“If you don’t play my game, I won’t be your friend anymore!”
With a stormy temper, the seven-year-old next door marched up to my daughter and demanded that they play the game she wanted. My stunned daughter didn’t know what to do. She thought friendship should be more enduring. She soon discovered that friends often put conditions on relationships.
Sadly, many adults do the same thing, putting conditions on their willingness to love others. This is often why marriages fail—people aren’t aware of the unconditional love necessary to make marriage work. Perhaps we should consider more possibilities in our marriage vows, such as, “I promise to love you even if you leave dirty socks on the floor and forget how to take out the garbage.” Such vows wouldn’t be very romantic, but they would give engaged couples the opportunity to think about their commitment and the meaning of unconditional love.
Fortunately, God’s love for us is completely unconditional and is freely available to us by grace through faith. We need to understand God’s unconditional love to live in abundant life. Ephesians 2:4-5 says, “But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved).”
How amazing to think that while we probably shouldn’t even have been liked, God completely, eternally, unconditionally loved us! It can be overwhelming to try to comprehend such love. Ephesians 2:4-5 shows us that God’s love for us is based solely on His grace. Our faith needs to stand on this fact. It’s not about the things we do or any value of our own.
Andrew Wommack explains God’s unconditional love in Living in the Balance of Grace and Faith. “God loves you. If you could grasp this revelation, it would solve all of your problems . . . If you understood how much God loved you, your faith would shoot through the roof. You’d be overwhelmed!”
Understanding God’s love for us empowers us to know that it is always God’s will to heal us; that it is always His will to prosper us; and that He would save us at any price.
Think of God as the opposite of the weather. The weather is frequently changing. In the natural world, we are subject to the conditions of the weather. One day it may be sunny; the next day, storms are brewing. But not with God. Hebrews 13:8 says, “Jesus Christ [is] the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever” (brackets added). This unchanging quality of God requires that His love for us is unconditional and unchanging.
God is not a friend with conditions. My daughter had to learn to reject the conditions of friendship that our neighbor tried to put on her. We must reject the conditions that we try to put on God’s love for us. Through faith, we must recognize that God loves us without limits.
To learn more about God’s unconditional love, given freely to us through His grace, read Andrew Wommack’s book, Living in the Balance of Grace and Faith.
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