Is God's Love Really Unconditional?

God’s love, as presently viewed in general culture, embraces an unconditional regard for all people, possessing only an accelerator for loving people, only moving forward to bless them no matter what they think, feel, or do, and no matter how they respond or don’t respond to him.

But this is not the God of the Bible, the God of Judeo-Christian revelation, who clearly possesses both deep expressions of love as well as discerning restraint, love that takes into account how human beings respond to him. 

God of the Bible

The Lord takes faithful care of those who trust in him and become like him, but pulls back from those who dismiss or dislike him, or deny his existence. In other words, while God in eternity loves blessing all who receive and obey him, in time he exercises discernment about whom he loves and how much he loves them.

The Bible repeats this consistent theme: 

“Know therefore that the Lord your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commands. But those who hate him he will repay to their face by destruction; he will not be slow to repay to their face those who hate him” (Deut 7:9-10). 

Jesus further emphasizes the conditional nature of God’s love when he says, “If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love” (Jn 15:10).

And, Jesus says, "You are my friends if you do what I command" (Jn 15:14).

From a human point of view, it can sound like God is playing favorites and being picayunish about the conditions he places on his love. But from the divine point of view, God is unwilling to squander his love on foolish relationships and imprint his stamp of approval on unrighteous behavior. He really does know the secret motivations that drive behavior, discriminating between those who seek him in their heart and those who don’t.

It is true that God is love, but his love is tempered with wisdom that balances expression and restraint. He expresses more of himself and his blessings to those who enter a reciprocal relationship with him, while applying restraint to those who harden their hearts. 

The Bible shows again and again how people can break down, nullify, or destroy the love bond that God initiates by perpetuating negative patterns of behavior, patterns that also break down human relationships. The Bible also describes how God can alternate between blessing and cursing people, cherishing or abandoning them, according to whether or not they abide in him.

Christ provides expression/restraint guidelines for human love: 

Expression and Restraint

 

For the forward rhythmic swing of the arc Jesus says, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’” (Lk 10:27). Christ wants those who love him to take on his passion for the wellbeing of humanity. 

So during the course of a day, persons are to watch out for the welfare of others, helping strangers in need, displaying kindness toward employees in stores and fellow drivers on the freeway, and expanding tenderness in one’s heart for friends and family members.

By the same token, the backward rhythmic swing of the arc represents an equally crucial teaching of Christ: “Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves. Therefore be wise as serpents and harmless as doves” (Mt 10:16). 

Naïve love can result in a world of trouble, because many human situations call for a more objective assessment of people’s intentions and less of a subjective, heartfelt involvement with the person. Responding with an open heart to everyone who shows interest leaves a person with no defense against the manipulative patterns of a con artist or narcissist.

For more, read: 

Trusting in The Trinity: 

Compass Psychotheology in Action

Trusting in The Trinity

How The Christian Trinity Is Unique

Undifferentiated concepts of God, like God as nature, or God as the evolution of the universe, yield little meaning because they are so vague they fail to grasp the distinctly differentiated aspects of God’s personhood that offer concrete points of integration with human beings. 

The Bible holds a unique place among world religions because what it records about God and persons occurs over several millennia, arising out of particular historical situations and concrete interpersonal encounters. This creates a public account open to all peoples, a common legacy to humankind. “I have spoken openly to the world,” Jesus says. “I said nothing in secret” (Jn 18:20). The cohesiveness of Scripture comes from the divine Subject who guides the biblical narrative, and the human subjects who interact with God.

Bible

Two singular concepts arise from the Bible that reveal how this divine Subject, this God of the Bible, interfaces with people, concepts that arise from the Old Testament and carry forward into the New. 

The singular message of the Old Testament lies in the revelation of a personal transcendent Creator, a novel concept even in the world of ancient comparative religions. 

The singular message of the New Testament lies in the revelation that right thinking about God, or doctrine, combined with personal faith in God, leads to reconciliation and friendship with God, a thesis original to religions of that day.

Christianity

Christianity puts together the Old and New Testament into the synthesis of orthodox doctrine about the personal transcendent Creator, asserting that God can be known and loved by understanding his personality and attributes. This requires a rhythm of integration and differentiation, so that people can perceive, name, and engage the personal transcendent God.

Just how does God disclose and differentiate himself from all the other claims to deity in world history? He simply says, “I AM” (Ex 3:14; Jn 8:58). God’s essence, therefore, constitutes self-existent personality without beginning or end.

"I AM"

 

From this foundational premise, God continues to reveal himself throughout Scripture with names that provide clarification. From the Old Testament come the names God Almighty, for example, and Lord of Hosts, Holy One of Israel, and Ancient of Days—surely meant to convey awe and wonder, mystery and majesty. Not the average idol in the land of Canaan, or the average tribal god. This is God the one and only, Maker of heaven and earth, a transcendent-personal presence to be reckoned with. 

In the New Testament comes increased differentiation, this time toward personalizing God’s immanence, his holy and loving presence in the world. Now God becomes entirely personal—so personal that his name is Jesus. Human, yes, but also divine: one Person with two distinct natures, co-existing without mixture or confusion, in one interpersonal self: Jesus Christ, the Son of Man and Son of God. Here is differentiation, in rhythm with integration. 

Jesus Christ

And through Jesus, God the Almighty becomes differentiated as God the Father, Holy Father, Righteous Father…Our Father. And whom do the Father and Son reveal but the differentiated Holy Spirit: the Spirit of the Father, Spirit of Christ, and Spirit of the Lord.

And what is the sum total of God’s self-communication in the Old and New Testament story? 

One God in Three Persons, blessed Trinity.

For more, read: 

CHRISTIAN PERSONALITY THEORY:

Compass Psychotheology Applied

Christian Personality Theory

   

How Can Christians Be Holy As The Trinity Is Holy?

“Be holy as I am holy” (Lev 19:2).

In the Old Testament the Lord reveals a good deal of concern for both his holiness and the holiness of his people—a concern expressed with what one might consider uncomfortable frequency.

A frequency which the apostle Peter reinforces in the New Testament with a fair degree of forcefulness: “But just as he who called you is holy, so be holy in all you do; for it is written: ‘Be holy, because I am holy’” (1 Pet 1:15-17).

What is God getting at? What can he mean?

How can a person be holy like God?

And just how is God holy, for that matter?

Let us begin with Jesus.

When Jesus appears to his disciples after his resurrection, he blesses their hearts, declaring, “Peace be with you!” (Jn 20:19), offering his shalom of well-being and wholeness. Later, concerned for their physical well-being, he feeds them with fish cooked over a charcoal fire. How does he provide for them spiritually? Jesus breathes on them, saying, “Receive the Holy Spirit” (Jn 20:22).

Through this gift, Christ initiates human beings into wholeness, into holiness, into a new creation that came into being in Christ by his incarnation, death, and resurrection, and is actualized by the Holy Spirit.

Help from The Holy Trinity

So we could conclude that, far from being left out on a limb, struggling against impossible odds to be holy as God is holy, the Trinity really understands a person’s needs and frailties, really takes in the impossibilities of living a holy life on this planet without the all-out help of the holy Trinity. 

But the assistance is not unilateral. God does not accomplish it all on his side. For Jesus consummates his call to holiness and wholeness with the challenge, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (Jn 20:21). Such a challenge requires a good deal from anyone who accepts it, for it calls on human beings to embark on a process of holistic transformation in personality and attitude, thoughts and feelings, as well as practices and behavior (Lk 24:38-43). 

Holy Transformation

Compass psychotheology asserts that it is less helpful to view holiness in the Platonic sense of an absolute quality in God’s eternal being, and more helpful to view it as a relational dynamic that overflows from intra-Trinitarian love into God’s relationship with people. 

This means there is a compass dimension of holiness meant to connect people to their own highest good that grows from relating rightly to God and one another. Thus we can understand God’s holiness as a delicate balancing act between his altruistic love (Love compass point) and impartial justice (Assertion compass point), between his humble service (Weakness compass point) and glorious majesty (Strength compass point).

Taken together, these dynamic interactive qualities set God apart from both the physical creation and from any sense of moral degradation, because his faithfulness to his eternal consistency and wholeness endures forever. 

This holiness and sheer interpersonal health of the holy Trinity helps explain the great reversal of the cross, through which “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:21). While God finds sin abhorrent, he nevertheless took sin into himself in order to ultimately vanquish it; that is, to dissolve sin from inside out, replacing its insidiousness with a deeper outworking of loving power.

The Great Reversal of The Cross

For instance, God initially sanctifies King Saul and fills him with the Holy Spirit, but when Saul disobeys God, the Lord sends his Spirit to torment Saul (1 Sam 16:14), and uses Saul’s paranoid jealousy to develop holy qualities in David, so that when David becomes king, he will rule righteously, having become a man after God’s own heart. In this way God makes even evil serve his holiness.

When people allow God to set them apart for his holy purposes, their lives take on a depth dimension, for the Holy Spirit has their permission to promote personality health, cultivate interpersonal communion, and actualize their mission on earth.

This is holiness and wholeness.

Hope is offered in the words, “Be holy as I am holy,” for in contemporary exegesis they mean, “Be well-balanced…in your whole lifestyle” (1 Pet 1:13,15; Davids, NICNT).

For more, read:

TRUSTING IN THE TRINITY

Trusting in The Trinity

 

Why We Need A Christian Personality Theory

There is a Freudian personality theory, a Jungian personality theory, a cognitive-behavioral personality theory. And now there is a Christian personality theory.

   

Compass personality theory offers a Christian approach to personality and relationships that is anchored in a biblical worldview, informed by personality research, and applied to the understanding of self, others, and God.

Compass theory describes human beings through the term interpersonal selfhood, a term that unites the essence of individual persons with their common humanity, a term that preserves the singularity of personality while reflecting the plurality of social existence, a term derived from the Trinity as three persons in one God who created humankind in their image. Thus, human beings derive their personhood and interpersonal orientation from God, who is “a living person whose nature defines the meaning of personhood” (cf. Nah 1:4-5).

God exists as the transcendent and sovereign Creator of all that is: “The Lord our God, the Lord is one!” (Deut 6:4). Yet the plurality of God’s Being is revealed by the use of the plural pronoun, elohim, in the Genesis narrative of creation: “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness’” (Gen 1:26). Further, God has disclosed his personality and interpersonal nature through Jesus Christ, the God-person, and through the social Trinity—the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—who are historically and progressively revealed in the biblical narrative.

Because Jesus voluntarily descended from the Godhead to assume human nature, he relates to all humanity. His death accomplished the atonement for sin that reconciles persons to God and one another. At his resurrection he declared on behalf of every person, “I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” (Jn 20:17).

Because Jesus is himself God, sharing with the Father and Holy Spirit the interpersonal selfhood of God’s essence, Christ mediates the Lord’s actualizing purpose for human personality, infusing those who trust in him with the power of personality transformation, power imparted not through esoteric teaching, ethical striving, or religion per se, but through an individual’s own human nature, personality, and connection to Almighty God.

Human psychology is not foreign to Christ because he invented it. Human personality development is not irrelevant to God, because God’s personality gives infinite significance to human personality. Human community is not alien to God, because he delights in it, reflecting as it does the Trinitarian community. 

When joined together in Christ, human psychology, personality, and community find actualizing fulfillment, as Jesus foresaw in his earthly prayer to the Father. “I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (Jn 17:22-23).

Christ actively engages those who invite him with the greatest challenge they can know: to develop their thoughts and feelings, sensation and perception, learning and memory, motivation and intentionality—with the presence of God in their personality. 

Since the Trinity radiates supreme health in their unity as God and their relationship to humanity, Jesus provides the standard for assessing personality health among human beings, not just theoretically, but as the ontological foundation for compass personality theory.

For more, read:

CHRISTIAN PERSONALITY THEORY:

A SELF COMPASS FOR HUMANITY

God Gave You A Mind, Heart, Body, & Spirit. Why?

God gave you a human nature -- a mind and heart, body and spirit -- to grow closer to him.

The Human Mind

The mind houses cognition, where people think about their life experiences, store past learning, plan for future contingencies, and make choices about whether or not they seek God as an intimate companion. 

For all who seek a living relationship with the Trinity, the mind plays a crucial role, capable not only of conversing with God, but of understanding God’s self-disclosure received through the Bible, God’s living and lively Word, which conveys a historical record regarding God’s attributes and expectations about people’s personalities and patterns of behavior.

For good reason Paul says, “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Ro 12:2). 

The pursuit of God requires intellectual commitment, a hunger to know God interpersonally, and a willingness to develop conceptual constructs in accord with the Word of God and in the person of Christ. To think about God is a good thing, to pray to him even better, asking what matters to him, and what his plans are for one’s life. This takes the discipline, mental focus, and thoughtfulness that only the mind can bring. 

The Human Heart

While the mind plays a crucial role in self-understanding and perceiving enough about God to trust in him, it is the heart, one’s emotional attitude, where God encounters the person.

Whether it is God speaking through the prophets to the Israelites or Christ speaking about what really matters in a relationship with the Father, the heart holds high status in the eyes of the Lord.

“I will give them a heart to know me, that I am the Lord. They will be my people, and I will be their God, for they will return to me with all their heart” (Jer 24:7).

Parents want their children to love them. Spouses want to give and receive love. Friends share love through their loyalty and enjoyment of each other. The Trinity desires to experience heartfelt human love, and wants persons to know and trust God's love for them.

Carrying on a relationship with God brings inclusion in the active love flowing between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Though it has received little emphasis in the history of the Church, God is far more interested in people feeling warmly connected to him than he is in all the rites and rituals and rules combined—and not just connected by way of membership in the church, but interpersonally connected to the Lord by way of attraction, excitement, curiosity, delight, and celebration. 

Jesus experienced John as the beloved disciple precisely because John more than all the rest cared for Jesus, treasuring the time they could spend together, the many talks they shared, the good times and frightening times they walked through together as friends, including the Last Supper, where John, alone among the disciples, rested his head on Christ’s shoulder, and at the cross, where Jesus entrusted his mother Mary to John’s tender, faithful care.

The sharing of one’s emotions with God is not limited to love, but within that love, encompasses occasions of frustration, confusion, depression, irritability, complaint, anguish, insecurity, anxiety, loneliness, and even doubt. God, for his part, never turns a deaf ear or tries to change the subject in order to cut short a person’s cathartic release. The Lord draws especially near when one is processing and ventilating human emotion, knowing that some feelings are crucial to express before gaining a larger perspective. David, the Psalmist, a man after God’s own heart, knew this well.

The Human Body

God views the human body as good. He created it. He wants people to cherish it. “Do you not know,” Paul says, “that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?” (1 Cor 6:19). The human body—whose tangible bone and tissue, muscle and sinew, brain and spinal cord, central and autonomic nervous systems—is home to that mystery called the human spirit, something that scientists can never explain. Paul declares that the body and spirit are raised together in a personal resurrection that transfigures the corruptible biological body into an incorruptible one like Jesus Christ’s (1 Cor 15:39-44; Ro 8:23).

Yet persons are called by God to live in their bodies in the here and now: touching, tasting, seeing, hearing, moving, dancing, making love, playing sports, walking, running, swimming, exercising, eating, drinking; using one’s hands to express caring, write a poem, create a science experiment, or fold in prayer; lifting one’s arms to embrace another with a hug, carry a load of groceries, shovel snow, or praise the Lord: surely reason to celebrate the body—as does the Son of Man during his time on earth. 

As embodied persons, human beings need techniques for reducing the distraction of body tensions that mount in a stressful day. Teeth grinding, chest tightness, migraines, or lower back pain need attention not only for bodily health, but for finding the source of the underlying psychological stressors; not only for mental health, but for the health of one’s relationship with the Trinity. Relaxing the muscles and deepening the breathing helps the Holy Spirit move through the human body to inspire the human spirit.

The Human Spirit

The spirit rounds out the fullness of human nature, the gift of God to Homo sapiens, a gift that differentiates them from other mammals, bringing a level of awareness, choice, and responsibility unparalleled in the animal or plant kingdoms.

While no field of study can objectively account for the spirit within human existence, we can say that when people are dispirited they are depersonalized, losing the sense of meaning and purpose that would otherwise enliven them. This awareness increases the trend for health professionals, including psychotherapists, to respect and utilize spirituality as a healing force within human nature.

The human spirit is not an ethereal, otherworldly affair, but rather a concrete, embodied dimension of one’s grounding in Christ, the “life-giving spirit” (1 Cor 15:45). While persons can live apart from a relationship with God, they cannot abandon his image within them as the true origin of their existence. They can repress the spirit that comes as part of human nature, or distort it to such an extent that their behavior is far removed from God’s will. But they cannot escape the reality that God loves them and is calling them into his family.

Christ’s entry upon this earth unites the human spirit with God the Holy Spirit, who in turn assists the human spirit to form an intimate, inner connection with God, a connection that generates a conscience, not in the sense of Freud’s rule-shackled superego, but in the sense of a living union with Christ, an inspired yet vulnerable capability to know and do the Father’s will. 

In other words, the Holy Spirit is sent by the Father and Son to indwell the person, bearing witness with their spirit that they belong to God. “And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Gal 4:6). Invited to serve God with the same intentionality that Christ did and the Holy Spirit does, individuals can now learn to do so, not by following the letter of the law, but because God is so loveable. 

For more, read:

TRUSTING IN THE TRINITY:

COMPASS PSYCHOTHEOLOGY APPLIED 

 

Three Ways to Keep Christianity Simple

Have you ever wondered as a Christian believer how to keep your faith simple and effective over all the years of your life? Have you wondered how to keep your first love for Christ alive in spite of all the cultural, financial, and psychological pressures of modern life?   

I'm going to share three insights that I hope are as meaningful to you as they have been for me in keeping your personal walk with Jesus zestful and focused.

1. Keep in mind that the core teaching of Christianity has to do with the Triune God: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. This is a great mystery and we ought to feel no shame in receiving it as a gift of divine revelation, rather than a product of our own rational deduction of what we think God could or should be. 

Other world religions have core beliefs about God that must also be accepted through faith and not rationally deduced from experience. For instance, Hinduism professes to believe in a million gods, whereas Buddhism teaches that there is no personal God at all. 

So when the Bible shows us the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit each acting as fully God in different historical situations, while existing together as One God, we do well to make this a primary building block of our view of reality. This teaching of the Trinity is especially meaningful to me as a theologian-psychologist because it answers so many important questions about humanity's existence and God's existence; how they are similar and how they differ.

We know from anthropology, psychology, and sociology that humans do not live successfully in isolation. And from your practical experience you know that those people who are loners do not do well in life. They become depressed, develop no social skills, and over time lose even the ability to converse meaningfully. There are two mental disorders that lead to this condition, known as the avoidant personality disorder and the schizoid personality disorder. In both conditions individuals isolate themselves from others, and hide in the margins of life, work, and civilization. Before long, their emotions shrivel up and their cognition becomes bleak and barren. Their spirit dies within them, and even their bodies look forlorn and forsaken.

Looking back at what the Word of God teaches us, however, offers a remedy. God declared way back in Genesis, during the foundational epoch of an ancient civilization, that it is not good for persons to live alone. Why? Because, from God's point of view He has created them for friendship, fellowship, love, empathy, communication, communion, trust, and lifelong interpersonal learning.

In other words, just as God Himself is an interpersonal Trinity, so we are made in His image as interpersonal selves. Whatever else we are called to know or to do, we can never get away from the universal calling to become meaningfully involved with others as God is and does.

Knowing this keeps your life simple in this way: you dedicate yourself to become a lifelong student of personality development and social communication, so that you're always gaining greater facility in meeting, talking to, caring for, and living together with friends, acquaintences, and family members. This calling to caring relationships won't end with your personal death, but is resurrected with your body and personality for eternal pursuit in heaven.

Think of how both in the Bible and today God is always involved in relationships — perceiving, speaking, listening, caring, confronting, feeling, thinking, and acting. And you are invited to do the same!

But you can forsake your calling in Christ altogether by insisting so vehemently on your own selfish ways that you separate yourself from God and spend eternity in hell.

Instead, why not spend your life drawing ever closer in your thoughts and feelings, sensations and spirit, to the living Triune God, and through God's love for others, to them as well. Why not treat even strangers or newcomers as potential new friends? God does, or else he never would have chosen you while you were yet His enemy.

2. Make the Bible, God's personal revelation of who He is and what He expects from you, the foundation of your life. That means reading it many times through, on your own or in a Bible study group, all the while you are going through school, working at a job, or raising a family.

You will no doubt run up against many human opinions, some of them from very smart people, who will contradict what you learn and believe in Scripture. But where were they when God laid the foundation of the Cosmos? When He set the stars in heaven and created the fish in the ocean? When He made the thousand types of butterflies, and formed them to emerge as delicately winged and beautifully colored creatures out of former worms?

Recently a person emailed me to say he had read a Bible verse in his daily devotional that reinforced just what he was in the process of doing with his relationships:

"Don’t lie to each other, for you have stripped off your old sinful nature and all its wicked deeds. Put on your new nature, and be renewed as you learn to know your Creator and become like him" (Col 3:9-10).

3. Many atheistic scientists and pseudo-philosophers have been quite enamored with themselves during the short time their enfleshed skeletons walk around, and they make grand pronouncements about God, truth, and meaning. But far greater heed should be paid to Jesus Christ, the Son who was sent by the Father from heaven to teach us about God, truth, and the meaning of life. Don't let His voice from the New Testament or His Spirit whom He sends to indwell you, get lost in the shuffle. Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me (Jn 14:6)."

It's amazing how well you can do in keeping your first love for Christ, and developing a humble spirit for learning the Word of God, by just placing the Trinity, the Bible, and the love of Christ for you at the center of your consciousness. 

And if you need a little more encouragement, I invite you to read the Compass Series books that my wife and I have provided for fellow Christians or those interested in the Christian faith. In fact, when you read our words, we feel a family feeling toward you, a bond that originates in the Trinity and is passed to us on earth. You are why we write, and we always pray that our concepts are just what you are hoping to find.

May I say, since it's that time of year, Merry Christmas to you, and may God the Father, Son, and Spirit draw very close to you in the coming year!