October 19th, 2026
by Deon Hairston
by Deon Hairston
Love Starts With God: Why Real Love Has a Source
There is a question worth sitting with today. Where does love actually come from?
Not the surface-level kind. Not the love that shows up when everything is easy and comfortable and convenient. The kind of love that stays. The kind that costs something. The kind that walks into a hospital room and sits in the hard chair all night. Where does that come from?
Most of us have been taught, in one way or another, that love is something we generate. Something we work up, maintain, and distribute based on how much energy we have left at the end of the day. But what if that framing is entirely backward?
The Source of the Spring
In 1 John 4, verses 7 through 10, the apostle John uses the word love nine times in four verses. He is not being subtle. He wants one word lodged in your mind by the time you finish reading. And the reason he hammers it so hard is because the point he is making cuts against everything our culture assumes about love.
He writes that love is of God. That small word, of, carries enormous weight. It means love comes out of God the way water comes out of a spring. The spring does not get its water from the bucket. The bucket gets its water from the spring.
Think about your phone. It can call, text, navigate, photograph, and entertain. It is remarkably capable. But there is one thing it absolutely cannot do. It cannot make its own power. No matter how new it is or how much it cost, when the battery drains, it must be plugged into something bigger than itself. That is us, and that is love. We are not the source. We are the carriers. And before we can carry it anywhere, we have to be plugged in.
God Is Love, Not the Other Way Around
John also gives us four words that have ended up on coffee mugs and tattoos and greeting cards for generations: God is love. But the order of those words matters more than most people realize.
John does not say love is God. Those are two completely different sentences. Consider this: your mother may be a cook. That is true. But that does not mean every cook is your mother. When someone says that any act of love, regardless of its source or direction, is God, they have flipped the sentence. And a flipped sentence is no longer true.
God defines love. Love does not define God. He gets to tell us what love looks like, not the other way around. And what he tells us, through the sending of his son, is that love is costly, sacrificial, and initiated entirely by him.
A Love That Showed Up First
Verse 10 is the hinge of the entire passage. John writes that love is not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be an atoning offering for our sins. Then, in verse 19, he draws the conclusion: we love because he first loved us.
We did not start this. We did not go looking for him and find him in hiding. He came looking for us. And he did not wait for us to get cleaned up before he came. The apostle Paul echoes this in Romans 5, verse 8, where he describes God demonstrating his love toward us while we were still sinners. The bill was paid before we even knew what we owed.
The word atonement is worth breaking apart. At its root, it means to bring two parties back to being at one with each other. An atoning offering is the offering that closes the gap. For the people who first heard John's letter, this language would have landed with tremendous weight. They had grown up with Yom Kippur, the annual Day of Atonement described in Leviticus 16, when the high priest would enter and make a covering for the sins of the people. Every year. Without fail. And then the next year, again. The year after that, again.
When John declares that God sent his son to be that atoning offering, the people steeped in Hebrew scripture would have understood immediately. Everything the annual ritual pointed toward had arrived in a person, once and for all.
Flooded From the Inside
So what does any of this mean for a Tuesday morning or a hard conversation or a relationship that is asking more of you than you feel capable of giving?
Romans 5, verse 5 offers something practical and profound. It describes the love of God being poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. One translation says our hearts are flooded with the love of God. Not handed a coupon. Not given a small and carefully measured portion. Flooded. Poured out in abundance.
The old hymn captures it well: Fill my cup, Lord, and let it overflow. That is the picture. God pours into us so that we have something real to pour out to others. A full cup shares easily. An empty cup has nothing to offer and creates resentment in the trying.
This is why the order in verse 19 is not just theological detail. It is practical instruction. You have to receive the love of God before you can genuinely give it. You cannot pour from empty. And the solution to empty is not trying harder. It is returning to the source.
Carrying It Into the World
The invitation here is not complicated, even if it is demanding. Let the love of God fill you. Then carry it outward, to the people who are easy to love and especially to the ones who are not. To the neighbor who frustrates you. To the person whose life looks nothing like yours. To anyone who crosses your path on an ordinary day.
When you love like that, something becomes visible in you that points beyond you. People should be able to look at how you treat them and recognize something familiar. A family resemblance. The mark of whose child you are.
Love starts with God. It always has. And it reaches the world through people willing to stay plugged in.
There is a question worth sitting with today. Where does love actually come from?
Not the surface-level kind. Not the love that shows up when everything is easy and comfortable and convenient. The kind of love that stays. The kind that costs something. The kind that walks into a hospital room and sits in the hard chair all night. Where does that come from?
Most of us have been taught, in one way or another, that love is something we generate. Something we work up, maintain, and distribute based on how much energy we have left at the end of the day. But what if that framing is entirely backward?
The Source of the Spring
In 1 John 4, verses 7 through 10, the apostle John uses the word love nine times in four verses. He is not being subtle. He wants one word lodged in your mind by the time you finish reading. And the reason he hammers it so hard is because the point he is making cuts against everything our culture assumes about love.
He writes that love is of God. That small word, of, carries enormous weight. It means love comes out of God the way water comes out of a spring. The spring does not get its water from the bucket. The bucket gets its water from the spring.
Think about your phone. It can call, text, navigate, photograph, and entertain. It is remarkably capable. But there is one thing it absolutely cannot do. It cannot make its own power. No matter how new it is or how much it cost, when the battery drains, it must be plugged into something bigger than itself. That is us, and that is love. We are not the source. We are the carriers. And before we can carry it anywhere, we have to be plugged in.
God Is Love, Not the Other Way Around
John also gives us four words that have ended up on coffee mugs and tattoos and greeting cards for generations: God is love. But the order of those words matters more than most people realize.
John does not say love is God. Those are two completely different sentences. Consider this: your mother may be a cook. That is true. But that does not mean every cook is your mother. When someone says that any act of love, regardless of its source or direction, is God, they have flipped the sentence. And a flipped sentence is no longer true.
God defines love. Love does not define God. He gets to tell us what love looks like, not the other way around. And what he tells us, through the sending of his son, is that love is costly, sacrificial, and initiated entirely by him.
A Love That Showed Up First
Verse 10 is the hinge of the entire passage. John writes that love is not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be an atoning offering for our sins. Then, in verse 19, he draws the conclusion: we love because he first loved us.
We did not start this. We did not go looking for him and find him in hiding. He came looking for us. And he did not wait for us to get cleaned up before he came. The apostle Paul echoes this in Romans 5, verse 8, where he describes God demonstrating his love toward us while we were still sinners. The bill was paid before we even knew what we owed.
The word atonement is worth breaking apart. At its root, it means to bring two parties back to being at one with each other. An atoning offering is the offering that closes the gap. For the people who first heard John's letter, this language would have landed with tremendous weight. They had grown up with Yom Kippur, the annual Day of Atonement described in Leviticus 16, when the high priest would enter and make a covering for the sins of the people. Every year. Without fail. And then the next year, again. The year after that, again.
When John declares that God sent his son to be that atoning offering, the people steeped in Hebrew scripture would have understood immediately. Everything the annual ritual pointed toward had arrived in a person, once and for all.
Flooded From the Inside
So what does any of this mean for a Tuesday morning or a hard conversation or a relationship that is asking more of you than you feel capable of giving?
Romans 5, verse 5 offers something practical and profound. It describes the love of God being poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. One translation says our hearts are flooded with the love of God. Not handed a coupon. Not given a small and carefully measured portion. Flooded. Poured out in abundance.
The old hymn captures it well: Fill my cup, Lord, and let it overflow. That is the picture. God pours into us so that we have something real to pour out to others. A full cup shares easily. An empty cup has nothing to offer and creates resentment in the trying.
This is why the order in verse 19 is not just theological detail. It is practical instruction. You have to receive the love of God before you can genuinely give it. You cannot pour from empty. And the solution to empty is not trying harder. It is returning to the source.
Carrying It Into the World
The invitation here is not complicated, even if it is demanding. Let the love of God fill you. Then carry it outward, to the people who are easy to love and especially to the ones who are not. To the neighbor who frustrates you. To the person whose life looks nothing like yours. To anyone who crosses your path on an ordinary day.
When you love like that, something becomes visible in you that points beyond you. People should be able to look at how you treat them and recognize something familiar. A family resemblance. The mark of whose child you are.
Love starts with God. It always has. And it reaches the world through people willing to stay plugged in.
Deon Hairston
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