Unconditional

God created love and has placed the desire to be loved unconditionally within each of our hearts.

If God is love, if he created love, if he created within us a desire to be loved, why is our love conditional?

I’ll love you if…….

I love you because ……..

I love you for…….

If God created man, made us in his image, redeemed us to receive his Spirit and be like him, why isn’t our love also like his-unconditional?

I love you regardless.

Because His is the epitome of unconditional love, and it’s not of this world.

Israel left her first husband to pursue other lovers, she adorned herself with pride, she worshiped other gods, she forgot Him.

But what does God say?

“I will allure you…and speak tenderly to you…and give you hope. And you will call me ‘Husband.’

I love you regardless.

Though we make valiant attempts at this love, we often miss the mark.

C.S. Lewis says it’s because of our ‘Need-Love.’ We love because we acquire something from it, like affection or companionship or status or security or possession. It might be the most selfish thing in the world, loving to be loved. Yet it’s exactly the way God would have it when it comes to our relationship with Him. ‘Need-Love’ exists because it must. We cannot love God apart from our need for Him. If we were to suddenly stop needing him, then we would be as God, equal to him, and that equality has only room for pride, not love. “Our Need-Loves may be greedy and exacting but they do not set up to be gods. They are not near enough to God to attempt that.”

“Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?”

When have you felt closest to God? My hunch is that like me, it’s been during times when you’ve felt like you had no other choice but to turn to Him. It’s been in times of great need. Do you remember no matter what the situation, however painful or trying, that you actually enjoyed the closeness you felt with God? I do not long for pain, but I do long to be close to Him in that way always.

Consider the facets of His character we need. How the clay needs the Potter to mold it.  How the sheep need the Shepherd to guide it. How the servant needs the Master to offer provision for her. How the friend needs her Friend to comfort her.  How the daughter needs her Father to protect her. How the bride needs the Groom to love her.

Interesting that in the analogies of our relationship with God, a husband and wife are at the top of the list.

So this has always nagged me. If marriage is the closest we can get in grasping real, unwavering love, then how are we who are single supposed to know or experience it? Am I missing something because I’m not married? Often times I feel the bride/Groom analogy is a concept as foreign to me as Astrophysics.

Or is it?

I guess I don’t need to be married to be reminded how God loves me unconditionally. I don’t need an earthly marker to measure God’s love.  That’s ludicrous.  It has to be the other way around. Any love I find or experience here on earth has to be measured against the love I already own.

I have loved you with an everlasting love. I have drawn you in with kindness. (Jeremiah 31:3)

Beloved let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have 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. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. (1 John 4:7-12)

Never will I leave you, never will I forsake you. (Hebrews 13:5)

Deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls; all your breakers and your waves have gone over me. By day the Lord commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life. (Psalm 42:7-8)

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. – John 13:34

Bless my husband’s heart. If I were to use my heavenly Father as a gauge, he’d have quite the man to live up to. In fact, he couldn’t do it. Thankfully though, I already know perfect love. Whatever my husband and I bring to our marriage someday will just be icing on the cake.

Perhaps our relationship with God is a progression. We begin as clay, formless, and without shape when we first enter into a relationship with Him. Then as we grow and mature, our relationship changes, it becomes more personal, more intimate, until at last we fully embrace and stand with our Groom as an enthralled bride. Or perhaps these aren’t stages we develop through at all, but rather, overlap at all times for the rest of our lives.

“In the long run it is perhaps even more apparent in our own growing awareness that our whole being by its very nature is one vast need: incomplete, preparatory, empty yet cluttered, crying out for Him who can untie things that are now knotted together and tie up things that are still dangling loose.”

I just needed to remind myself of this today.  Thanks for reading. Know God’s unconditional love.

Sources of inspiration: The Bible, The Four Loves -C.S. Lewis, Every Woman’s Battle-Shannon Ethridge

Relevant Magazine (http://www.relevantmagazine.com/life/relationship/features/29263-marriage-doesnt-solve-your-problems)