1 John 4:10

Real love is defined not by our love for God but by his initiative in sending his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins. The cross is the measure of love.

Cross-references · 16

• Eph 2:4–5But God, being rich in mercy, for his great love with which he loved us,
• Rom 5:8–10But God commends his own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
• 1 Jn 4:19We love him, because he first loved us.
• 1 Jn 2:2And he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the whole world.
• John 15:16You didn’t choose me, but I chose you, and appointed you, that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain; that whatever you will ask of the Father in my name, he may give it to you.
• 1 Jn 4:8–9He who doesn’t love doesn’t know God, for God is love.
• John 3:16For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.
• Titus 3:3–5For we were also once foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving various lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful, and hating one another.
• 1 Jn 3:1See how great a love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God! For this cause the world doesn’t know us, because it didn’t know him.
• Deut 7:7–8Yahweh didn’t set his love on you, nor choose you, because you were more in number than any people; for you were the fewest of all peoples:
• 1 Pet 3:18Because Christ also suffered for sins once, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring you to God; being put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit;
• 1 Pet 2:24who his own self bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live to righteousness; by whose stripes you were healed.
• 2 Cor 5:19–21namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not reckoning to them their trespasses, and having committed to us the word of reconciliation.
• Rom 8:29–30For whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.
• Rom 3:25–26whom God sent to be an atoning sacrifice, through faith in his blood, for a demonstration of his righteousness through the passing over of prior sins, in God’s forbearance;
• Dan 9:24Seventy weeks are decreed on your people and on your holy city, to finish disobedience, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most holy.

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