Confidence is the child of love, and known love begets confidence.
God would have the practical life of a believer instinct with love more than any other thing. Righteousness is assumed and obedience, but there must be love, and as love is the energetic power in God's nature, so is it also the indispensable power that works in the Christian's life one with another, coming out more saliently perhaps than anything else.
To love is inseparable from being born of God, and so he that loves proves by this very fact that he is a child of God. It has nothing at all to do with natural affections, which everybody ought to know may be strong in the most wicked men and women.
We require not only to be begotten of God, but also divine power, nay, God's abiding in us, in order that we should love one another according to God. [23]