Study Desk

True love is God's love for us, not our love for God. He sent his Son as the way to take away our sins.

That is how much God loved us, dear friends! So we also must love each other.

No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us. If we love each other, God's love has reached its goal—it is made perfect in us.

We know that we live in God and God lives in us. We know this because he gave us his Spirit.

Anyone who says, "I believe that Jesus is the Son of God," is a person who lives in God, and God lives in that person.

So we know the love that God has for us, and we trust that love. God is love. Everyone who lives in love lives in God, and God lives in them.

If God's love is made perfect in us, we can be without fear on the day when God judges the world. We will be without fear, because in this world we are like Jesus.

We love because God first loved us.

If we say we love God but hate any of our brothers or sisters in his family, we are liars. If we don't love someone we have seen, how can we love God? We have never even seen him.

God gave us this command: If we love God, we must also love each other as brothers and sisters.

How do we know that we love God's children? We know because we love God and we obey his commands.

Loving God means obeying his commands. And God's commands are not too hard for us,

because everyone who is a child of God has the power to win against the world.

It is our faith that has won the victory against the world. So who wins against the world? Only those who believe that Jesus is the Son of God.

We believe people when they say something is true. But what God says is more important. And this is what God told us: He told us the truth about his own Son.

Whoever believes in the Son of God has the truth that God told us. But people who do not believe God make God a liar, because they do not believe what God told us about his Son.

This is what God told us: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son.

Whoever has the Son has life, but whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.

I write this letter to you who believe in the Son of God. I write so that you will know that you have eternal life now.

We can come to God with no doubts. This means that when we ask God for things (and those things agree with what God wants for us), God cares about what we say.