Editor’s note: This is a reprinted column from Jack Purcell’s “On the Journey” archives. It originally appeared in The Star in 2013.
I received an email this week with a picture of a rather large church sign on the lawn of a church somewhere in America. You could tell it was no backwater group in the middle of nowhere.
It was a very nice sign as church signs go, with one obvious exception ... what it said. It read, “God’s love is unconditional as long as you are obeying Christ.”
The sign would indicate that this pastor believes that God’s love depends on our behavior. This would imply that Christianity is just a gigantic behavior modification program.
If God’s love depends on our total obedience, then we can control God. All we have to do is be a little disobedient and we have changed God’s mind about us. What powerful people we are to be able to control God with some self-serving behavior!
However, Colossians 2:13 tells us, “He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven all our transgressions.” Notice the “all.” It is important not only to understand the nature of God’s love but how his love is connected to his forgiveness.
Scripture tells us that God is love – it’s one of His attributes. Here is where it is easy to be led astray. God’s love has nothing to do with our earning or deserving his love. It is the nature of God to love his children because of who he is, not what we have or have not done.
The statement regarding unconditional love being conditional is also an unfortunate message to teach children. A reasonable conclusion would be that either their parents don’t love them when they disobey or that God is not to be trusted.
This kind of thinking originates with a less than accurate concept of God in which God is just a larger version of man with many of our weaknesses. It is God formed in our image rather than the truth – us formed in his image.
This problem may be the result of not seeing a difference between obedience and acceptance. They are two very different issues. If our acceptance by Christ is determined by our obedience then his acceptance is based on “works” and not grace.
In my years on two different university campuses I frequently saw students who had tried the obedience route to earn God’s acceptance and found they could never measure up so they walked away from their faith, giving up.
No one was telling them there was nothing they could do to earn God’s love and acceptance. Their need was to accept their acceptance.
If you believe what the church sign says, how would you not fall under constant condemnation? Yet Paul tells us in Romans 8:1, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
Jesus said in John 15:9, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.”
Those have to be two of the more comforting verses in Scripture. Just think, Jesus’ love for you is the same as the Father’s love for his Son.
I wonder if you have noticed that when people preach a gospel other than the one in Scripture, it always comes back to one issue. It is all about “me.”
This is yet another occasion to acknowledge that it is all about God and who He is, not about my behavior.
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