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3 Think about how much God our Father loves us! He says that we are his children. In a spiritual sense, this is completely true. That is why people who are unbelievers do not understand us. It is because they have not understood who God is, and we take after him just as children take after their parents. 2 Dear friends, at present we are God’s spiritual children. He has not yet shown us what we will be in the future. However, we know that when Jesus comes back again, we will become like him, because we will see him as he truly is. 3 So all those who confidently expect to see Jesus as he truly is make themselves free from sin because Jesus himself is free from sin. 4 But everyone who continues to sin is refusing to obey God’s laws, because that is what sin is, refusing to obey God’s laws. 5 You know that Jesus came in order to make us free from our sins. You know also that he never sinned himself. 6 Those who share life with Jesus do not continue sinning. But all those who continue to sin have not understood who Jesus is and they do not really know him. 7 So I urge you who are very dear to me not to let anyone deceive you by telling you that it is all right to sin. If you continue doing what is right, that will please God, just as Jesus always does what pleases God. 8 But anyone who continues to sin is behaving like the devil, because the devil has always been sinning, ever since the world began. The very reason that God’s Son became a human being was to undo this work of the devil that kept people continually sinning. 9 People do not continue sinning if they have become spiritual children of God because God has made them to be like him. They cannot continually sin, because they are God’s spiritual children. 10 People who belong to God are clearly different from people who belong to the devil. Those who do not do what is right do not belong to God. Those who do not love their fellow believers also do not belong to God.
11 You should recognize this because the message that you heard when you first believed in Jesus is that we should love each other. 12 We should not hate others as Adam’s son Cain did. He belonged to Satan, that evil being. Cain murdered his younger brother Abel. I will tell you why he did that. It was because Cain behaved in an evil way, and he hated his younger brother because his younger brother behaved in the right way. 13 Therefore, my fellow believers, you should not be amazed when unbelievers hate you. 14 We love our fellow believers, and this assures us that God has made us spiritually alive. But if someone does not love other believers, then that person is still spiritually dead. 15 Anyone who hates one of his fellow believers is doing something just as bad as murdering him. And you know that someone who murders another person is not living in the new way that God enables us to live. 16 Jesus taught us how to truly love each other when he willingly died for us. For our part, we should also be willing to do anything for our fellow believers, even die for them. 17 Many of us have the things that are necessary for life in this world. But suppose that we become aware that a fellow believer does not have what he needs. Suppose also that we refuse to provide for him. Then we are not loving him the way that God taught us to love people. 18 You who are as dear to me as though you were my own children, let us not merely say that we love each other. Let us love each other genuinely by helping each other.
19-20 19-20By doing that, we can know that we belong to God, who is the source of everything that is true. When we are in God’s presence we may feel that we do not belong to God because of our sins. When that happens, we can reassure ourselves that we truly do belong to him. This is because God is more trustworthy than our feelings and he knows everything about us, including that we have trusted in him. 21 Dear friends, when we feel that God does not condemn us for having sinned, then we can pray confidently to God. 22 We find that when we pray confidently to God and ask for something, he gives it to us. We pray confidently like this because as people who belong to him, we do what he commands us to do and we do what pleases him. 23 I will tell you what God commands us to do. We must trust in his Son, Jesus the Messiah. We must also love each other just as Jesus commanded us to do. 24 The people who do what God commands share life with God, and God shares life with them. I will tell you how we can be sure that God is sharing life with us. We can be sure of that because we have God’s Spirit, whom he gave to us.