As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love.— John 15:9
Love cannot be done alone. Love with no one to receive it goes nowhere. A heart with no one to hold it stays only a feeling. The very word love points beyond the one who loves to the one who is loved.
That is what makes John’s declaration stranger the longer we sit with it: God is love (1 John 4:8). John does not simply say that God loves. He says that God is love. Love is not something God occasionally turns on. It belongs to who He eternally is. And yet, if love is who God is, where does that love find its home?
Jesus gives us a glimpse of the answer as He faces the cross. He prays to the Father, “you loved me before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24). God’s love did not begin when we came into existence. It was already there, eternally shared between the Father and the Son.
In John 15, Jesus opens that love to us and invites us to enter. Abide in my love. The word He uses is not the language of a passing visit. It is the language of staying, settling, making our home there. First, we come to know the love of Jesus personally. Then, in our relationships with others, we come to understand that love more deeply. And what we receive from Him, we pass on to others.
We tend to picture faith as our movement toward God. Scripture runs the other direction. We love *because he first loved us *(1 John 4:19). Our love does not begin anything. It is our response to the love we have already received.
The clearest picture of this is John 21. On the shore of Galilee, the risen Jesus had already lit a charcoal fire and was waiting. Peter would have known that smell. Days earlier, in the high priest’s courtyard, he had stood warming his hands at a charcoal fire and said three times that he did not know the man (John 18:18, 25–27). Now the same kind of fire burned in front of him again.
Jesus did not bring up Peter’s denial. He asked, “Do you love me?” Three times. It is difficult not to see the connection between those questions and Peter’s three denials. Jesus restored His fallen disciple through a personal encounter, giving Peter the opportunity to affirm his love and receive his calling anew. And that restoration led directly to a responsibility: “Feed my sheep” (John 21:17).
This love does not stay private between me and Jesus. John is blunt. If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar (1 John 4:20). Whether we love God shows up in how we handle the person nearest to us.
Paul prayed that the Ephesians would have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge (Ephesians 3:18–19).
If this were something one person could fully grasp alone, why would Paul add with all the saints? This love is too large for any single life to hold. We learn comfort from whoever sat beside us in silence when things fell apart. We learn forgiveness from whoever covered our failure and never mentioned it. We learn patience from the person we would not have chosen. God shapes us into people who love inside exactly those relationships.
The early church lived out this love at great cost. When plague swept through the Roman Empire in the third century, many fled the cities, leaving the sick behind. Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, described Christians who stayed to care for the afflicted, risking their own lives in the process. They tended not only to their fellow believers but also to others in need.
We live in the most connected age in history. A screen the size of a palm puts a face from the other side of the world in front of us. And in 2023 the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory calling loneliness and isolation an epidemic. The means of connection multiplied. The places where hearts are actually handed over got thinner.
Faith drifts the same way. A sermon is always available. Worship plays in our earbuds. Scripture lives on an app. All of it is good. But when it becomes everything, faith quietly turns into something we consume alone. No one knows us. No one asks. We carry no one. We keep our distance so we won’t be hurt, and in the process we lose the one place where love is learned. Love does not grow at a distance. I have kept that distance myself, and called it busyness.
But if God is love, then faith was built from the start to grow inside relationships. That is what this age is thirsty for, and that is what the church actually has. It is why Jesus prayed that His followers would be one, so that the world may believe that you have sent me (John 17:21). Love is not a decoration on the gospel. It is the road the gospel travels.
In our effort to do faith well, we forget that faith grows within a relationship of love. We measure what we know and how committed we are. We rarely ask whether we have been close to Jesus lately, or close to anyone at all.
So maybe nothing grand is required. Five minutes with the phone face down and Jesus before us. And one name. Not everyone, just one. A resolve to love everybody usually ends in loving nobody. But one person you pray for by name. One person you can tell how you are actually doing, without editing it first. Love starts growing there.
I don’t know who that name is for you. If there isn’t one yet, that is today’s work, and it may take longer than a day.
We cannot love alone. But from the very beginning, we were never alone.
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