God's Love: Better than Unconditional

David Powlison argues that God's love is cheapened and distorted by expressing it in the secular language of "unconditional." And because of that, people are not as free as they could by by the power of the gospel. Here are some of his thoughts:

The Lord watches you. The Lord cares. What His children do and what happens to them matters to him. His watching, caring, and concern are intense. Complex. Specific. Personal. Unconditional love isn’t nearly so good or compelling. In comparison, it is detached, general, impersonal. God’s love is much better than unconditional.

God’s love is active. He’s involved. He’s merciful, not simply tolerant. He hates sin, yet pursues sinners by name. He welcomes the poor in spirit with a shout and a feast. God is vastly patient and relentlessly persevering as He intrudes into your life.
God’s love is full of blood, sweat, tears, and cries. He suffered for you. He fights for you and he fights with you, pursuing you in powerful tenderness so he can change you. He’s jealous, not detached.
His sort of empathy and sympathy speaks out, with words of truth to set you free from sin and misery. He will discipline you as proof that He loves you. God Himself comes to live in you, pouring out His Spirit in your heart, putting out power and energy, so you will know Him.
God’s love has hate in it too: hatred for evil, whether done to you or done by you. God’s love demands that you respond to it: by believing, trusting, obeying, giving thanks with a joyful heart, working out your salvation with fear and trembling, delighting in Him.
Like Aslan, the Lord’s love for his children is no tame love. It is not characterized by calm detachment or a determination not impose His values on you. His love is good in a way that is vigorous and complex.
Unconditional love feels safe, but the problem is that there is no power to it. When we ascribe unconditional love to God, we substitute a teddy bear for the King of the universe.

What words will do to describe the love of God that spectacularly accepting, yet opinionated, choosy, and intrusive? What words will do to describe the love of God that takes me just as I am but makes me over? That accepts people but has a lifelong agenda for change? The term unconditional love seems flabby and weak in the face of God’s powerful, purposeful love.
(David Powlison, from With New Eyes)

Luther again on faith-produced works

“When we have thus taught faith in Christ, then do we teach also good works. Because you have laid hold upon Christ by faith, through whom you are made righteous, begin now to work well. Love God and your neighbor. Call upon God, give thanks to him, praise him, confess him. Do good to your neighbor and serve him: fulfill your office. These are good works, indeed, which flow out of this faith and this cheerfulness conceived in the heart, namely that we have remission of sins freely by Christ.Now whatever cross or affliction afterwards ensue, they are easily borne, and cheerfully suffered. For the yoke that Christ lays upon us is sweet, and his burden is light (Matt. 11:30). When sin is pardoned, and the conscience delivered from the burden and sting of sin, then may a Christian bear all things easily: because he feels all things within sweet and comfortable, therefore he does and suffers all things willingly. But when a man walks in his own righteousness, whatever he does is grievous and tedious to him, because he does it unwillingly.”[1]
[1] Martin Luther, A Commentary on St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, cited in John Dillenberger, Martin Luther, pp. 111,112.

Boldness in Grace

This is from a book I have referred to a number of times:

Preaching the gospel to myself each day nourishes within me a holy brazenness to believe what God says, enjoy what He offers, and do what He commands. By the grace of God I am what I am and I have what I have, and I hereby resolve not to let any portion of grace prove vain in me! And to the degree that I fail to live up to this resolve, I will boldly take for myself the forgiveness that God says is mine and continue walking in His grace. This is my manifesto, my daily resolve, and my God be glorified by the confidence that I place in Him.
Understanding that I am not the ultimate end of gospel, but rather that God’s glory is, actually enables me to embrace my salvation more boldly that I would otherwise dare to do. For example, when my timid heart questions why God would want to love someone as sinful as I, I read the answer, “to the praise of the glory of His grace” [Eph. 1:6,12,14]. I figure, then, that my unworthiness must actually be useful to God, because it magnifies the degree to which His grace might be glorified as He lavishes His saving kindness on me.
Indeed, the more I embrace and experience the gospel, the more I delight in the worship of God, the more expressive my joy in Him becomes, and the more I yearn to glorify Him in all I say and do. (Milton Vincent, A Gospel Primer, 52, 54)

Bookends Experience

I was reading and discussing Jerry Bridges book Bookends of the Christian life with a couple of friends last weekend. As we read and confessed that we all were in the crosshairs of Bridges' description of self-righteousness, one of the guys who had read the chapter earlier that week said, "I feel like I never read this book until now." He had read it, but it was not until we read outloud and confessed sin togther that he was gripped how much he really needed the gospel. It reminded me too of how we learn: in community with honest and vulnerable friendships.

Faith that produces works

This is Luther on how saving faith produces works:

"Faith is a divine work in us. It changes us and makes us born anew. It is a busy, active, mighty thing, this faith; and so it is impossible for it to not do good works incessantly. Faith is a living, daring confidence in God’s grace… This confidence in God’s grace makes men glad and bold and happy in dealing with God and all His creatures; and this is the work of the Holy Spirit in faith. Hence a man is ready and glad to, without compulsion, do good to everyone, to serve everyone, to suffer anything, in love and praise to God, who has shown him this grace; and thus it is impossible to separate works from faith, quite as it is impossible to separate heat and light [from] fires." (Martin Luther, Introduction to his commentary on Romans, xvii)

When we see a lack of works of service, or lack of desire for works, we should never simply go directly to works and activity. We should, like Luther, go back to the gospel and see if we are living in it, believing it today from the heart. We repent first for unbelief, not laziness.