7 Dear friends, we need to be loving each other, because love is from God and everyone who truly loves has been reborn into God and knows God. 8 Those who don’t love, don’t love God because God is love. 9 God’s love was revealed to us when he sent his only son to be born into the world so that we can live through him. 10 So this is real love, not us loving God, but God loving us and sending his son to be the sacrifice to clear us of the sentence from our sins.

11 Dear friends, if God loves us like that, we ought to be loving each other. 12 No one has ever seen God,[ref] but when we are loving each other then God is living in us, and his love is being perfected in us.

13 We can know that we are living in him and him in us because he has given to us from his spirit. 14 And we have seen and are testifying that the father sent the son—the saviour of the world. 15 Anyone who confesses that Yeshua (Jesus; Grk. Yesus) is God’s son, God lives in that person and they live in God. 16 We have known and experienced the love that God has in us.

God is love, and anyone who lives in love, lives in God, and God lives in them. 17 This is how love will be perfected in us so that we can live with confidence about the coming judgement day: we live like Yeshua in this world. 18 There’s no fear in love, but rather perfect love drives away fear, because our fear is that of being punished but the one fearing has not been perfected in love.

19 We love others because he loved us first. 20 Anyone who says that they are loving God but hates a fellow believer, that person is liar because if someone can’t love a fellow believer that they’ve seen, they can’t love God who they’ve never seen. 21 So we have this command from Yeshua that anyone who loves God must also love their fellow believers.