1 John 4:8 Meaning He Who Doesn’t Love Doesn’t Know God

God is love, and God is your own imagination, so the one who will not love does not yet know what he himself is. To love is to choose the lovely image of another and hold it, seeing and assuming good for that person regardless of appearances or of anyone's opinion. This is not sentiment. It is the creative act by which you shape the world you project.

What you hold inwardly toward others is what you meet outwardly, because changing your attitude toward a person changes the world that comes back to you. The man who withholds love has not discovered that his own inner state is the one power. When imagination fills with the lovely image and rests there, it works on the other without their leave. The world softens as the heart within softens.

Al-Wadūd: The Loving The Quran gives God the name al-Wadūd, the Loving. Love belongs to what God is, so it is not an extra that gets switched on for people who have earned it. Someone whose picture of God keeps love as a side feature, nice but optional, has drawn a picture of somebody else.

I was a hidden treasure and I loved to be known, so I created the world: love comes first Sufis repeat this saying constantly, and Ibn Arabi returns to it more than any other. Loving and wanting to be known are one motion in it, which is why God cannot be reached by study alone. People work the same way: you can collect facts about someone for years and still not know them, while love opens them to you.

Maḥabba: Love Al-Ghazali puts love at the top of the path, the station every other one is climbing toward. He also holds that nobody loves what they have never known, so even a small glimpse of God starts a warmth that wants more. The two grow together, the way it goes with a friend: knowing more makes you care more, and caring more shows you more.

Ma'rifa: Knowing God from close up Ma'rifa is the knowing that comes from acquaintance, the way you know someone you live with. Al-Ghazali had mastered every argument about God and found, in a crisis that ended his teaching post, that his heart was untouched by any of them. A person can hold every correct opinion about God and still be a stranger to the one they describe.

Takhalluq bi-akhlāq Allāh: growing into God's own qualities Al-Ghazali taught that each of God's names becomes clear to a person as something of it grows in them. Mercy stays a dictionary word until you have forgiven someone who hurt you; then you know what it costs. Someone who never loves has nothing inside to match the word, so God's love stays a term they repeat without meaning.

None of you believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself: love of people is where it shows A saying of the Prophet that Sufis keep close, and it rests belief itself on how you treat the person next to you. Wanting the same good for someone else that you want for yourself cannot be faked for long. Nobody can see whether a person loves God, but what they want for the people around them is plain to everyone.