Mike Parsons
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The God I thought I knew twenty years ago—or even twelve years ago—is now a distant memory. He is not what religion taught me He was. He is not what I was conditioned to believe by church or anything else—He is so much better than that. He is so much better. He is so good, so loving, so kind, so thoughtful, so passionate—beyond what I could ever have imagined until I met Him face to face and began to experience how He revealed Himself to me.
Thankfully, He did not do that all in one go, because it would have completely shattered my mind, I expect. But the Father has deconstructed my thinking and expanded my consciousness beyond what I could ever have imagined or thought possible. God is so much bigger, better, further—and creation is beyond what I ever could have imagined. I was conditioned, like most people, to believe you went to heaven when you died. But when God opened up that realm to me, and the dimensions and all those things to engage with Him and to experience—it is just so awesome.
So many of the things I believed about God were programmed into me by religious doctrines and theological understandings that I now know were never true. But I believed they were true, because that was the stream I was in at the time. I started off in the Methodist Church, went to the Brethren Church, eventually started a charismatic church—and I have been on a journey of discovering things. But that was nothing compared to engaging God in the realms of heaven, face to face, or engaging God within me in a place of intimacy.
All the doctrines that were programmed into me about who He was—the angry God, the God who needs appeasing, the Old Testament God as opposed to the New Testament God—all those confusing things, I realised I believed were true because I had never actually met Him. One day, He said to me, “How much of what you know about Me comes directly from Me, and how much of it has come from reading, listening to sermons and other people?” I had to admit—probably ninety-nine percent of what I thought I knew was not from personal experience. Therefore, it was only information, not true knowledge.
All of us have been programmed by the things we have been taught and the things we have received. You could be programmed into a non-religious mindset that is just as religious. You could be in an atheist household and be programmed to believe God does not exist. Or you could be brought up in religious settings, church settings, that have, in a sense, determined what you believe about God, and the Bible, and everything else.
For me, this has been a long, sometimes arduous journey to come to the knowledge of the truth and come to the realisation that, actually, God is love. His love is unconditional. Experiencing that is what He wants us to do—so that we can come into a reality where we love as He loved.
This teaching forms part of Mike Parsons’ new book Unconditional Love, which is out in print on 20 June 2025. Order it from your favourite local or online bookseller today, or get the ebook from our website. More details at eg.freedomarc.org/books.
Unconditional love is hard to grasp. It is so difficult for people to understand because of the way we have been programmed. For me, if God is love, and He is not unconditional love, then He is not love at all. Because if love is conditional, it cannot be love. You cannot earn love.
Understanding unconditional love—and the nature of it, and why it is so often challenged—is really, really important. I believe this is probably the most important and the biggest key truth that has made the most impact in my life over the last ten to twelve years. The truth that God is unconditional love has been attacked; it has been twisted in many different ways. That is because it is so important that we understand it and experience it. When we experience that unconditional love, it brings freedom. It releases us to be ourselves. It stops us from having to perform to earn it or deserve it.
A phrase any of you familiar with me for any length of time will have heard me say a lot—because the Father said it to me—is: “Live loved, live living, and live loving.” He has said that so many times as an encouragement and a motivation. This is simply how we can live: we can live loved. Now, that does not mean live trying to be loved, or trying to earn love, or deserve love, or be good enough for love. Just live loved. Just accept that we are loved in an unconditional way—in a completely unconditional way. That is the key to this understanding and this experience.
If we are living in that place of living loved, then we can love living. Life is joyous. I look forward to every day, because there is more to experience, more to explore, more to just resting—to just be. And then we can live loving. This is really where the rubber hits the road. To live loving means we have to demonstrate the love to others that we have received. Jesus said, “Love one another as I have loved you.” People strive to love other people—and it is hard sometimes—when they are not very nice to you, and they do things that really make you say, “Well, I do not want to love them. Look how they treated me. Look how they hurt me.”
Any of you who have been involved in church for very long will know how easy it is to be hurt by people—whether deliberately or by accident. It is hard in relationships to maintain a loving attitude to someone all the time and to everybody. That is really difficult. But it is possible, because that is the way God has loved us. God has loved us, and He wants us to love other people in the same way. So if God’s love towards us is unconditional, then our love towards other people should also be unconditional.
Now, I use the word should, and actually, that is a word I want to eliminate from my vocabulary when it comes to God, and relationship, and living life. I do not want to do things because I should do them. Who says I should do them? Did God say I should do them? If so, that is a condition—that I should do something. So what is the consequence of not doing something? If I do not do what God wants me to do, what will He do? So what sort of God do we believe in? What does He do when we do things that do not line up with what He wants us to do? Are there a whole load of things we should do?
On my journey, He has really challenged me about that word. So many of us have that word: “Well, I should do this… I should go to church, I should pray, I should read my Bible, I should witness… I should, I should, I should.” Why should I? Because I am conditioned to? Because I think it is the right thing to do?
God challenged me over things like obedience. Should I be obedient? And of course, I thought, “Well of course I should! Why would I not want to be obedient to God?” But He challenged me. My thinking around that was very old covenant. Because obedience is to something which is a law. God does not want us to obey Him. God wants us to have a relationship with Him in which we share, in which we cooperate with one another—and in which, of course, we would only want to do the things that we see the Father doing. But not because we should, but because we desire to. Because it is the desire of my heart to be in relationship with God, who loves me in such a wonderful way.
So many people accept that God is love—but there is always a but. Religion programmes buts. Yes, that is true, but… I had lots of buts myself in the past. Why? Because it is too good to be true for an independent, alienated mind to accept that God could love you without any condition. We have been programmed by religion to believe we have to do something to deserve or earn love, or to appease anger. That is what God really wants to change. That is the greatest deception. It fools people into trying to earn something that is already theirs by right of inheritance—because we are all His children. We are all co-heirs, whether we know it or not.
We are all God’s children and, therefore by definition, we are all loved unconditionally by a loving Father, overflowing in loving kindness. To experience that and to know that is life-changing.
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Sons of Issachar 