Delivered September 26, 2010
When Jesus was asked what was the most important commandment in the Bible, the one that summed up everything the Bible commanded, he said it was love – Love of God and love of neighbor. Love is the essence of the gospel. It is the heart of our faith, and the fountain from which all other virtues flow. The apostle Paul says “Faith, hope love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is love.” Yet love is much misunderstood in our culture and in the Christian church. Jesus’ concept of love was so revolutionary – so different from the normal understanding of love - that the early Christians had to adopt a new word to describe it – the Greek word agape. Today I am going to preach about this spiritual divine love taught by Jesus.
1. First, the Meaning of Unconditional Love. Jesus communicates the meaning of this type of love in the Sermon on the Mount. “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you, 45 that you may be sons of your Father in heaven; for He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. 46 For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 47 And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so? 48 Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.” (Matthew 5:43-48) Here Jesus uses the word “perfect” to describe this love. It can be translated absolute love, or complete love or mature love. I will use the word unconditional love.
Unconditional love is the love that God demonstrates. His love is not conditional on the one being loved. It is not deserved, but freely given. Jesus says it is demonstrated by how God sends the sun and the rain on the good and the evil, the just and the unjust. It doesn’t matter if a person is good or bad, the sun still rise on that person and the rain still falls on that person. The weather does not discriminate, and neither does God’s unconditional love. Jesus contrasts this with the normal human type of love. He says in verses 46-47 “For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so?”
Everyone loves those who love them. Everybody exercises conditional love. That is worldly love. Jesus is urging us to have an otherworldly type of love – a love toward those who do not love us – indeed even those who curse us, hate us, spitefully use and persecute us. That is unconditional love. That is the love of God, and if we have that type of love we are sons – and daughters – of our Father in Heaven. If we don’t we are no different than the world – illustrated by the tax collectors in this passage.
2. Second is the Source of Unconditional Love. The source is God. Christians have a unique understanding of God. We believe that God is one God in three persons. Lots of religions have three or even more gods – polytheism. Several religions have one God – like Judaism, Islam, Sikhism. Only Christianity believes in the Trinity – one God in three persons – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. There are reasons for this concept of God. One is that God in his own nature is a Community of Love. The three Persons of the Trinity love each other. At Jesus’ baptism the Spirit rested upon him and the Father spoke from heaven and said, “This is my Beloved Son.” Repeatedly in the Gospel of John Jesus says that the Son loves the Father and the Father loves the Son. God’s very nature from all eternity is love.
It isn’t as if God, before he created the world, was all alone and lonely and indifferent drifting in nothingness. Before the universe was created, God loved. He loved within his nature as Trinity – the three persons of the Trinity loving each other. God is love; this is where love comes from. We can’t know God without knowing that love. John says in our epistle lesson, “He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” Knowing God is not just holding theological doctrines about God. Anything we might understand with our tiny human brains about God does not come close to comprehending the true nature of God. His thoughts are high above our thoughts. The only way we really know God is by unconditional love.
The only love that God can have is unconditional love because God by nature is unconditioned. We could call it unconditioned love. When I looked up in the dictionary the meaning of the word ‘unconditional,” the most common synonyms listed were “absolute” and “unqualified.” God is absolute; he cannot have anything less than absolute love, unqualified love. Unconditional love is in the very nature of God, and if we do not know love, we do not know God, regardless of what we may believe about Jesus. God, the Holy Trinity, is the Source of unconditional love.
3. Third is the Gift of Unconditional Love. This love that is the nature of God and which God experiences in himself as Trinity has been directed toward us. Because God is love, he created the world in love, and he loves the world. He loves the people of the world, and not in a general sense, but individually. You have probably heard the quotation by Charles Shultz: “I love mankind; its people I can’t stand.” God loves people as well as mankind. He loves individuals.
This is the Christian doctrine theologians call election. When we hear that word “election,” we normally think of democratic political process. But the word existed in theology long before the American experiment in democracy. It means to choose. God chose us. This idea is at the heart of the Bible. The Jews are called God’s chosen people. The NT says we are chosen by God. Peter says, “But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people, that you may proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.” (I Peter 2:9)
Ephesians 1:4-6 says, “He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, 5 having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, 6 to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.” God chose us before the foundation of the world. Long before we were born. Before any human was born. Before there was galaxies or stars or an earth, God loved us and chose us. Before we did anything good or bad God chose us. That is why it is unconditional. It is not based on anything we did or didn’t do because it was before we existed.
God’s love is not dependent on preexisting conditions. A few years ago the Pittsburgh Baptist Association was ending its group health insurance plan, and I had to go shopping for individual health insurance. I applied directly and through a insurance broker but they would not accept both me and my wife because of “preexisting conditions.” God does not accept us or reject us based on preexisting conditions. There are no conditions in God’s love; his love is unconditional. That is why it is called grace. Grace by definition means it is undeserved. God’s love and acceptance and choice to save us are not based on anything in us. That is why we cannot lose our salvation. We did nothing to gain it; therefore we can do nothing to lose it.
4. Fourth is the Expression of Unconditional Love. “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.” The unconditional love of God has been expressed to the world in Jesus Christ – his birth, his life, his teachings, his ministry - but supremely in his death and resurrection. I John 4:9-10 “In this the love of God was manifested toward us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” The supreme expression of God’s unconditional love is the Cross. God sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
God loves us in spite of our sins. God loves us enough to deal with our sins in a complete manner so that we could live in eternal fellowship with Him. Love does not overlook sins or tolerate sin. Love does not ignore sins. Love does not explain sin away or downplay sins. To treat sin lightly is not love; it is sentimentality. But the Bible does not say that God so tolerated us that he sent his only begotten Son, but God so loved us. Love takes obstacles to fellowship seriously. Sin is an obstacle to fellowship with a holy God. Habakkuk 1:13 “You are of purer eyes than to behold evil, And cannot look on wickedness.” A holy God can only have communion with those who are holy. Therefore we had to be made holy. That is the purpose of the cross. The cross provided atonement for our sins. The cross dealt decisively once and for all with sin, by paying the price, bearing the punishment, extinguishing our sins and making it possible to come into the presence of a holy and just God. That is love. If you want to see unconditional love, look at the cross.
5. Fifth is the Receiving of Unconditional Love. We receive unconditional love is by faith. Ephesians 2:8 “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, 9 not of works, lest anyone should boast.” We are saved by grace through faith. What is faith? This is another word that has both human and divine dimensions.
Human faith is conditional. When we go to the doctor we are placing faith in his/her healing skills, but we are also open to getting a second opinion just in case. We deposit our hard earned money in the bank having faith that we can get it out again – but we will not put all our eggs in one basket, as they say, because banks fail. Many people had faith in financial investor Bernie Madoff, but he took all their money in a Ponzi scheme. Human faith is conditional, and rightly so, because human beings are imperfect, sinful creatures. But God is not man. God is unconditioned and loves us conditionally. Therefore our faith in him is to be unconditional. In war we speak of unconditional surrender. That is when one side has so thoroughly won the victory that there is no room for negotiation. God has won the victory in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. There is no room for negotiation. Our faith in Jesus Christ is unconditional surrender to his unconditional love.
Is your faith in Christ unconditional? Or do you have conditions attached? When we unconditionally surrender our lives to Jesus Christ, there is no further room for negotiations. We do not pick and choose which commandments we will keep and which ones we are unwilling to do because they might cramp our lifestyle. John 14: 21 “He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me. And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself to him.” When you surrender your life unconditionally, there is no turning back. There are no qualifications. There are no ifs, ands, or buts. There are no “What ifs.” Unconditional love requires unconditional faith.
6. Sixth is the Transmission of Unconditional Love. If we are so loved by God, we will communicate that love to others. I John 4:10 In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” I John 4:7 “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” I John 4:20-21 “If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen? 21 And this commandment we have from Him: that he who loves God must love his brother also.” You cannot receive the love of God without giving the love of God to others. I John 3:17 “But whoever has this world’s goods, and sees his brother in need, and shuts up his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in him?” I John 4:19 says it simply, “We love Him because He first loved us.”
When I left Sandwich in 1994 I went to pastor a church in Lowell, Massachusetts we had many Cambodian members, both first and second generation. The first generation came out of the killing fields, the Cambodian holocaust during which two million Cambodians were killed by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. They had stories to tell.
One story I heard about indirectly was about a man who as a young orphaned boy was in a prison camp in Cambodia. Four times a day people were brought to the outskirts of that camp to be executed. The children were all lined up and forced to watch. If they cried, they would be killed. This boy was terrified that each time, that among them would be a friend, a neighbor or a relative and he would cry, and then he would be killed. This went on for years and the only way for him to survive was to completely cut off all emotion and feeling inside himself. Later he was freed and adopted by an American couple and brought to this country. He had the scars of war and did not know how to feel or express emotion. He especially had a difficult time relating to men because all the killers were men. He said he eventually learned how to feel again by looking into the eyes of his foster father and seeing the love there. He eventually was able to accept that love as genuine and return that love.
God is love – unconditional love. The only possible way we can know and live such love is if we have looked into the eyes of our Heavenly Father and seen that love and experienced that love firsthand. Only then can we pass it on. We cannot manufacture this love within by ourselves because its source is not the human heart. Our hearts will find a thousand reasons why we cannot and should not exercise unconditional love toward people who do not deserve it, until we realize deep down that we do not deserve it either, and no one deserves it. That is why it is called unconditional love.
I know this church would like to attract new members. You have bought some new equipment and have plans to hire a director of Children’s ministry. And this is wonderful. But nothing attracts people like unconditional love. It attracts people like flowers attract bees. Flowers do not have to work to attract bees; it happens naturally by how they smell. I read that a technique used in selling homes is to have an open house and bake some bread or cookies right before it starts. The aroma flows through the house and makes like the property more attractive. It connects to some deep part of us. It smells like home.
Unconditional love is like that. It smells like home baked bread or chocolate chip cookies fresh out of the oven. It is irresistible. When a church loves unconditionally, it smells like home. And everyone wants to feel at home. It attracts people of all ages and all religious or nonreligious backgrounds. People will flock here like they are coming home. On the other hand, unforgiveness, judgmental attitude, or a critical spirit will turn people away, and it won’t matter how much bread you bake. But if this church loves, people will be attracted to this congregation like people drawn by a sweet aroma to enter a bakery. Love is the bread of life. It smells like home.
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