Introduction
In this passage David is attempting to talk about the wonder and power of God's love. He piles word upon word to try to describe God's love, and yet we are left with the impression that he thought he hadn't succeeded in describing God's love fully.
It isn't much different for us today. We struggle for words in describing the all-encompassing love of God. Perhaps it is even harder today because of lack of understanding of what love is.
One of the ways we tend to describe God's love is as unconditional. There is some truth in that description and it is often used to protect God's love from any human contribution to receiving it. But I would like to show to you that God's love is better than unconditional. Unconditional love seems to be understood in our culture as love that begins and ends with sympathy and empathy, with blanket acceptance. It accepts you as you are with no expectations. You can take it or leave it.
God's love is much more than that. God does not calmly gaze at you in benign affirmation. God cares too much to be unconditional in his love.
I. Watchful, Caring Love
A. Imagine yourself as a parent, watching your child playing in a group with other children.
1. You might accurately say that you have unconditional love for all the children there.
a. You have no ill will toward any of them.
b. You generally wish them well.
2. But when it comes to your child, something more goes on because you take more interest in your own child.
a. Injury, danger, bullying, or injustice arouses a strong feeling of protection because you love your child.
b. If your child throws a tantrum or mistreats another child, you are again aroused to intervene because you love your child.
c. If your child thrives, you are filled with joy because you love your child.
B. All these reactions may be tainted by sin, but they do reflect the love of God for us.
1. You read passages like Ps. 121, Hosea 11 and 14, Is. 49, the life of Christ and you see that the Lord watches you and he cares about you.
2. What his children do and what happens to them matter to him.
3. His love is complex, specific, and personal.
C. God's love is better than a detached, general, impersonal unconditional love.
II. Active, Intrusive Love
A. God's love is active in that he decided to love you when he could have justly condemned you.
1. God is involved and merciful, not just tolerant.
2. He hates sin, and yet he pursues you.
3. God is so committed to forgiving and changing you that he sent Jesus to die for you.
B. God is vastly patience and relentlessly persevering as he intrudes into your life.
C. God's love actively does you good.
1. His love is full of blood, sweat, tears, and cries.
2. He suffered for you, he fights for you, and he fights with you.
3. He pursues you in powerful tenderness so that he can change you.
4. His sort of empathy and sympathy speaks out, with words of truth to set you free from sin and misery.
5. He will discipline you as proof that he loves you.
6. God himself comes to live in you, pouring out his Holy Spirit in your heart, so that you will know him.
D. God's love is intrusive in demanding that you respond to it by believing, trusting, obeying, giving thanks with a joyful heart, working out your salvation with fear, delighting in the Lord.
E. This real love is so different from: "You're ok in my eyes. I accept you just because you are you, just as I accept everybody. I won't judge you or impose my values on you."
1. Unconditional love feels safe, but the problem is that there is no power to it.
2. When we ascribe this type of unconditional love to God, we substitute a teddy bear for the King of the universe.
III. Love That Has a Goal
A. What words will do to describe the love of God that is spectacularly accepting, yet opinionated, choosy, and intrusive? I think Paul does a good job.
2 Cor. 5:14-15 – For the love of Christ compels us, because we judge thus: that if One died for all, then all died; and He died for all, that those who live should live no longer for themselves, but for Him who died for them and rose again.
B. The love of God takes us just as we are, but makes us over.
C. The love of God accepts people, yet it has a lifelong agenda for change.
D. The love of God has a goal.
Rom. 8:28-30 – And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose. For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom He predestined, these He also called; whom He called, these He also justified; and whom He justified, these He also glorified.
IV. Four Unconditional Truths
A. Many people use the phrase unconditional love attempting to capture four significant and interrelated truths.
B. It is true that conditional love is a bad thing.
1. Conditional love is not love at all; it is, rather, an expression of self-centeredness.
2. People use unconditional as shorthand to contrast with manipulation, demand, or judgmental attitudes.
C. It is true that God's love is patient.
1. God, and those who imitate him, forbear and endure with other in hope.
2. God does not give up.
3. Because God perseveres, his saints will persevere to the end and come through into glory.
4. So people use unconditionalas shorthand for hanging in there through the process of change, rather than bailing out when the going gets rough.
D. It is true that true love is God's gift.
1. God's love for us is his initiative and choice – it isn't given out on the basis of our performance.
2. God's gospel love is not wages that we earn with model lives – it is a gift.
3. It is a gift that we cannot earn and do not deserve
4. God loves weak, ungodly, sinful enemies (Rom. 5).
5. God ought to kill us on the spot, but instead he sent his son to die on our place.
6. People use unconditional as shorthand for such unearned blessing, so that legalism can be overcome.
E. It is true that God receives you just as you are – sinful, suffering, confused.
1. You don't clean your act and then come to God, you just come.
2. People use unconditional as shorthand for God's invitation to dirty, broken people.
3. They use it to overcome despair and fear that would shrink back from asking help from God and his people.
V. Four Biblical Improvements
A. There are more biblical, vivid ways to capture these truths.
1. The words grace and free capture the unearned quality of God's love less ambiguously than unconditional.
2 Cor. 9:15 – Thanks be to God for His indescribable gift!
Eph. 2:8-9 – For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.
2. In the Bible, the opposite of manipulation is not dispassionate complacency; rather, real love has zeal, self-sacrifice, and a call to change woven in it.
1 Thess. 2:7-10 – But we were gentle among you, just as a nursing mother cherishes her own children. So, affectionately longing for you, we were well pleased to impart to you not only the gospel of God, but also our own lives, because you had become dear to us…. You are witnesses, and God also,how devoutly and justly and blamelessly we behaved ourselves among you who believe; as you know how we exhorted, and comforted, and charged every one of you, as a father does his own children, that you would walk worthy of God who calls you into His own kingdom and glory.
B. Unmerited grace is not strictly unconditional.
1. While it is true that God's love does not depend upon what we do, it very much depends on what Jesus Christ did for us.
a. In that sense, it is highly conditional.
b. It cost Jesus his life.
2. The love of God described in the Bible requires the fulfillment of two conditions.
a. Perfect obedience and a sin-bearing substitute.
b. Jesus, by his active obedience to the will of God, demonstrated and earned the verdict righteous.
c. In his passive obedience, the substitutionary Lamb of God took our death penalty to bring us freedom and life.
C. God's grace is intended to change people.
1. There is something wrong with you.
2. From God's perspective, you not only need someone else to be killed in your place in order to be forgiven, you need to be transformed to be fit to live with him.
3. The objective of God's love is a comprehensive and lifelong process of learning the "holiness without which no one will see the Lord."
D. Unconditional love carries cultural baggage.
1. It is wedded to words such as tolerance, acceptance, affirmation, being ok.
2. It is wedded to a philosophy that says that love should not impose values, expectations, or beliefs on another.
VI. Not Unconditional, but Contraconditional Love
A. God does no accept me just as I am; he loves me despite how I am.
B. He loves me just as Jesus is.
C. He loves me enough to devote my life to renewing me in the image of Christ.
D. Contrary to what I deserve, he loves me.
Conclusion: The Better Love of Jesus
We need something better than unconditional love. We need the crown of thorns. We need the touch of life bestowed on the dead son of the widow of Nain. We need the promise made to the repentant thief. We need to know that God will never leave us or forsake us. We need forgiveness. We need a Shepherd, a Father, a Savior. We need to become like the one who loves us. We need the better love of Jesus. And by God's grace, that is what he offers us.
http://olympiabp.blogspot.com/2015/05/better-than-unconditional-psalm-36.html
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