“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love.
In his commentary on this verse, Robertson observes that “Our love for Christ is the result of Christ’s love for us and is grounded at bottom in the Father’s love for the world.” (RWP) See also (1 John 4:19, Joh 3:16)
1 John 4:19 We love because he first loved us.
John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
Jesus tells us we are to “remain” or “abide” in His love. What He means here is not that we continue in our love towards Him, but that we continue in our experiencing and relishing in His love for us. There is a flow of love from Christ to us which can be slowed or stopped by us. His love for us will never fail, but we can cut off our experience of His love for us by simply not receiving. That is what Jesus is telling us not to do. The world does not know the love of Christ for them, even though He died for them, because it refuses to accept it. We can do the same, or we can choose to accept less of it than there is by thinking wrongly that Jesus doesn’t love us as much as He does. The devil uses this tactic against us. He wants us to think of ourselves as ugly or dumb or bad, but the truth is that we are made in the image of God (which he isn’t, by the way!) (Gen 1:27) Don’t fall for the temptation of having a poor self-image of yourself. God loves you and sent His Son to die for you and no lie of the devil can change that fact.
Genesis 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
If we remain in His love, there is a great advantage that befalls us, for there is no sorrow, or trouble, or temptation that can touch us, because we are protected by the strong tower of knowing for certain that He will get us through whatever we face and will turn the circumstances around in our favor. His love for us is a fortress in which he invites us to dwell forever.