God's Conditional Love

In the course of just a few days I heard the following from four evangelical preachers, three of whom are influential pastors of megachurches.

J. D. Greear (Senior Pastor, Summit Church, Raleigh) "In Christ there is nothing I can do that would make You love me more, nothing I have done that makes You love me less."

Pete Briscoe (Senior Pastor, Bent Tree Bible Fellowship, Dallas) "There's nothing I can do to make him love me more, there's nothing I can do to make him love me less."

Andy Stanley (Senior Pastor, North Point Community Church, Atlanta) "Do you know what the root, the heart, the pull-back-the-layers is when it comes to following Jesus? This is uncomfortable, but it will change you. And it will change us. I think it will change the world. God could not love you more. And there is nothing you will do and nothing you could do that will cause him to love you less. And the corollary is this: Every person you're ever eyeball to eyeball with God could not love more. And there's nothing they could do to cause God to love them less. Nothing."

Lay Preacher (Name withheld, Chicago area) "His love for us is unprovoked by us. He loved us before we existed, and even the very best things we do will not increase the love that God has for us. God does not love us because of something we did, something we said, something we thought, something we felt... - he doesn't love us any more for that. God's love is not influenced by us. It has nothing to do with who we were. God's love for us has nothing to do with who we are. God's love has nothing to do with who we're going to grow to be. Our efforts, our constitution, our make-up, our behavior, whether we find it very loveable or very unlovable, is completely irrelevant when it comes to God's love for us. He doesn't love us because of who we are. And in that sense God's love is very unconditional...Our condition, our behavior, our thoughts, our deeds, are irrelevant to whether God loves us or not."

I am withholding the name of the last preacher because he is not a vocational clergyman, has no seminary training, and as a layman was merely (and commendably) responding to an invitation to preach. So he is less accountable for his biblical illiteracy than the ordained ministers quoted above. In his case, the accountable ones are the pastors who allow him to address their congregation.

The source of the evangelical slogan, "Nothing you can do can make God love you more, nothing you can do can make God love you less," is, as best as I have been able to determine, Philip Yancey's 1997 book What's So Amazing About Grace? The original full quote is,

Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more - no amount of spiritual calisthenics and renunciations, no amount of knowledge gained from seminaries and divinity schools, no amount of crusading on behalf of righteous causes. And grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less - no amount of racism or pride or pornography or adultery or even murder.

In the last 15 years, Yancey's formulation - or some abbreviated version of it - has achieved near creedal status among American evangelicals. It would be hard to overestimate the enthusiasm with which it has been received. Andy Stanley, pastor of the second largest church in North America, says above that it represents "the root, the heart" of following Jesus. I have been asked to recite it out loud with other parishioners in a Sunday morning worship service. While in the church I grew up in we would say together, "I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, our Lord...", nowadays we are much more likely to affirm, "Nothing we can do can make God love us more; nothing we can do can make God love us less."

Is it biblical?

I will wait, while crickets chirp, for proponents of this doctrine to go fetch their Bibles and find even one verse in its 66 books that supports it. I should make plain that the issue is not whether God's love is great, patient, deep, kind, forgiving, full of mercy, eternal, prevenient (precedes ours), or beyond imagination. I happily grant all that. The issue is whether there are any conditions or degrees attached to it. Does the Bible say anywhere that God loves us all the same no matter what we do?

No. It doesn't. I can save you hours of vain searching. Or, if you prefer, go verify my flat denial by reading through the entire Bible at your leisure as carefully as you can. In the meantime, here are some Scriptures that teach the opposite:

Psalm 5:4-6: You are not a God who takes pleasure in evil; with you the wicked cannot dwell. The arrogant cannot stand in your presence; you hate all who do wrong. You destroy those who tell lies; bloodthirsty and deceitful men the Lord abhors.

King David would not have recognized as his Good Shepherd a god who loved the righteous and the wicked equally, unconditionally, and without regard for their behavior. David's God, Jehovah, though bounteous in mercy and slow to anger and quick to forgive, hated those who did wrong, and abhorred bloodthirsty and deceitful men. Can you imagine David enduring for one moment a sermon where the preacher maintained, "Our condition, our behavior, our thoughts, our deeds, are irrelevant to whether God loves us or not"? The shepherd king through whom Messiah came would have denounced such doctrine as a blasphemy against his holy God!

Psalm 86:5: You are forgiving and good, O Lord, abounding in love to all who call to you.

The Yancey doctrine would render this verse meaningless. How can the affirmation "God's love abounds to all who call to him" mean anything at all if God's love remains exactly the same whether you call to him or not? If nothing you do makes God love you more or less, then calling to him can have no connection whatsoever to his abounding love. The Yancey doctrine must regard this verse as odd as the assertion that the sun rises in the east on Tuesdays. Well, yes, I suppose it does. But why single out Tuesdays? The sun rises in the east every day. Chop off "on Tuesdays" and you have a meaningful sentence. In like manner, the Yancey doctrine needs to chop off "to all who call to you" in Psalm 86:5 in order for the verse to make sense.

Psalm 103:11: For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him.

More of the same. Here David is trying to make a point about God's love being connected to our fear of him, which the Yancey doctrine must blunt by correcting it to read, "...so great is his love, period," or, "so great is his love for those who fear him which is exactly equal to his love for those who do not fear him, because, as we all know, fearing him won't make him love us more or less."

Psalm 37:27-28: Turn from evil and do good; then you will dwell in the land forever. For the Lord loves the just and will not forsake his faithful ones.

I don't know how much plainer it can be. The Bible affirms that the Lord loves the just. To say that God loves the just and the unjust equally because his love is unconditional and nothing we do can make him love us more or less is absurdity to the point of farce.

Psalm 32:10: Many or the woes of the wicked, but the Lord's unfailing love surrounds the one who trusts in him.

Note the words, "the one who trusts in him." That's a condition. Those who do not trust in him are not surrounded with exactly the same amount of unfailing love.

There are plenty of verses like this in the Bible's wisdom literature, verses that stubbornly resist being shoehorned into the doctrine that God's love is unconditional, cannot be affected by us, cannot be increased or decreased by anything we do. How can such a doctrine stand when confronted by texts like the ones below?

Psalm 146:8-9: The Lord gives sight to the blind, the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down,the Lord loves the righteous. The Lord watches over the alien and sustains the fatherless and the widow, but he frustrates the ways of the wicked.

Proverbs 15:9: The Lord detests the way of the wicked but he loves those who pursue righteousness.

Pardon me for resorting to cliche, but this isn't rocket science. If you want God to love you, pursue righteousness. If you do wrong and become wicked, God will hate you (Psalm 5:5) and your way (Proverbs 15:9). It is right there on the pages of Scripture, again and again and again and again. Painful as it may be to acknowledge, the truth is that those who teach the unconditionality of God's love either do not read their Bibles or do not pay attention when they read them. This includes the vast majority of evangelical preachers today. I'm sorry, but someone had to say it.

Please do not think for a moment that God's love became unconditional when BC switched to AD and the Old Testament gave way to the New. The cross changed many things, but not this. The same affirmations about the conditionality of God's love are found in the New Testament:

2 Corinthians 7:9: God loves a cheerful giver.

These words can only be meaningful if God loves cheerful givers in a way or to a degree that he does not love grumpy givers, cheerful non-givers, or grumpy non-givers. I deny that this verse contains implicit qualifiers demanded by the Yancey doctrine: "God loves (exactly the same) cheerful (and grouchy) givers (and non-givers)." No, that is not right. The plain meaning must be allowed to stand and inspire many great and happy works of charity: Give cheerfully, and God will love you more.

Jude 21: Keep yourselves in the love of God.

This verse means, "Keep yourselves in the love of God."

An analogy might help. Imagine a commandment that said, "Keep yourselves fit and trim." We might not like that commandment, we might be fat and out of shape and want to stay that way - but there would be no doubt about what the words meant, and we would know exactly how to fulfill them. To keep ourselves fit and trim we must exercise and eat moderately. There would be things we would actually have to do and not do. But the Yancey doctrine must understand Jude 21 to be analogous to something more like, "Keep yourselves composed of atoms": an admonition to remain in a state from which you could not conceivably escape. And I think that's silly.

In this verse, Jude does not tell us how to keep ourselves in the love of God. But it wasn't necessary - his half-Brother had explained how to do that some years before:

John 15:10: If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love.

Jesus did not say, "Whether or not you obey my commands, you will remain in my love." We remain in his love, or "keep ourselves in the love of God," by doing what he said. The condition is explicit and unmistakable.

Two more. In the following verses, Jesus expresses a cause-and-effect relationship between our doing something and God responding to it. The cause is our loving Jesus. The effect is God loving us.

John 14:21b: He who loves me will be loved by my Father.

John 16:27: The Father himself loves you because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God.

Again, there is no mistaking the condition. In these verses, God's love for us depends upon our love for Jesus. (It is also true that our love for Jesus depends upon God's love for us - see John 6:44, Romans 5:8, 1 John 4:10: these two truths complement rather than contradict.) And loving Jesus is not expressed as having a warm fuzzy for him, valuable as that may be. Jesus' love language is always obedience: If you love me, you will obey what I command...Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me (John 15:15, 21a).

Maybe someday I'll go to an evangelical church and rather than being asked to repeat, "Nothing I do can make God love me more," I'll be asked to say together with my brothers and sisters in Christ, When I obey Jesus, God loves me.

Amen.