Unconditional ?

If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. John 15:10

I struggle with a concept…to the extent that I generally won’t say the phrase.  The phrase is this:  God’s love is unconditional.  Unconditional.  Is it? Really? Last Sunday in worship I spoke on what a covenant is, and in the Bible it is a legal term denoting a formal and legally binding declaration of benefits to be given by one party to another, with or without conditions attached.

Is then God’s love (or his covenant of grace) unconditional?  Passages like John 15:10, where it says, “If you keep my commandments…(then) you will abide in my love” make it sound rather conditional.  Other passages like Jeremiah 7:23 (and many other similar passages) have God saying things like, ‘Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be my people.”  Even John 3:16 seems to have a condition. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” There seems to be a condition of belief to receive everlasting life.

Is God’s love then, unconditional?

Perhaps a brief closer look at the John 15 passage might give us a clue. “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love.” The key word here for me is ‘abide.’   If you keep…then you will abide. The Greek word for abide (and I know this is where most people’s eyes glaze over) is μένω (meno), which simply means to ‘stay’ or ‘reside.’ 

Stay or reside.  So we could translate this passage as saying, “If you keep my commandments, you will reside and stay in my love.” Which means, if I’m looking at this correctly, God’s love is given freely and unconditionally; we then have the responsibility of responding in obedience to ‘stay’ or ‘reside’ or live into his love and grace.

In other words, I guess I can say, or at least wrestle with a little more openly, that His love is given unconditionally; what we do with that love however is a responsibility that we must shoulder to continue to receive the benefit his blessings of love.

Experientially, we know that John 15:10 is true.  How many times in my life have I wandered away from keeping his commandments (succinctly summarized by Jesus as, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind…You shall love your neighbor as yourself" visit Matthew 22:37-39 ) and in turn found myself feeling alienated from God’s love? A love which was given to me in the first place out of His pure good will.

OK, God gives his love undeservedly and unearned.  Perhaps even unconditionally.   

Now.  

 What are you going to do about it?