John 3:16-17 (Amplified Bible)

16 For God so greatly loved and dearly prized the world that He [even] gave up His only begotten (unique) Son, so that whoever believes in (trusts in, clings to, relies on) Him shall not perish (come to destruction, be lost) but have eternal (everlasting) life.

17 For God did not send the Son into the world in order to judge (to reject, to condemn, to pass sentence on) the world, but that the world might find salvation and be made safe and sound through Him.

God planned our salvation and was prepared to pay the price for us even before we were conceived. There is nothing that we can do to make God love us more, or to make God love us less. God is love, that is who He is. Everything we find in the Bible is God inspired, and therefore is love inspired.

We have to understand that His heart is always love, and that He has given us free will. Even when He is angry, His anger is out of frustration that we do not understand that He knows and that He wants what is best for us out of His love, after all, He knows us better than we know ourselves, He is our Creator. His will is that none should perish but all come to repentance and the knowledge of Him:

2 Peter 3:9 (Amplified Bible)

9 The Lord does not delay and is not tardy or slow about what He promises, according to some people’s conception of slowness, but He is longsuffering (extraordinarily patient) toward you, not desiring that any should perish, but that all should turn to repentance.

God loves us so much that He sent Jesus, His only Son, to pay for our sins and to restore us into relationship with Him. Jesus really did not feel like dying on the Cross for us, but He did!

If we believe in Him, we have to reckon ourselves completely dead to our old nature, because we died with Christ on the Cross - so that now through His resurrection, we can be channels of His life through us.

Our God is a Holy and a pure God. He cannot tolerate any sin in our lives at all. If we have ever told a lie once, we are guilty of sin. That is why we needed a Saviour.

Sin is not dead, but we are dead to sin if we are in Christ. If God has done all of this out of love for us, then when we receive the depth of this revelation in our hearts, we can respond in the love He poured out into our hearts by the power of the Holy Spirit.

If we fall in love with a person, we look for things to please them, to do for them and to give them. That is the type of response we are empowered to have by the leading of the Holy Spirit.

I pray that you would know God’s unconditional love towards you so deeply by experience and that you would be so filled with His love, that you would be able to trust that God loves you beyond human understanding or feelings, and want to respond and overflow in that love, not because you have to, but simply because you have a new nature, a new, free ‘want to’ in your heart and rebellion has lost its power over you.

  1. What does it really mean to you to be loved unconditionally?
  2. How can we respond to this?
  3. What will be the effects on my relationship with God and others?