Falling in love has become a strange thing. We can spend years drawing someone’s name in notebooks, feeling our heart pound when their name appears on our phone, and fantasizing about spending a lifetime together. For some, that love doesn’t last. Almost without warning our love for them stops growing, begins fading, and in time it becomes a memory of happier days.
Praise God that He isn’t as fickle as we are.
How we love others
A great danger when we think about love is that we so often tie it to our emotions. The amount we love someone is often linked to how much happiness they bring us. Ask most young people why they love their significant other and you’ll hear answers like
- They make me feel safe
- They know how to make me laugh
- They enjoy the same hobby as I do
- They’re always optimistic
- They’re attractive
What will you likely never hear? “I love them because I chose to.” Our love is based on merit. That’s how we give love, so it makes sense that it’s how we expect to receive it.
Yet consider how easily that love is lost.
Those traits aren’t guaranteed to be around forever. Personalities change, attractiveness diminishes with time, and the things we love now may not be enough to help us get past things we grow to dislike in that person. Perhaps someone else comes along who can offer even more than our current love, so we replace them with a newer model who, this time, will definitely be “the one.”
How we earn God’s love
If this is how we experience love, it’s no wonder we live as though we need to earn God’s love. God is ultimate, so surely earning His love requires far more work than a human relationship. We have to follow all the rules. The better we follow them, surely the better we’ll be in His sight.
This popular belief will probably plague us until Christ returns. We have the idea that to earn God’s favor, we need to do something. God can’t possibly love us for who we are, so we need to clean ourselves up before He can accept us.
For we too were once foolish, disobedient, misled, enslaved to various passions and desires, spending our lives in evil and envy, hateful and hating one another. But “when the kindness of God our Savior and his love for mankind appeared, he saved us not by works of righteousness that we have done but on the basis of his mercy, through the washing of the new birth and the renewing of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us in full measure through Jesus Christ our Savior.(Titus 3:4-6)
God’s unending love isn’t based on our performance but on His own mercy. God’s love is fully dependant on who He is, and for that we shout praises. God is never changing, which means His mercy doesn’t grow or increase based on His mood or our actions.
The fact that we can’t earn His love should cause us great relief, yet it often results in great discomfort. How could God possibly just… love us? Surely He has to get something out of the deal. We get an eternal, majestic, almighty savior who allows us to worship a holy God without fear of the wrath that we deserve. In exchange, God gets a bunch of idol-loving wretches who are utterly incapable of pleasing Him without God helping them do it. Is that really how it works?
For by grace you are saved through faith, and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so that no one can boast. (Ephesians 2:8-9)
That’s exactly how it works!
How we keep God’s love
But God’s goodness doesn’t stop there. Not only can we do nothing to earn the forgiveness of our sin and enjoy the mended relationship bought with Christ’s blood, but God requires us to do just as much work to keep His love.
The person who does not love does not know God, because God is love. (1 John 4:8)
God isn’t like us, requiring motivation to maintain His love for others. Every aspect of God is unchanging. God doesn’t simply act holy; He is holy. God doesn’t merely choose to mete out justice because His very nature is justice. So we see that God’s love isn’t conditional or prone to grow or fade because the great, unchangeable God is love.
If God is the ultimate, then every aspect of Him is likewise ultimate. That means our actions can’t buy favor with Him. No amount of prayer, Bible reading, or giving money to the church will increase our standing before God.
We are all like one who is unclean,
all our so-called righteous acts are like a menstrual rag in your sight.
We all wither like a leaf;
our sins carry us away like the wind. (Isaiah 64:6, NET)
What more can be said about the value of our good works than that? God doesn’t want us to do good works so that He can love us, but because He loves us!
Living with God’s love
It is God who initiates and enables our capacity to please Him. Even when we’re saved, any good we do is purely to God’s glory, not our own. Notice what Paul says to the church in Colossi:
We always give thanks to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, since we heard about your faith in Christ Jesus and the love that you have for all the saints. (Colossians 1:3-4)
Did you catch it? The church is being commended for their faith in Christ and the love they show to others. Yet who gets the praise? Who does Paul give full credit for their goodness?
It’s God alone who deserves praise and glory. He deserves it for sending His son to rescue us from sin and death, for having mercy on a world who hates Him, and for every good thing we do in our brief time on Earth.
If we don’t have to earn God’s love, we’re left with nothing but the freedom to enjoy Him. God didn’t save us to leave us stuck in sin.He didn’t rescue us from our just punishment so that we could live like His enemies.
Rather, He saved us so that we could live out our purpose of obeying and serving Him. Not because we fear what happens if we don’t, but because we know there’s nothing more worthwhile than a life spent loving and pursuing the one who first loved and pursued us.I, therefore, the prisoner for the Lord, urge you to live worthily of the calling with which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. (Ephesians 4:1-3)
Knowing that Jesus loves me regardless of what I do has completely transformed my relationship with Him! What a life changing truth!
So true! It can be easy to spend all our energy trying to buy His favor, leaving none left to simply enjoy our savior as broken people in desperate need of Him!
Truth! ❤️