.  If we become love, or if we are love, we WILL love. If that's the case, then we find ourselves in love with the giver of love.  When we love someone we tend to do everything we can not to harm that relationship and possibly damage that love.  So, for the believer, that means that we don't memorize the ten commandments, we become the ten commandments.  What I mean is that if we are truly in love with God and made complete by His love we will not do anything to mess up that relationship of love.   We will not kill, or steal, or covet, or anything else that makes up the commands of God.  Jesus came to fulfill the law, not do away with it.  That being the case, it stands to reason that the law is not done away with but actually fulfilled in the lives of believers through the purity of a deep abiding love of the Saviour.  I love God so I won't harm my brother.

This gives us confidence in the gift He gave us as the Gift of Jesus brings us the gift of His Spirit which fills us with the Gift of His Love which completes us and convinces us that we are filled with His Spirit.

14. And we have seen and testify that the Father sent his Son to be the Saviour of the world.

15. If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him and he in God.

16a. And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.

The next thing that happens is that we want to tell everybody else about the indwelling Spirit God has given which evidences His love to us.  We want others to know about the greatness of our new life in Christ.   We want others to be freed from their sins.  We want others to experience the perfection of God's love and the tremendous power the believer experiences by way of that love.
We can no more refuse to acknowledge that Jesus is God's Son that we can refuse to breathe.

16b. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him.

I believe this is simply a restatement of the obvious facts that have heretofore been expressed by this passage of scripture.

17. Love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him.

18. There is no fear in love.  But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment.  The man who fears is not made perfect in love.

Love frees us from judgment.  The fear talked of here is the fear of God's judgment of us for our sins.  It is intelligent and expresses some degree of common sense for one not to walk down a dark alley alone at night or to do other things that would be considered less than smart.   But, again, this is not the type of fear spoken of here.  Do we not see that oneness with God's Salvation and completeness of true and perfect love removes any fear of the love giver or God.  We realize that our Creator and Father, the giver of this perfect love, truly is one who is NOT to be feared.  We are one with Him and do not fear His judgment.

19. We love because he first loved us.

As we said above, one can learn to love to some degree or other.  However, no one can learn to love unconditionally without God's love indwelling him or her.  Unconditional love allows us to love the unlovable, those that can not be loved without some gargantuan stretch of the human love.   The love of God filling us allows us to love even this type person. 

20. If anyone says, "I love God, yet hates his brother, he is a liar.  For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.

Here's, as they say, the rub.  If one truly loves God, then that same person WILL love his neighbor.  It does not mean that we love the sin men do, but rather we love the person who does the sin.  We can hardly expect someone to be better or change their lives if we aren't able to show them something the rest of the world can not show them.  The most obvious thing is a love that man cannot express without God.  A love that allows us to touch the untouchable, the distraught, the dead soul desperately seeking God, to lead that soul to the perfect salvation of God through Christ His Son and the filling of that person with His perfect and healing love.

21. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must love his brother.

Not a request, this is a command.   The true believer does not hate.  The true believer loves unconditionally just as our Father loved us unconditionally and saved us from our sin and filled us with His love.

We hear "Win the world for Christ".  Yet, many who claim they are believers spout God out of one corner of their mouths and simultaneously spout hate out of the other.  This is NOT how we win the world for Christ.  This is also NOT how believers live.

Brothers, Sisters, love is the only way.  Practice, practice, practice.  Express what He has given us every day in every way we can.   God's blessings on you as you experience the Love God Our Father Has Given Us.   Share it with the world!!!