Unconditional, Inconvenient Love

At this point I hope I’ve made it quite clear that God loves you in the most unfathomable way. Unfathomable because of how unconditional His love is as He gave up His completely willing son, Jesus, to take the punishment we duly deserved for our sin. And let’s face it, that also makes this love very inconvenient for Him as it cost Him the greatest price imaginable.

Unconditional, inconvenient love is really, when you come down to it, crazy love. Crazy because it’s a love that, honestly, makes absolutely no sense! It’s a love that we, on our own, aren’t even capable of. It doesn’t line up with our tendency as humans to call for someone to pay for wrongs that have been done at all. We, who are so faulted, desire immediate punishment for every misstep that’s been made. God, who is perfect, offers up grace and withholds punishment for as long as He possibly can. 

Are you catching on to why it’s so crazy? In our minds that sort of thing is plainly unfair! To us, Jesus taking our beating and handling everything is something that couldn’t, shouldn’t be. We either think we’ve done too much wrong or that we have enough willpower to right our wrongs or simply do no wrong. None of these mentalities line up with the Bible because it clearly tells us that God can save anyone and we can’t save ourselves. We wouldn’t have done it that way with our limited minds. We just don’t get it! Only God could come up with such a perfect, mind-blowing system. So, come to think of it, it’s not that crazy for Him to love this way because He’s the only being that’s even capable of doing so. 

Because God is the only one that is initially capable of such love, that brings me to reiterate some of my comments from my introduction post. The fact that only He can love this way causes us to rely on Him to love the same way. This is why the concept from 1 John 4:19, that we only love because He first loved us, is true. And this is why we can, and it only makes sense to rely on Him for our very identity and for every good thing that is in us. When we understand that we can only have unconditional, inconvenient love through God, only then can we know how to show and live that love.

“Dearly beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” – 1 John 4:7-8,10-11

Do you get that? We love others because love is of God and those who love are born of & know God. And vice versa. God is literally the very essence of love, so for us to truly know God that means we’re going to be portraying love. That’s just the way it works. It makes sense and there’s really nothing else to it. God revealed to us just how great His unconditional, inconvenient love is with the perfect example of Jesus dying on the cross to give us life, knowing all the while that many of us would never love him back. 

And you know what that tells me? The greatest kind of love comes with the heavy potential of heart-wrenching grief and confusion. And because Jesus loves this way we are now able to emulate and share that love. We can love our family this way. We can love our friends this way. We can love our significant others this way. To love unconditionally means to be relentless about it even when it hurts, even when it’s hard, even when it takes some time. And again, that’s pretty inconvenient! But don’t be afraid of loving that way because it really is the only thing worth fighting for. Plus God did it in a much more severe way, so we definitely should fight for it.

“If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? And this commandment we have from Him: that he who loves God must love his brother also.” – 1 John 4:21

For us to really love we must do our best to avoid hate at all costs. You can’t sincerely love God when you hate others because God is incapable of hate towards the people he created. And when you have a relationship with God, He begins a work in you that causes you to grow into his image. Hate just doesn’t match his image. We are actually commanded to love others as an obvious proof of our love for God. What these verses are saying and what I guess I’m trying to voice is: To love God means to love people. And not just the convenient people, but, more importantly, the inconvenient people. He loves us all the same, so there’s no reason we shouldn’t love everyone the same. Yes, even the difficult ones. They actually need it the most.

Oh, and by the way, when we continually operate in love we can virtually do no wrong. Love does no wrong and so follows all of God’s ways.

“Love does no harm to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.” – Romans 13:10