Dear Friends,
As we continue to pray for the city of Los Angeles and the victims of its ravaging fires, may you enjoy (if that’s the word) this slight offering on the nature of “unconditional love” with “no strings attached.” Sounds good, doesn’t it? Perhaps too good to be true.
For some reason, as I was preparing the podcast, I found myself drawn to some old, “gospel” hymns. Perhaps it is only the poet/hymn writer who touches on the mysterious, ineffable nature of God’s love.
And for my good, “High Church” friends, I’ll soon return to my beloved Bach and Charles Wesley before dipping into the old “gospel” song books again. Well, I can’t promise you that! I can, though, promise you my prayers. Yours are deeply appreciated as well.
For those experiencing the Arctic blast, stay warm! It’s been below zero here in Indy the past few nights! But, bundled up, we are…
Pressing On!
D. Paul
A Conditional, Unconditional Love
My wife is a devotee of daily devotional books. We’ve used various ones for several years, beginning each day (or trying to) with a brief reading, some scripture, followed by a prayer for the family, our friends, the world (it is His footstool, after all), and the Church at large, always ending our devotional time with the Lord’s Prayer—our Down’s daughter would have it no other way.
After reading it throughout 2023, we put aside Oswald Chambers’s exacting My Utmost for His Highest, and Debby suggested we read Jesus Calling, written by Sarah Young, who died from leukemia in 2023 at the age seventy-seven. A graduate of Wellesley College with a degree in philosophy, she’s nobody’s intellectual sluggard, but compared to the rigorous, spiritual depths of Chambers, I initially found her writing … well … dare I say it—fluffy—a bit mystical for my taste, and though not blasphemous as some accuse her, it is presumptively written throughout, as Ms. Young channels the voice of Jesus Christ. Though hardly an original literary/fictional device—a first-person narrator who breaks the fourth wall—it gets a little dicey when that narrator is continuously Jesus. But my wife convinced me to “stay with it,” and we have through the close of 2024. Compromise is one of marriage’s great gifts, and I, along with 45 million readers of Ms. Young’s oeuvre, have grown to appreciate her obvious love for Jesus.
But as I thought about the nature of “unconditional love” this Advent season, I read these musings from Ms. Young’s journal entry of December 26: “I am the gift that continuously gives, bounteously, with no strings attached.” Flashing back, momentarily, to my theatrical days, I almost broke into song from the Richard Rogers musical by the same name:
“No Strings, no strings,
Except our own devotion,
No other bonds at all.
Let the little folk who need the help
Depend upon vows and such,
We are much too tall.”
With my wife urging me to stay focused on our devotional text, I resumed reading Ms. Young as she continued to speak in the commanding voice of Jesus: “Unconditional Love is such a radical concept that even My most devoted followers fail to grasp it fully.” Well, perhaps I am one of those “little folk” who “fail to grasp it fully,” in spite of my employing the sentiment in a podcast, On Forgiveness, of October 16, where I wrote: “…it was others He thought of in his closing moments, asking his Heavenly Father to forgive them—unconditionally.” And, true to his Word, the God who is love, pardoned and set the world free “from the law of sin and death.” Little wonder the redeemed continue to sing:
That Christ Should Join So Freely In The Scheme,
Although It Meant His Death On Calvary,
Did Ever Human Tongue Find Nobler Theme
Than Love Divine That Ransomed Me?
Such Love, Such Wondrous Love,
Such Love, Such Wondrous Love,
That God Should Love A Sinner Such As I,
How Wonderful Is Love Like This! (Words and music by C. Bishop and Robert Harkness, ©1926 Lillenas Publishing) *
Yes, my brothers and sisters in Christ, I pray I will bear witness to the “unfailing love” of God which “endures forever” till my closing breath. But that old hymn, friends, doesn’t embrace a spurious, people-pleasing, pop-theology love, with its saccharine attachment to “no strings attached,” reducing the magnitude of God’s bountiful love to a pulpiteer’s sound bites, dispensing bromides to those seeking a cheap absolution with no cost nor conditions attached. To paraphrase Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “cheap grace vs. costly grace,” it is a “cheap love” versus a “costly love,” obscuring the true nature of God’s “unconditional love.” The absurdity, of course, is this: nowhere in Scripture will you find the phrase “unconditional love,” let alone coupled to “no strings attached.” King David never picked up his harp and set such words to music. Quite the contrary is true.
From the opening, creation scenes of Genesis to the closing scenes of Revelation, “conditions” to this “unconditional love” are to be found everywhere: all will be blissful in the garden unless Adam and Eve eat “from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”; in Revelation, the church at Ephesus is praised for its endurance, but still brought up short by Christ: “Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first” (Revelation 1:4 NIV). The weight, it would appear, of the entire biblical narrative gives credence to the unconditional love of God being a conditional love—a “conditional, unconditional love,” if you will. The two are not mutually exclusive:
When the rich young ruler comes to Jesus asking what he must do to inherit eternal life, Jesus tells him he must keep the commandments, with the ruler assuring Jesus, “All these things I have kept from my youth.” At this point in the story, Ms. Young might have evoked the voice of Jesus with its unconditional love: “You need inquire no further. Few have kept all the commandments from their youth, thou good and faithful servant. Be at rest—you have inherited eternal life.” But in our biblical account, we again encounter the Jesus of “conditional/unconditional love”—the One who searches the human heart as no mortal can, and responds without hesitation to a final question the rich ruler has, a question that Jesus knows is crucial to his total surrender and obedience. “What do I still lack?” he asks Jesus, who tells him, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.” Then we are told, “But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions” (Mathew 19:16-22 NIV). Jesus offered him the endless gift of eternal life, but it was a conditional offering, at a cost much higher than the rich young ruler was willing to pay.
Throughout the New Testament, Jesus speaks of this conditional, “costly love,” telling his disciples that “unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies,” unless one denies himself, takes up his cross and follows Him, unless one loses their life for Him, they will never experience the joy and fullness of His “unconditional love.” Yet, deceptively comforted by the pulpiteer’s bromides, millions of Christians continue to live below the spiritual poverty line—our anxious lives nearly indistinguishable from our secular counterparts.
As I podcast this morning, I’m grateful to recall from seventy years ago my saintly father’s open, tear-stained face, as he sang from one of his favorite hymns:
But we never can prove the delights of His love,
Until all on the altar we lay;
For the favor He shows, for the joy He bestows,
Are for them who will trust and obey. (Music by John H. Sammis, 1887, Public Domain).
It is the “obey” part, I suspect, that most of us wrestle with; we want an “unconditional love” with “no strings attached” Yet, it is only there—in surrender and obedience—that we will find “a place of quiet rest..a place where sin cannot molest…a place of comfort sweet…a place of full release,” and yes, my brothers and sisters in Christ,
“A place where all is joy and peace,
Near to the heart of God.” (Music by Cleland B. McAfee, 1903, Public Domain).
May such a place be yours this week … and forever.
Amen
*For an absolutely fun, a cappella version of this song, give a listen to it as sung by Christian artist, Michael Lining:
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