<p>4:17 - see on 1 Cor. 15:10; 1 Jn. 4:4.</p><p><em>In this way is love made perfect with us, so that we may have boldness in the day of judgment. Because as he is, even so are we in this world</em>- The connection is with how Jn. 14:2,3 taught that through the gift of the Comforter, we can be with the Lord &quot;where I am&quot;, or &quot;as he is&quot;, where He was and is in His relationship with the Father. He prayed for this in John 17; that His relationship with the Father might be ours. And this is effected by the gift of the Comforter, as often noted on John 14-16.</p><p>As explained on :12, the work of the Spirit is to perfect or develop our characters towards an ever deeper love, approximating progressively closer to the love of the Lord for us on the cross. By the end of our lives we will have reached the maturity of love intended for us, and thereby we shall be confident in the day of judgment. We shall know that we have the spirit of Christ, which in simplest essence is love like His love; and in this sense, we will have received the eternal life, the spirit of living as He lived, and we can confidently expect to resume living that eternal life through the process of resurrection and glorification.</p><p>There is a major theme in the NT: that we are living the life of Christ, and thereby His life becomes ours. In this sense we have and live the eternal life. &ldquo;As he is, so are we in this world&rdquo;; we will be persecuted as He was persecuted (Jn. 15:20); we fellowship His sufferings, being made conformable to the image of His death, and thereby will fellowship His glory (1 Pet. 4:13; Phil. 3:10; 2 Cor. 1:7). Paul had this idea ever before him: &ldquo;It is now my joy to suffer for you; for the sake of Christ&rsquo;s body, the church, I am completing what still remains for Christ to suffer in my own person&rdquo; (Col. 1:24 REB).<br />In the grace of Christ, we can have a certain &quot;boldness&quot; in prayer (Heb. 4:16); but we will have &quot;boldness in the day of judgment&quot; (1 Jn. 4:17) in the sense that the attitude we have in prayer now and the experience of the Lord we know now will be that we have in the day of judgment. If He is no more than a black box in our brain we call 'God' or 'Jesus', if for all our Christianity we haven't known Him, so it will be then as we face Him.</p>