Why is it hard to think of God’s love in unconditional terms?
Luke 15:17-21“When he finally came to his senses, he said to himself, ‘At home even the hired servants have food enough to spare, and here I am dying of hunger! I will go home to my father and say, “Father, I have sinned against both heaven and you, and I am no longer worthy of being called your son. Please take me on as a hired servant.”’ So he returned home to his father. And while he was still a long way off, his father saw him coming. Filled with love and compassion, he ran to his son, embraced him, and kissed him. His son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against both heaven and you, and I am no longer worthy of being called your son.’”
Our human experience of love is almost invariably conditional, and it often involves our feelings that we don’t really deserve love. This can come to taint our relationship with God. This is particularly true in moments of repentance, when we realize we have abused and resisted God’s love and desire to restore our relationship with him. Like the prodigal son, we assume God will only accept us back if we agree to take a lesser role than a fully loved child. Like the prodigal, we are shocked to experience God’s open-armed welcome.
1 Corinthians 13:4-13Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance. Prophecy and speaking in unknown languages and special knowledge will become useless. But love will last forever! Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete, and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture! But when full understanding comes, these partial things will become useless. When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. Now we see things imperfectly as in a cloudy mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely. Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.
We instinctively long to experience and express love in its purest form, yet discover that we both receive and practice love imperfectly. We desperately need love and need to love yet find ourselves unable to manage either on our own. Momentary expressions of unconditional love and awareness of God’s unconditional love for us are only possible for us by God’s gift of grace.
1 John 4:9-10God showed how much he loved us by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.
Loving God is never meeting a condition that allows God to love us; God’s love always pre-empts ours and the best expression of our response to him is obedient, loving actions to carry out what God tells us to do through his guidance and strength.
