This is how we know that we love God's children: it is by loving God and obeying his commands.

No! Love your enemies and do good to them; lend and expect nothing back. You will then have a great reward, and you will be children of the Most High God. For he is good to the ungrateful and the wicked.

God's Spirit joins himself to our spirits to declare that we are God's children.

Since we are his children, we will possess the blessings he keeps for his people, and we will also possess with Christ what God has kept for him; for if we share Christ's suffering, we will also share his glory.

Since you are God's dear children, you must try to be like him.

the field is the world; the good seed is the people who belong to the Kingdom; the weeds are the people who belong to the Evil One;

You are the children of your father, the Devil, and you want to follow your father's desires. From the very beginning he was a murderer and has never been on the side of truth, because there is no truth in him. When he tells a lie, he is only doing what is natural to him, because he is a liar and the father of all lies.

and said, "You son of the Devil! You are the enemy of everything that is good. You are full of all kinds of evil tricks, and you always keep trying to turn the Lord's truths into lies!

Let no one deceive you, my children! Whoever does what is right is righteous, just as Christ is righteous.

Whoever continues to sin belongs to the Devil, because the Devil has sinned from the very beginning. The Son of God appeared for this very reason, to destroy what the Devil had done.

You know that Christ is righteous; you should know, then, that everyone who does what is right is God's child.

But anyone who denies this about Jesus does not have the Spirit from God. The spirit that he has is from the Enemy of Christ; you heard that it would come, and now it is here in the world already.

But you belong to God, my children, and have defeated the false prophets, because the Spirit who is in you is more powerful than the spirit in those who belong to the world.

But we belong to God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever does not belong to God does not listen to us. This, then, is how we can tell the difference between the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error.

We know that we belong to God even though the whole world is under the rule of the Evil One.

He who comes from God listens to God's words. You, however, are not from God, and that is why you will not listen."

My dear friend, do not imitate what is bad, but imitate what is good. Whoever does good belongs to God; whoever does what is bad has not seen God.

We know that we have left death and come over into life; we know it because we love others. Those who do not love are still under the power of death.

Those who hate others are murderers, and you know that murderers do not have eternal life in them.

If we say that we are in the light, yet hate others, we are in the darkness to this very hour.

If we love others, we live in the light, and so there is nothing in us that will cause someone else to sin.

Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.

The command that Christ has given us is this: whoever loves God must love others also.