Unconditional Love 
Love is a verb.  Love is an action word.  Love is what it does.  Love is blind.  Love hides a multitude of faults.  Love knows no color or boundary.  These are clichés that we all have heard at one time or another.  Many times the word “LOVE” is over used and under-realized. 

Suffice it to say God has been dealing with me lately about unconditional love.  I am compelled to share. God, through Jesus, clearly demonstrated his love for us at Calvary.  As Christians, we are charged with being examples of God’s love.  We are His children.  We are His ambassadors.  We are His body in the earth.  We should reflect His very character.  In short, we’re supposed to look just like Him.  So often, we fall short.  And we drop the ball when it comes to demonstrating the love of God to our brothers and sisters, to our families, friends and neighbors, to our fellow human beings.   

I met a woman within the last month who is “not into church.”  But she has the biggest heart.  She is the best example of God’s love working in the earth that I have ever seen.  She shows so much love and compassion to others, even people she doesn’t know.  (I think it is poor commentary that people in the world tend to be better at showing what love really is than people in the church, but that’s another blog.)  But she is turned off by the church because we tried to clean the fish before we caught it.  She ran into some saints with a Pharisaic mindset who couldn’t love her in spite of – who couldn’t extend God’s heart to her because of the sin that entangled her.   Basically, we beat her up with the Bible before we ministered to her soul.  There are wounds from her past that needed to be attended to.  Her spirit and her psyche needed to be healed and delivered and we missed it. 

We have a tendency to not offer unconditional love, but to attach all kinds of strings and conditions.  Then we practice what I call “spiritual discrimination.”  We judge people and we decide who is deserving of our love and even who is deserving of God’s love and redemption.  We get so wrapped up in how a person looks or what sins or transgressions that person may have committed that we lose sight of our primary focus.  We lose sight of the fact that that person has a soul that needs to be ministered to and that it is our job to minister to it.  We forget that we are sinners saved by grace.  We also underestimate the power of God to complete the work in that person.  If He was able to save us and clean us up, then is He not able to do the same thing for them?  Is God not able to deliver? 

I must admit that there are areas where I too have to come up.  Although, I may not have been guilty of the spiritual snobbishness that I previously described (and that doesn’t let me off the hook), I was certainly guilty of not doing anything about it.  I was apathetic. I thought, "It's not my problem.  It's not my job."

I said all of that to say this:  1) we must be examples of God’s love and we must remember that everyone is entitled to it, 2) we must not use our status/position as members of the body of Christ to attack or belittle others and 3) it is incumbent upon all of us to minister to those who need it. 

Love IS a verb.  Love IS an action word.  Love IS what it does.  Love IS blind.  Love DOES hide a multitude of faults.  Love DOESN'T know color or boundary.  GOD IS LOVE.  Can anyone see God in you?