365. I Don’t ‘Believe’ In Unconditional Love

Mike Parsons

I don’t believe in God’s unconditional love

When I’m talking about the unconditional love of God, it’s my personal experience that God loves me unconditionally. That doesn’t mean things don’t go wrong. His love for me is His love for me as a person, and therefore, no matter what happens to me, or what I’ve done, or what’s been done to me, His love doesn’t change. But that doesn’t mean He can step in and change everything for everybody. We live in a world that is fallen, a world that is broken. It’s being restored, but it’s not yet fully restored, so things do go wrong.

I don’t have an answer, obviously, as to why some prayers seem to work, and some prayers don’t. We do things that we think are right, yet things don’t always work out. There’s no real answer to that. But when I have experienced God’s unconditional love—and it is an experience, not just a belief—I don’t believe in God’s unconditional love; I know His unconditional love through experience. God loves you as an individual, and that love is unconditional.

Difficult things happen

Unconditional love keeps no record of the past and wants to bless you for the future. In the context of free will, which God has given everyone, we live in a world where difficult things happen and people make choices. We live in a world that is not yet fully restored. When I look at sickness, disease or tragedies, whether they be earthquakes or other disasters, because I know God loves me in that way, and I have that face-to-face relationship with Him, it doesn’t cause me to doubt God. I realise that God can’t stop everything; otherwise, there would be no free choice, and therefore no love. You can’t love someone by force, and God doesn’t want us to be forced to love Him. He wants us to choose to love Him.

Unconditional love goes both ways, of course. In fact, love has to be unconditional, or it isn’t love. If God puts a condition on His love, then I’m earning a reward for my behaviour. If I put a condition on God, then I’m also only loving Him because He’s done something good for me. I love God inherently because He’s my Father; I’m in relationship with Him, I know His goodness, and I choose to love Him. But I also feel that love because I’ve felt His love for me, and He’s always been there for me, no matter what has happened in my life.

Where can we go?

When I find myself in a difficult situation, unsure of what to do or think, I go to God and ask Him to reveal what He wants to reveal to me. Sometimes He provides a direct answer to my questions, and sometimes He doesn’t. But I’ve learned to trust Him. When it comes to trusting God, I think of when Jesus said to His disciples, “Are you going to leave me?” I believe this was after He talked about “Eat my flesh and drink my blood” in John 6. And the disciples said, “Where can we go? You have the words of eternal life.” For me, it’s like that: there is no one else. There is no other option. I trust God, and I know God is good.