As He Is, So Are We
The Love That Finishes Its Work

Section IThe Verse That Names What Love Is For

A man whose judgment I trust, and who has read more Scripture than most pastors I know, told me yesterday that this is the most meaningful thing he has ever read about love. I have not stopped digging at it since, and I think he is right, and I think the reason he is right is worth setting down carefully.

We are surrounded by commands to love. Love God with everything you are. Love your neighbor as yourself. Love your wife as Christ loved the church. Love the stranger, because you were strangers. Love your enemies. Love one another, and by this everyone will know whose you are. The commands are constant, and they are good, and they leave most honest people quietly exhausted, because a command tells you what to do without ever telling you when you have done it.

John does something different here. In a single sentence he gives love a finish line. He tells us what love is aiming at, what it looks like when it arrives, and how we will know. And then he does the thing almost nobody expects: the finish line turns out to have nothing to do with how strongly we feel, how much we have given up, or how well we have performed. The finish line is a person who is not afraid.

That is the whole argument of this article, and everything that follows is an attempt to walk slowly through the verse so the weight of it lands.

Section II"Perfected" Is a Finishing Word, Not a Flawless One

The King James renders the opening clause, "Herein is our love made perfect." Modern ears hear "perfect" and immediately think of moral flawlessness, of love without a single selfish thread in it. That is not what the word means, and the misunderstanding has done real damage in the church.

The Greek verb is teleioo. It means to bring something to its goal, to carry it to the end it was made for, to complete it. A journey is teleioo when the traveler arrives. A building is teleioo when the last stone is set. It belongs to the same family as the word Jesus spoke from the cross, tetelestai, which we translate "It is finished." Not "It is flawless." Finished. Completed. Carried all the way through.

So the question John is asking is not whether your love is spotless. He is asking whether your love has arrived anywhere. Love that produces nothing has not failed an inspection; it has simply stalled somewhere short of its purpose. And there is enormous mercy in that distinction. A believer who reads "made perfect" as "made flawless" will spend a lifetime auditing the impurities in his own affection and will never once feel finished, because the audit never ends. A believer who reads it correctly can ask a different and far more answerable question: has this love come to anything?

There is a second detail in the grammar, and it is the one that undoes the whole exhausting project of trying hard enough. The verb is in the passive voice. Love is perfected. It is not something we perfect. Somebody else is doing the finishing.

Scripture tells us plainly who. The promise of the New Covenant was never that we would try harder at the old vows but that God Himself would write them somewhere new. "I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts" (Jeremiah 31:33). The Ten Words, what most Bibles call the Ten Commandments and what Hebrew calls the ten spoken words of the King, were the marriage vows of God to His people, and the New Covenant does not cancel them but relocates them. Same vows, new address. And the writing is done by the Holy Spirit, called in Hebrew the Ruach HaKodosh, the Holy Breath of God. The love in question reaches its completion in us rather than by us.

Section IIILove Perfected "With Us," Not "In Us"

The next detail is small enough to read past a hundred times. John writes that love is perfected with us. The Greek is meth' hemon. He had another preposition available, and he used it constantly elsewhere in the letter: en hemin, "in us." Here he chose "with."

"In us" would make a person a container. Something is poured in, and the container holds it, and the container contributes nothing but volume. "With us" makes a person a party to a work. It is the language of two people finishing something together.

That is covenant grammar, and it runs through the whole Bible. God did not deliver His vows to Israel like a memo. He spoke them face to face, and the people answered, and the elders went up the mountain and ate and drank in His presence. Covenant is always a work with two parties in the room. God is never described as loving at His people or over them. He binds Himself to them, and He calls them to bind themselves to Him, and the love is finished in the keeping.

This is why the verse can carry the weight that is put on it. Love here is not a feeling that happens to a person while the person stands still. It is a work that God brings to completion in the company of someone who has said yes. Not slavery, which is compelled, and not independence, which is free of relation, but the strange third thing Scripture describes when the freed servant stands at the doorpost and says, I love my master, I will not go out free (Exodus 21:5). Love-bound, by choice, on purpose.

Section IVThe Test Is a Courtroom

"So that we may have confidence for the day of judgment."

Here is where the verse turns and becomes something more than a devotional sentence. John gives love a measurable outcome. He tells us what finished love produces, and it is not warmth, and it is not zeal, and it is not a track record of service. It is a posture in a courtroom.

The word behind "confidence," which the King James renders "boldness," is parresia. In the Greek world it was a civic word before it was a spiritual one. It named the right of a free citizen to stand up in the public assembly and speak plainly, without flattery and without flinching. Slaves did not have parresia. Foreigners did not have it. A client standing before his patron did not have it. It belonged to people who had standing in the room.

The apostolic writers use it deliberately. We are told to draw near to the throne of grace with parresia (Hebrews 4:16). We are told we have parresia to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus (Hebrews 10:19). John himself uses it a chapter earlier: abide in Him, so that when He appears we may have parresia and not shrink back from Him in shame (1 John 2:28). It is the language of a person who belongs where he is standing.

And notice what a strange test this is, because it is the one test nobody can fake. Affection can be manufactured. Service can be rendered out of guilt or ambition and look identical to service rendered out of love. Sacrifice can be made with an audience in mind. Every outward measure of love can be performed convincingly, including to ourselves.

But no one can perform what rises in the chest at the thought of standing before the King with nothing hidden. You already know what you expect there. You know it in the small hours when you are honest. That expectation is not a mood. According to John, it is the readout on whether love has finished its work in you.

Every other measure of love can be performed. What rises in you at the thought of the day of judgment cannot.

Ten Words Press

Section VThe Ground Underneath the Boldness

"Because as he is so also are we in this world."

This is the clause that made my friend say what he said, and it deserves to be read one word at a time, because every tense in it is chosen.

John does not write, "as He was." That would make the sentence a call to imitation. It would mean: look at how Jesus lived, live like that, and hope the resemblance holds up under inspection. Millions of sermons have said exactly that, and they have produced sincere and tired people.

He does not write, "as we shall be." That would push our standing into the future and leave the present unresolved. It would mean: one day you will be like Him, and on that day you may relax, but not yet.

He writes, as He is. Present tense on both sides of the comparison. As He is right now: risen, vindicated, accepted, seated, beloved of the Father without qualification. So are we. Right now.

And then he adds the phrase that should stop a reader cold: in this world. Not in the world to come, once the record has been cleaned up. Here. In the same world where the failing is still happening, where the temper still flares, where the prayer life is still uneven, where the marriage is still hard. The comparison is drawn in the middle of the mess, not after it.

Which means the confidence John describes has nothing whatsoever to do with self-assessment. It is not "I have loved well enough to survive the audit." It is that the verdict has already been spoken over the Bridegroom, and the Bride, that one people God is gathering out of believing Israel and out of every nation, is not tried in a separate proceeding. She is not a co-defendant hoping the character witness helps. She is in Him. The standing is His standing, and it has already been settled in public by the resurrection.

Here is the part most readers miss, and it is the hinge of the whole verse. John grounds our confidence not in our love but in our union. And then he calls the settled acceptance of that union the perfecting of love. Love reaches its intended end in a person at the moment that person finally believes what is already true of them.

That is a stunning definition, and it reverses the direction we all instinctively run. We assume love is perfected when we finally love enough. John says love is perfected when we finally rest in being loved, and the evidence is that we stop bracing for the blow.

Section VIWhat Love Does to Fear

The very next verse is the proof, and John writes it as flatly as a man laying a brick.

The word for punishment is kolasis. Fear, in John's usage here, is not the fear of the Lord that Proverbs calls the beginning of wisdom, which is reverence before holiness. This is dread. This is anticipated punishment, the flinch of a person who expects to be struck.

And dread cannot share a room with love. One of them evicts the other. There is no arrangement in which both stay, because they make contradictory claims about the same relationship. Dread says the sentence is still pending. Love says it has already been served.

John gives us a diagnostic here, and it is a kind one, so it should be read kindly. He does not say that a fearful believer is unloved, or unsaved, or a fraud. He says the work is unfinished. That is a statement about a process, not a verdict on a soul. Read from the other direction it becomes one of the most useful measures in the Christian life: growth in love can be tracked by how much dread has left the building.

And it goes the other way too. Wherever dread is still sitting in a person's life, love has not yet been allowed to finish there. Which brings us to the thing that matters most about this verse, and the reason it cannot stay in the devotional category.

Section VIIThis Standing Touches Everything

If where we stand before God were only a doctrinal position, we could file it under theology and go on. But it is not a position. It is the floor under every room in the house. Change the floor and every room shifts. John knew this, which is why he does not leave the sentence in the air but spends the rest of the letter walking it into ordinary life.

It changes how we pray

The same word John uses of the day of judgment, parresia, is the word Hebrews uses of the throne of grace. That is not a coincidence; it is the same standing viewed from two directions. A person unsure of the verdict prays like a petitioner working an angle. He opens with credentials, or with apology, or with the careful language of somebody who is not certain he is welcome. He negotiates. A person whose standing is settled simply talks. The difference shows up in the first thirty seconds of anyone's prayer life, and it is one of the most reliable indicators of what a believer actually thinks is true about himself.

It changes what obedience is

The Ten Words are vows, and vows kept to secure a verdict are a different act than vows kept because the covenant is already sealed. The behavior can look identical from outside. The direction is opposite. Obedience downstream of the standing is loyalty, the natural fidelity of somebody who belongs to someone. Obedience upstream of it is negotiation, and negotiation with God always curdles, either into pride when it seems to be working or into exhaustion when it does not. This is why two believers can keep the same commandment for thirty years and arrive in completely different places. One was answering love. The other was buying safety.

It changes what we do with our sin

Dread hides. That is the oldest recorded data point in Scripture, and it is worth noticing exactly where it falls. Adam heard the voice of God in the garden and went into the trees, and when he was asked why, he said, "I was afraid" (Genesis 3:10). The hiding came after the sin, not before it. The sin was the wound; the hiding was the infection.

Where the standing is secure, confession gets faster and more honest, because nothing is actually at risk in the telling. Where it is not secure, sin goes underground and hardens, and the believer begins managing an image instead of walking with a person. Nearly every long-running secret in a Christian's life traces back to somebody who did not believe 1 John 4:17. He was not primarily protecting a reputation. He was protecting himself from a verdict he thought was still open.

It changes how we treat other people

John is not sentimental about this connection. Three verses later he says that anyone who claims to love God and hates his brother is a liar. The link between the two is precisely the standing.

A person still defending his own case has to keep score, because every wrong done to him is evidence in a trial he believes is still running. He cannot afford to let anything go, because letting it go costs him standing he thinks he is still earning. A person who is not on trial can absorb a wrong without needing it paid, and can be wrong in an argument without it costing him anything he cannot spare. This is where "as He is, so are we" stops being abstract and starts costing something real at a kitchen table on a Tuesday night.

It changes what the verdicts of men are worth

If the only verdict that finally matters has already been read, the verdicts handed down by employers, relatives, congregations, and strangers on the internet lose most of their teeth. Not all of them. We are made for one another and the judgments of people we love will always land somewhere. But they stop being existential. A believer who has stopped auditioning for God will eventually stop auditioning for everyone else, and the relief in that is difficult to overstate.

It changes how we work

Work done to prove something is never finished, because proof is never finished. Work done from a settled place can be excellent without being frantic, and it can be interrupted, and it can even fail without taking the worker down with it. Colossians says our life is hidden with Christ in God. That is a strange place to keep a life, and the practical effect of keeping it there is that no employer, no market, and no failure has custody of it.

It changes how we die

And at the end, this is the whole point of the verse. John frames all of it around the day of judgment, which is to say he frames it around the moment when everything else has been stripped away and only the standing remains. What a person believes about 1 John 4:17 will be visible in the last week of his life more clearly than in any other week. The believer who has let love finish its work does not go out flinching.

Section VIIIPerfected, Present Tense

One honest qualifier belongs at the end, because without it this becomes a burden rather than a gift.

Love is being perfected. Dread leaves in degrees, not all at once, and a believer can have real confidence about eternity while still flinching in one particular corner of his life, usually the corner where a specific failure lives. That is not hypocrisy. That is a work in progress, and John's own diagnostic assumes a process. He wrote this letter to people who were already in Christ and still needed to hear it, which tells us something about how long the hearing takes.

So the practical question in any given week is not whether the standing is real. It is whether we are living in the rooms of our own lives as though it were. And the wonderful thing about John's test is that we do not have to guess. Fear is a locator. It marks the spot where love has not yet been allowed to finish, and it marks it accurately, and it does so without condemning anyone.

My friend called this the most meaningful thing he has ever read about love, and I understand why. Everywhere else in Scripture, love is commanded, described, praised, or defined. Here alone it is given a finish line, and the finish line turns out to be a person who can stand in the day of judgment and speak plainly. Not because his record is impressive. Not because his affections were pure enough. But because of ten words that have been true since the morning the tomb opened, and that are true of him right now, in this world, in the middle of everything unfinished.

As he is, so also are we in this world.

1 John 4:17