Daily Manna · Day 51 · February 20
Dwelling in Love
“And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.”
You can be certain that God loves you and still be unable to sit at a table with a certain man three rows back in church.
That is the very problem John is working on, and his answer is more of a test than a comfort: "God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him." To dwell means to move in and live somewhere. It is more than visiting, more than agreeing, and more than feeling moved during a good song; it means living at that address. Four verses later John closes the way out so bluntly that it is hard to read aloud in company: "If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar." He does not call the man mistaken or immature. He calls him a liar, and he gives the reason: "for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?"
Still, a question stays open here, and I will not pretend John settles it. He does not define hate, and most of us are not doing anything so obvious. What we do is quieter: the message left unanswered, the seat chosen at the far end of the room, the two-year drift that nobody ever named. Is that hatred, or is it simply the limit on how many people one person can carry? John does not answer that, but he does not offer us the excuse either.
So you can be certain God loves you and still find that you cannot sit at that table. John's letter says the second fact tells you something about the first, and he leaves you to work out what. He also leaves you to settle it at the table itself, with the person, and not only in your head. You do not go to that table empty-handed. John says, "We love him, because he first loved us." The love you need for that man begins with the love God has already shown you.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 51 is What It Is For (2 Timothy 3:16).