The Root Is Love
God is love, and His Word and His Spirit are how that love reaches us and is received, not a machine for getting doctrine right, so unity is given from above, never built upward.
Two other clusters build on this: Not My People and The Capacity Must Be Given.
Scripture shows this in five steps:
It all comes together in Genesis 11:4 and Acts 2:6-8.
Underneath it all lies 1 John 4:19.
It is easy to think that knowing God means having the right answers. Read the Word, ask the Spirit, get every doctrine right, and the one who knows the most is furthest along. I have thought that way. It is a trap for anyone who loves to study. This chain shows what is at the root of it all, and it is not knowledge. It is love.
1 John 4:8, 16
“He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.”
1 John 4:8
“And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.”
1 John 4:16
Look at the word John uses. He does not say the one who does not love disobeys God. He says he “knoweth not God.” Loving and knowing God are tied together in one sentence. If I do not love, I do not know Him, however much I know about Him.
And “God is love” is not one fact about God among many. It is what is at the root. Nothing comes before it. Nothing made it.
1 Corinthians 2:11-12
“For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God.”
1 Corinthians 2:11-12
What is inside a person cannot be seen. He makes it known by his word. And it is only known where there is a spirit on the other side to take it in. So when God makes Himself known, there are two parts: the word that goes out, and the spirit that receives it. Take away either one, and nothing is known at all.
And the receiving spirit is not something I had on my own. From the beginning it was given. God breathed into man, “and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7).
Even my own heart I cannot read rightly. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). Only God can: “I the LORD search the heart” (Jeremiah 17:10). So the Word and the Spirit are not a help to a mind that works well. They are given because mine does not.
What we receive is “freely given.” It is a gift, not a pile of information.
1 Corinthians 13:1-3, 8
“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.”
1 Corinthians 13:1-2
This is the verse that settles it. Paul gives me everything a seeker could want: prophecy, all mysteries, all knowledge, all faith. Nothing missing. And without love, the result is “I am nothing.”
So love is not a nice extra at the end of getting things right. It is the judge standing over all of it.
“Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.”
1 Corinthians 13:8
“And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”
1 Corinthians 13:13
Just before this, Paul wrote about the many different gifts in the church. Now he says the gifts will end. Knowledge will end. What lasts is love.
Romans 11:18
“Boast not against the branches. But if thou boast, thou bearest not the root, but the root thee.”
Romans 11:18
The root carries the branch. The branch does not carry the root. Life runs from the root out to the branches, never the other way.
The root is Christ, “the root and the offspring of David” (Revelation 22:16). The Father is the one who tends the tree: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman” (John 15:1). And we are “rooted and grounded in love” (Ephesians 3:17). So I have nothing to boast about. Everything on my branch, the root put there. My brother’s branch looks different, with different leaves and different fruit. The difference is real. None of it is to anyone’s credit.
John 17:21-23
“That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.”
John 17:21-23
If this prayer is a task, the church has failed at it for two thousand years. But it is not a task. It is what one root gives. When two people receive from the same God, and self is out of the way, there is nothing left to divide them. Jesus was not asking us to try harder. He was asking the Father.
This is oneness of will and heart, not of being. And the prayer ends in love: “hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.”
1 John 4:19
“We love him, because he first loved us.”
1 John 4:19
My love does not start anything. It is only love coming back to the One who sent it. So receiving God is not about being convinced. It is about being willing to be loved.
Genesis 11:4 and Acts 2:6-8
“Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name.”
Genesis 11:4
“every man heard them speak in his own language. … And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born?”
Acts 2:6, 8
At Babel men had one language and one plan, but no Spirit. They tried to build up to God and make a name. It ended in confusion and scattering. At Pentecost God gave His Spirit from above, and every man heard in his own language. The languages were not taken away. Sameness is what men build when they try to make themselves one. Unity is what God gives, and it does not cost the differences.
What this means
The Word and the Spirit are how God’s love reaches me and is received. They are not just a way to check that my doctrine is right. Checking matters, but if my way of reading the Bible would still stand with love taken out of it, Paul has already scored it: nothing.
And one question falls away: how much do I have compared to my brother? Love cannot be cut into pieces. You do not have half a love. Rewards will differ, but the root is not something anyone has more of. That is why “God is no respecter of persons” (Acts 10:34).
Connected chains
This cluster is built on Israel Is Spiritual, Babel Deified the Heavens, The One Work Is to Believe, The One God Is the Father, The Reward Is Not the Gift and The Will of the Father Is to Believe.