ESOCS Devotional 14 December 2025 – He First Loved Us
MEMORY VERSE: “We love him, because he first loved us.” 1 John.4:19 KJV
TEXT: 1 JOHN 4:11-21
11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
12 No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God abides in us, and His love has been perfected in us. 13 By this we know that we abide in Him, and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit. 14 And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son as Savior of the world. 15 Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. 16 And we have known and believed the love that God has for us. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.
17 Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness in the day of judgment; because as He is, so are we in this world. 18 There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment. But he who fears has not been made perfect in love. 19 We love Him because He first loved us.
20 If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, [b]how can he love God whom he has not seen? 21 And this commandment we have from Him: that he who loves God must love his brother also.
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The wonderful love of God for those that trust in Him is once again laid bare in this first epistle of John. Perfect love casts out fear, and our relationship with our heavenly Father, which is founded on Christ’s finished work at Calvary, should give us inner joy and a profound peace.
The very character of God is love. He is divine love and He initiated love in our heart and inner soul. It is only because of His love for us that we are able to love Him back. But the love that He gives is not the broken human love that was tainted by sin, but the love of Christ that is placed within. How wonderful to know that we are not only the object of God’s divine love, but that His desire is that we reciprocate His love. By His grace He has poured the love of Christ into our inner being so that we can love with the same supernatural love with which we are loved.
We are therefore called to love Him because He loved us first. But do we simply express our love for the Lord as a required obligation or Christian duty, (as do unsaved tax-gatherers and sinners, who only love those who reciprocate their love), or is there a deeper level of loving God because He loved us first? God’s love for us streams from the perfection of His character and the eternal excellences of His attributes.
Oh, we are indeed intensely thankful and eternally grateful that He loved us enough to die His ignominious death on the Cross to save our damned souls but God’s Own love must be the foundation upon which our love for Him is firmly secured and His compassionate, perfect love in us, must be the fountain-head, through which our love streams out into the lives of others.
Perfect love, divine love, the holy love of God, which “first loved us,” is surely established as the ultimately highest pinnacle of our Christian life and the capstone in our relationship with the Lord, for as Paul reminds us in Corinthians, “… the greatest of all is love.” We are commanded by Jesus to emulate this love, “love as I have loved you,” so that Christ is seen in us.
Yes, indeed, “we love Him because He first LOVED us.”
CHALLENGES
- What practical ways have you expressed your love to God?
PRAYER POINT
- Father Lord, thank you for loving me the way you do; help me to love you till the end of my life.
FURTHER READING: Proverbs 12:17-28; 14:1-13; 1 John 5:1-13
ESOCS Devotional 14 December 2025
