Love, you're doing it wrong

Music has always had a particular way of allowing God to speak to me, and a few weeks ago, David Crowder's Oh, How He Loves Us popped into my head -- no doubt a quiet prompting.

I settled on the phrase in the chorus in which the song focuses on the awe of God loving us. In conjunction with God being God, and everything I know about God, that didn't make any sense. If God is just and perfect, there's no reason for God to love us as he does.

John 3:16 says that God loved the world so much that He sacrificed his son so we could be with him. In that frame of mind, the love of God is great -- it's huge and immeasurable, by our human standards -- but God's love is still quantifiable.

In other words, it can be earned and it can be lost.

That's a scary thought. If God's love can be measured, it can be used up. And with all the sin in the world, it would make sense that God's love would eventually run dry.

There's a flaw in that thinking, though. John 3:16 doesn't talk about WHY God loves us, it simply states that He does. God's love is unconditional, and I've grown up thinking that God's love is unconditional because there's a whole bunch of it.

That's now how unconditional works, though. Unconditional means that love is literally outside of conditions.

God doesn't love us because of what we do, how we act or who we are. God loves us BECAUSE we are. 

Consider the relationship between a parent and a child. No matter what happens between them, the son will always be the child of the father. If the father's love is based on the fact that the son is HIS son, then it will never change. It will never dissipate, and it will never grow or diminish based on how the son acts.

That light makes God's love far more comforting, I think. There's nothing that I could do to change the fact that God loves me, because he doesn't love me for the things I bring or don't bring to the relationship. He doesn't love me because of my talents or my looks, and certainly not because of my faithfulness.

God loves me because he created me and because God is love, and I will always be his creation -- regardless of the things I do in this life. God's love is unrelenting, it's a wall or a wave. It's unbroken and unfailing and constant.

What an example, and what a fresh way of thinking! If we are made in his image and we are called to reflect him, then we are called to the same love -- love that it outside condition. That's why it doesn't matter how we're treated, and it doesn't matter whether or not we get anything back from the relationship.

I need to learn to love like that.