Week 3 – What does unconditional love look like?

As little children, we are coddled and cooed at when we are cute and applauded and kissed when we are good. When we are bad, we are reprimanded, spanked and put in a corner. Consequently we grow up learning that our actions equal either love or disdain – and there doesn’t seem to be a lot of middle ground.  Depending on how discipline this was handled in any given household, this can sometimes cause a child to believe that the love of their caretakers is conditional.

 

Add to that that most of us have felt the sting of loss. Most everyone has had the experience of someone we love and cherish vanishing from our lives. Maybe it was a best friend who disappeared from your life almost overnight over a conflict. Or maybe it was a Father who left the family or was never around. Maybe it was the death of someone close to you. These are painful and send a powerful message to our psyche that we are only as loved as we are valuable to another person. We conclude that love is fickle, superficial and one-sided.

 

But here’s the thing. This isn’t God and this isn’t how he loves. It’s hard to wrap our hearts and mind around just how deeply our Heavenly Father loves us though because of the worldly type of love we experience.

Think about it. God gave over his only beloved son to be tortured and killed just to prove to how much he loves us. Let this reality sink in.

Once we truly begin to believe in the unconditional, powerful love of God, can we finally begin to embody that kind of love ourselves. Job was a brilliant example of mirroring God’s unconditional love back to the Father.  No matter what, he never turned his back on his Heavenly Father. No matter how many times someonentold him to just ‘curse God’, he wouldn’t do it. What a powerful example of unconditional love and faith for us today.

 

God asks us to love, not just himself, but others with the heart of Jesus. This is hard to do, let’s be real. When you’re hurting and nobody seems to care… when you overhear a friend saying hateful things about you… when a parent walks away… when a trusted member of your church looks more like the world than Christ… the struggle is real. It’s hard to hear those faltering whispers of unconditional love in your heart. 

This is when we turn to examples like Job, or Paul or Peter – who praised God right smack in the middle of horrifying circumstances – loss of a family, imprisonment, physical pain…  and know that unfaltering love is possible. 

Most of all, look to the example of Jesus – the guy who turned the other cheek again and again like he was made out of cheeks. The Savior who did the unimaginable just to show us his love. That’s unconditional love. Forgiveness. Grace. Waking up in the morning, every day, and saying “let’s start over”. Because we know that this is what God does for us, day after day after day. 

Lamentations 3:22 Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. 23 They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.