What Does the Bible Say About Obedience? How Following God Deepens Your Love for Him (1 John 2:3–5)

There is a question buried inside this passage that is worth sitting with this morning: Do I actually know Him? Not know about Him — but know Him. The way you know someone whose voice you’d recognize in a crowd. The way you trust someone even when you can’t see what they’re doing.

John gives us a straightforward test, and it’s not a trick question. “This is how we know that we know him: if we keep his commandments.” He isn’t building a case for earning God’s approval. He’s pointing to something simpler — that genuine relationship changes how we live. A tree is known by its fruit, as Jesus reminds us (Matthew 7).

But maybe you’re reading this in a season when obedience has felt heavy. When doing the right thing cost you something. When you kept His word and life didn’t get easier. If that’s where you are, this passage isn’t a rebuke — it’s an anchor. Your faithfulness in the hard places is not invisible.

John also names something uncomfortable: the gap between what we say and how we live. “One who says, ‘I know him,’ and doesn’t keep his commandments, is a liar.” That stings a little. Probably meant to. But notice — John isn’t describing a person who struggles and stumbles. He’s describing a person who has stopped caring altogether. Struggle is not the same as indifference.

Here is the grace in the middle of all of this: “whoever keeps his word, God’s love has most certainly been perfected in him.” Perfected — brought to its full, intended shape — in you. Not just around you or beside you. Obedience isn’t a toll you pay at the gate. It’s the road itself, the place where God’s love does its deepest work.

So today, in the ordinary moments — the choice to be honest when dishonesty would be easier, the decision to forgive when you’d rather hold on, the quiet surrender of what you thought you deserved — those moments matter. They are where you and God are building something real together.