Love is all about compromise. We have to find mutual ground in our love for one another. Love is about give-and-take. We love people for how they make us feel and for what they do for us emotionally, corporally, and even intellectually.
How many of you can boast a love like that in your relationship with your family, with your friends, and with your spouse? Well here is a shocker: this is selfish love and not God’s love!
God’s love is unconditional. Yet his love is also uncompromising. He loves us and wants a relationship with us but he hates sin and will not tolerate it. With this understanding, do you trample the grace that God provides? Or when you sin and are convicted of it, (first aware of it), Do you say to God, “My God, I am ready to give this up. Please give me the strength, ability, and wisdom through the Holy Spirit to do so.”
We cannot have an infinite relationship with God if we expect it to involve compromise. Compromise is a fleshly concept. Jesus Christ died so that we could live. Do we take that for granted? Or do we recognize that he did this as a means of providing access to salvation for the entire world as well as a means for us to stop living in sin and live in fellowship with the Holy Spirit within us?
Our God is a mighty God, and a loving God. He is a God who loves us with all of our faults. But his goal for us is to be holy, and perfect. He created us in his image and before we fell we mirrored him and his attributes well. We were holy and perfect. It is possible to get there again! But this is only possible through continued sanctification through the Holy Spirit and continual repentance and rejection of sin on our part.
We must show love in the same manner that God shows love to us. It must be uncompromising, and yet unconditional. It must be uncompromising with respect to Christ’s commandments. It must be uncompromising with respect to God‘s laws. But it must be unconditional in how we view others, interact with others, and seek the best for them continually.
“Therefore, since we also have such a great cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let’s rid ourselves of every obstacle and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let’s run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking only at Jesus, the originator and perfecter of the faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. (HEBREWS 12:1-2)”
Will you love with an unconditional, uncompromising love?
~Pastor Brian Wattenbarger