FALSE NARRATIVE: GOD LOVES YOU CONDITIONALLY

Just as we are made with a longing to be wanted and desired, we also deeply want to be loved without condition. We can never fully find wellness in our souls until we come to accept our acceptance in God, until we feel the embrace of the love of God. But it is difficult to feel that love. Unconditional love and unmerited acceptance are rare in human life. Because we are all human beings, flawed and finite, our loves, even the best ones, are flawed and finite.

Because we are loved conditionally by other humans, loved for what we do and how we look and what we have, we project this same conditional love onto God. And God knows more and sees more than any parent or coach or teacher, so we assume the scrutiny of God would make it impossible for God to love us. God is holy, God is pure—and we are not. Far from being loved without condition, many Christians believe God is disgusted by them, that they are “sinners in the hands of an angry God.”

And yet, the entire Christian narrative rests on John 3:16-17:

That passage clearly states that God loves the world, that God did not send Jesus to condemn the world. How did “angry God” narratives become so prevalent? And how can we ever come to believe we are loved in the way our souls long to be loved?

For most of my life as a Christian, it felt as if God was on a swivel chair. When I would repent, read the Bible, pray, go to church, I felt as if God was looking at me with approval. But when I sinned, when I failed to practice the spiritual disciplines, I sensed that God did not want to look at me, as if God were spinning on his chair until his back was to me so he did not have to look at me. So I would redouble my efforts and do something holy so God could make his face to shine upon me once again. But then I would sin again, and God would spin away again. My sin-confession-forgiveness-repentance-do-good cycle would repeat over and over, making God dizzy and me depressed.

Once I realized that God’s love was not dependent on me or my behavior, the absurdity of this swiveling became obvious. I was able to see that this approach was a form of legalism, and legalism is superstition. I don’t determine God’s love for me based on what I do any more than seeing a black cat brings me bad luck. But we like superstition because it gives us a measure of control. If I can make God love me by reading the Bible more, then I can feel in control. This illusory control, it seems, is preferable to not being in control, so we hold on to it for as long as we can.

REASONS WE DON’T ACCEPT GOD’S
UNCONDITIONAL LOVE

There are three main reasons it is difficult to accept the love of God: unaccepting parents, graceless religion in our churches, and exterior-based acceptance in secular culture.

All of us wrestle with unaccepting parents, to some degree or another. As a parent, I know how difficult it is to communicate to my children that I love them, while at the same time working diligently to make them better. We hear the word no far more than yes in our childhood. Good parents are all trying to teach good manners, right behaviors, and encourage success in their kids. The common method is to punish bad behavior (“go to your room,” “no dessert for you”) to make it stop, and to reward good behavior (“you got an A; let’s get ice cream”) to encourage more success. We hear this so much it becomes deeply ingrained, and we come to believe that love is based on our performance.

Second, it is difficult to accept God’s love for us as “graceless religion” creates “graceless Christians.” There is a general sense that God is disappointed with us at best, and downright angry at us at worst. Philip Yancey was asked this question by former president Bill Clinton, “Why do Christians hate so much?” This inspired Yancey to write his wonderful book, What’s So Amazing About Grace? It is ironic that a religion whose foundation is stated as “God so loved the world” could become a religion of so much judgment. When God is portrayed from pulpits to Sunday school rooms as a God who “punishes bad little girls and boys,” it is hard to imagine a God who knows our every sin and loves us still.

A third reason why we fail to receive God’s acceptance of us is that we live in a culture that appraises our value and determines our worth on the basis of what I call the big three:

• How we look

• What we do

• What we have

Sadly, we internalize this worldview ourselves. From the playground to the boardroom, from cliques to mean girls, from “likes” to “swipes,” we are judged on our appearance, performance, and material wealth. And the problem is, there is always someone better looking, more talented, with more money and nicer possessions.

All three of these add up to a mindset that says, “I am not enough. I do not deserve love.” As I felt that day in the living room with my father, we wonder, Can I ever do enough to earn love? What do I have to do to find approval? What do I need to do to be accepted? God can easily become the ultimate disapproving parent, the quintessential angry judge. Our only hope is to do better and try harder to get the not-loving God to love us. And yet, Jesus seems to be telling us a better narrative. In fact, as Brian Zahnd says so well, “Jesus didn’t die on the cross to change God’s mind about us; Jesus died on the cross to change our minds about God!”

And there’s one more reason: I have found that I am my own worst critic. I live “under the tyranny of the ideal self,” as Adrian van Kaam puts it. I don’t want to be kind of kind; I don’t want to be sort of smart; I don’t want to settle for being generally good. I want to be, as we like to say, “the best version of myself,” and for me that is nothing less than perfect, nothing short of the ideal me. As a result, I end up judging myself against a perfect me. The perfect me would never have an unclean thought or say an unkind word; the perfect me would never come in second or get a B, or even an A-.

I am not alone. Many of my friends also suffer under the tyranny of the ideal self. They live each day with a standard of perfection that is impossible to meet and never allows them to rest. One of my good friends is bright and beautiful and talented, to the point that most who meet her are intimidated by her. And yet she feels she is “worthless,” as she puts it. I asked her how this was possible, and she said, “Every time I did something that was not perfect, I had a father who let me know it and scolded me for it. Whenever I do anything less than perfect, I beat myself up pretty badly.” When she spoke these words to me I felt a deep pain, not just for her but for all of us who suffer from this.

I vividly remember the day I discovered that the tyrant of the ideal self had been ruling my life. I had to see it clearly before I could begin releasing its control over my self-narrative. I could only do so by the power of the unconditional love of God—the truly good news. If God loves me as I am, who am I not to love me as I am? I began to laugh at my silly attempts to be perfect. It was freeing to accept the reality that I am perfectly imperfect. Perfection is an illusion, and it prevents us from accepting God’s love for who we are, as we are.

TRUE NARRATIVE: YOU ARE LOVED BY GOD
BECAUSE YOU ARE LOVED BY GOD

One of the reasons I love reading the works of the great Christ-followers throughout the ages is that amid vast historical and cultural differences I find points of connection. Teresa of Ávila’s life and writings have inspired me since I first read her works in college. I love her candor and her passion. Teresa was a Spanish woman in the sixteenth century who entered the convent life as a Carmelite nun. She was a mystic who experienced deep connections with God in contemplative prayer. But she also wrestled with doubt and shame. Daniel Ladinsky offers a beautiful interpretive rendering of one of Teresa’s poems about her experience of God’s love titled, “He Desired Me So I Came Close.”

Teresa’s poem captures the hesitancy we have in accepting the love of God. She looked at what she had done and wondered how she could look into God’s omnipresent eyes, eyes that have seen everything we have ever done—including our worst sins.

But what does God do? God sings! God sings to her “a song even sweeter.” But what does Teresa do? She tries to shame herself once more. But God gets the last word: “I made you, dear, and all I make is perfect.” God does not say, “All I make can be perfect.” God says, “All I make is perfect.” But this perfection is not the morally impeccable, flawless performance kind of perfection I used to pursue. This has to do with the perfection of our being, not our doing. As made by God, we are made exactly as God intended, and in this sense we can say we are “perfect.”

I love how the poem ends: “Please come close, for I desire you.” This is perhaps the most difficult thing for us to believe, those of us who lived for years with an angry God on a swivel chair. We can maybe accept that God loves us because, well, God is God and can do anything. But surely God does not like us! The God who spoke to Teresa is the same God who speaks to you and to me. Maybe we cannot hear it audibly, but if we are honest, we can hear it in the cry of our hearts, the longing that we desperately have for this to be true.

One of the most powerful statements in the Bible is this: “God is love” (1 John 4:8). Three little words: God is love. Notice that it does not say, “God loves”—it says, “God is love.” This means that love is not something God does at one time and does not do at another. Peter van Breeman explains, “If we think of God as a person who can divide his love, then we are thinking not of God but of ourselves. God is perfectly one, the perfect unity. We have love, but God is love. His love is not an activity, it is his whole self,” because God is triune, three persons who are in an eternal relationship of love.

This is foreign to us because human love is divided. We can and do divide our love. We love sometimes, and sometimes we do not love. But that is not possible for God. The Greek words for this verse are theos agape estin, literally “God love is.” What kind of love is the love of God? It is agape love. There are four common Greek words for love, all describing different kinds of love (eros, romantic or sexual love; phileo, friendship love; storge, family love). Agape is “love that wills the good of another,” to use Dallas Willard’s definition. God’s love is agape love because God always wants the best for us and will go to any length, even self-sacrifice, for our well-being.

But God’s love for us is also phileo (Jesus said in John 15:15 [CEB], “I call you friends”) and we are members of God’s family (storge), and God’s love for us is also erotic, though not sexual, as seen in the last three words of Teresa’s poem: “I desire you.” Saint Bernard of Clairvaux wrote dozens of sermons on the Song of Solomon, comparing the love between lovers in that book of the Bible to the love between us and God. My point is that God loves us in every possible way love can be expressed. The best love felt between friends, the most passionate love between lovers, the most committed love between family members, are all reflections of God’s love. What is different about God’s love is that it is complete and never-ending. Passionate love wanes, family love can be strained, and friendship love does not always endure. The love of God is unlimited and eternal. It is the love we have all been longing for.

A few years ago I dug up an old tape of one of Henri Nouwen’s talks, one that had spoken deeply to my heart so many years ago and sustained me in ways I never knew. I listened to the talk anew and found my heart soaring once again. Henri preached,

The Spirit spoke anew to me through this old talk, as if Henri was speaking to me from the other side of the veil.

BELIEVING YOU ARE LOVED

And yet it is hard to believe we are the beloved. Love like this is so immense that it is difficult to bear, as William Blake wrote: “And we are put on earth a little space, / That we may learn to bear the beams of love.” We must learn to “bear” love because it is hard to accept being really loved in this way. I find the love of God to be overwhelming. In many ways, my need to hear that I am loved by God is greater than I can understand, and yet God’s love is also greater than I can accept. This is where the vicarious humanity of Jesus is so crucial. Jesus became human in order to do for us what we could not do for ourselves. As the early church father Irenaeus (AD 130-202) said so clearly: “Because of His measureless love He became what we are in order to enable us to become what He is.”

Jesus does for us what we could not do on our own, and that includes believing we are God’s beloved daughters and sons. Jesus, in his full humanity, has done this vicariously for us. We struggle to believe that we are the beloved because of many voices that shout that we are “no good,” or “not enough.” Jesus faced this struggle, and he succeeded in believing he was the beloved on our behalf. According to theologian Thomas Smail, “Jesus needed, not once, but again and again at each stage of his mission and each crisis in his living and dying, a freshly confirmed knowledge of his own identity.”

At Jesus’ baptism, which marked the beginning of his ministry, Jesus heard these words: “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17; Mark 1:11; Luke 3:22). My friend Trevor Hudson points out, “In stark contrast to ourselves, when Jesus needed to know who he was, he listened to his Father’s voice, trusted that voice and claimed its truth for his own life.” If Jesus needed to hear, again and again, that he was God’s beloved in whom God was well pleased, then there is nothing wrong or weak about us needing to hear it as well.

Jesus listened to the voice of the Father for us. You and I will fail to do this perfectly. We may believe it one day, then deny it the next. Jesus has listened and believed on our behalf. Jesus even faced the temptation to define himself on the valuation system of this world: what we do, what we have, what others say of us. The same Spirit who descended on Jesus at his baptism led Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted (Mark 1:12). Right after hearing, “You are my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” Jesus went into the desert to face Satan’s temptations to prove he was worthy of being loved. “‘Turn stones into bread . . . jump from a high tower . . . bow to me and you’ll be rich and powerful,’ the Enemy whispered. Jesus was clear in his response: ‘I don’t have to prove that I am worthy of love. I am the Beloved of God, the One on whom God’s favor rests.’” When I fail to believe I am the beloved—and I often do—I am comforted in knowing that Jesus always believes I am the beloved.

The apostles knew this truth about our identity, and proclaimed it in their letters. Peter, John, and Paul, who wrote most of the New Testament, communicated the truth that we are the beloved in their letters, or Epistles. In eleven of those letters, the term beloved is used forty-seven times. Paul calls the recipients of his letters “beloved” eighteen times, John uses it ten times, Peter six times, James seven times, and Jude four times (in one short epistle). Here are two that I find encouragement in:

The apostles learned that they themselves were the beloved—despite their failures and sins and betrayals—and they told the early Christ-followers that they were also the beloved. What is important to note is this: flesh and blood did not reveal this to them, but only by Jesus through the Spirit did they come to this understanding. But the frequency of this term, beloved, should alert us to the fact that the New Testament is unequivocal about our identity. We are sinners, to be sure, because we sin. But that does not negate our identity as beloved.

AN OLD TRUTH BECOMES NEW

I suspect that many of you reading this are saying, “This is not news to me. I have heard that I am loved by God.” If this is true for you, I am glad. But it may be that you, like me, need to hear it anew, and hear it in new ways.

Imagine a child is walking with her father. The father picks her up, hugs her and kisses her on the forehead, looks her in the eyes, and says, “I love you so much. You are so precious to me. I love just being with you. Do you know that?” The little girl blushes and smiles and kisses her dad on the cheek. So here is a question: Did she learn anything she had not known before? Was she given some new information about her father in that moment? Probably not. She is not given a new idea—but an old idea, one she has known and longs to hear, becomes new.

That is what the love of God is like for me. I need to hear it again and again. It is not new news; it is good news said in a new way. Every sunset, every act of kindness from a stranger, every piece of art or music that moves me, I now see as new ways God is loving me. Simone Weil said, “The beauty of the world is the tender smile of Christ to us through matter.” I am learning to see and feel that smile every day—and I need to see it over and over.

One of my favorite verses is 1 John 4:19: “We love because he first loved us.” God loved us first, by sending his Son for us (1 John 4:10). But, as Kierkegaard pointed out, God does not just love us first one time. God loves us first every single moment of every single day. “When we wake up in the morning and turn our soul to You . . . when we withdraw from the distractions of the day and turn our soul toward You, You are the first and thus forever. And yet we always speak ungratefully as if you have loved us first only once.” God is always present, loving us first each and every moment. I, for one, need to hear it again and again.

In the last few years, I have developed a deep love for 2 Corinthians 3:18. I believe it is the foundational verse for Christian spiritual formation. It is about looking into a mirror, but instead of seeing our face in the mirror, we see Jesus’ face:

In this spiritual mirror we see “the glory of the Lord.” And “the glory of the Lord” is “the face of Jesus” (2 Corinthians 4:6). So what we see as we look into this mirror, by the Spirit, is not our face but the face of Jesus. And as we look into this mirror, beholding the glory of Jesus, we are transformed “into the same image.” Love is the mechanism of change when we gaze on the face of Christ.

When we behold the face of Jesus, we see absolute love, and that love inspires love within us. This is how God communicates that we are his beloved. Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote, in what is one of my favorite quotes:

God, our Creator, the Creator of all, the “foundation of being,” smiles at us. Read that again: God smiles at us. Can you imagine God smiling at you? This is hard for many of us who were raised with a lot of false, toxic narratives about God. And those toxic God narratives have led to a lot of toxic self-narratives.

But imagine God, in the face of Jesus, smiling at you. When by the power of the Spirit we are enabled to see it, the image of God in us is awakened, like a seed that lay dormant. Just as a child needs to look into the smiling eyes of a parent or caregiver to awaken love, so too we, in our spirits, need to look into the face of Jesus and see a smile. It is the face of Jesus, looking at us, that can transform us. That is because Jesus, unlike the others in our lives, knows us completely (sins and all) and knows us accurately (he is not prone to error), and is the only voice powerful enough to penetrate our hardened hearts.

HE WAS LOOKING AT YOUR FEET

In the opening of this chapter I shared the story of how my father failed to acknowledge my outstanding performance on the basketball court, and instead focused on the little thing I did wrong. I shared this story with my counselor, who said, “I imagine you were hoping for something different.”

“Yes,” I said. “I was hoping he would say, ‘Wow, what a great week, pal. You played so well! Fifty-one points!’”

“That must have really hurt,” he said. I nodded yes. Then he said something that never occurred to me. “I think it is fascinating that he asked you about your feet.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because your father was in the stands looking at your feet. He was wanting so badly to help you, he was even watching your feet. He couldn’t help you from the stands, but he was doing the one thing he could do—he was looking for ways to help you. That is why he asked you if you knew why you missed the free throws. He was trying to help you. But that is not what you heard. And he should have said what you needed and deserved to hear: ‘What a great game—let’s go have a steak!’ and then, only then, should he have said, ‘And hey pal, maybe later we can work on your free throws. I noticed something with your feet.’”

I began to sob as he finished that sentence. My dad really did love me, but he was not always great at showing me in the ways that I needed to hear it, and I was not always great at listening in ways I could hear it. This is one of the great things about our heavenly Father. We may fail to hear his love, for all the reasons I have written about in this chapter. But God keeps on coming to our games, and keeps on watching our feet, and never fails to love us in the ways we need to be loved.