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Christian Network

Service to God should come from who we are, not who we are trying to be. There are a many variations of the "works-gospel", but they all come down to toiling out of an unhealthy fear of God, rather than out of love for the One who loved us first. It is fallen human nature to put the cart before the horse.

What is it that tempts us to try to earn our Lord’s love rather than simply accept it? We live in a world where "you don’t get something for nothing" and "if it seems too good to be true, it probably is." Everything, it seems, must be earned, including love. Even in a culture as obsessed with romantic love as ours’ few would claim that such love comes without the inevitable attached strings. This is especially true once the initial magic of "falling in love" gives way to the inevitable emotional letdown that comes with realizing the other person’s faults. We think we will always be willing to die for our wonderful love-interest, that is until we lose the intoxicating feelings of infatuation in the objective, and sometimes harsh, light of morning. Then we start trying to figure out if the relationship is "worth it". Often this leads to demands that our partner justify our love for them. We subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, put them to work for us. Our love becomes conditional.

In other aspects of life the stark doctrine of scarcity also conditions us to think of love as a commodity to be bought and sold. With the possible exception of sunlight everything else we need to survive physically is finite. The food we eat, the water we drink, the gas we use to heat our homes, all are bought at a price that depends on the law of supply and demand. Such a law would not exist if these things were present in endless supply. The fact that they aren’t gives rise to the entire economic system we live under. Such is the law of the marketplace. Capitalism assumes scarcity. It could not exist without it.

These examples from human relationships and human material need point up the ways that our nature and the world we live in lend themselves to the faulty understanding of God’s love being a thing we must earn. If everything else on earth is something we must attain, as the Bible says, by "the sweat of our own brow", why would we think acceptance by our Creator be any different?

But different it is.

The love of Christ is not based on our worthiness. This has been said countless times in countless ways by men and woman who have come to know this kind of love, but it always bears saying just one more time. Divine affection is not earned. This is because the very nature of God is to love and since he is infinite, so is His love. There is no scarcity with Him. We do not need to toil for something that exists in endless supply.

It is in our decision to rely on Jesus to enable us to receive the saving love of the Father that we become partakers of this unearned favor. Jesus, Himself, is the greatest picture of this kind of love that has manifested itself in all of human history. The Son of God giving everything up to save an ungrateful, rebellious race is the ultimate source of our comprehension that unearned love is not only possible but also real. He is the one who earned our salvation, not us.

As Christians we have experienced this "free love" by accepting the saving knowledge of Christ. This is what makes us children of God. It is also the motive power behind our continuing sanctification. We need not work for it, but only from it. He has done the work, the work of the cross. We have only to believe and receive.

This realization often does not come overnight and sometimes it arrives more progressively than in the form of ongoing crises. In the meantime the world continues to bombard us with the message that nothing is free and our dying flesh is in full agreement. But, if we know Jesus Christ, our flesh does not define us anymore. It is our spirits, in union with His, that define us and our spirits are the benefactors of God’s infinite, unearned love. The absolute reality of that love can set us free from doing something for God for any other reason than loving Him in return.