Will God Still Love Me?
Will God still love me if I fail Him? Is there anything that I can do that would put me outside the scope of God’s love? Stephen points to God’s unending love.
God’s Love For Mankind
The Bible talks a lot about God’s love for mankind, even giving us that great verse in Romans 5:8 where we read that
“God demonstrated his love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
But can God’s love ever run out, or perhaps more directly, can we ever exhaust God’s love? Can we commit so great a sin that God will no longer show us love? It’s an important question; especially since we can sometimes interpret love to be an emotion rather than something stronger. Emotions are conditional, based on external factors that we react to.
So, if love is just an emotion, it would by definition be conditional, and if conditional, it would stand to reason that there would be a scenario where the condition would not be met.
Will God No Longer Love Us?
Certainly from a human perspective this makes sense. We often base our feelings toward other people on a variety of things, like their attitude, behavior, how they act toward us or others, sometimes maybe even their appearance. We hold certain relationships in higher regard than others, our family members can usually get away with a lot more than our coworker perhaps. A long-time friend can act more boldly toward us than someone we are meeting for the first time. So the question remains, can we commit so great an offense that we will meet the condition where God will no longer love us? The simple answer is no.
Love Can Be Just An Emotion
Even though for us love can be just an emotion, for God love is an attribute, it is part of His nature or character. The Bible tells us this in 1 John 4:16 where it says
“So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God.”
Considering that God’s very nature is love, and that the Bible teaches that God never changes, it then becomes impossible for God to act outside of love. Now, I know this opens the door to a number of questions with regards to God’s love vs. God’s judgement, but we’ll save those for another post. For now, let’s take a more practical look at this.
God Is Omniscient
God is omniscient. That means He knows all, He knows everything about us, what we’ve done, what we will do. This is critical to understanding God’s perfect, enduring and unending love because it really negates the question of whether we can sin so greatly that he will no longer love us. God knows we will sin, He knows how we will sin, even before we’ve done it.
Yet he can make that declaration in Romans 5:8 that while we were still sinners, He showed us love by sending Christ, His only Son to die for our sin. And while it may be hard for us to understand God’s perfect knowledge of all things past, present and future, the truth is we really can’t do anything that will surprise God, therefore, we can’t commit any sin that God didn’t already know about when he made his promise to save us.
God’s Unending Love
He even reinforces the idea of His unending love in the scriptures. In Isaiah 54:8 we read
“With everlasting love I will have compassion on you, says the Lord, your Redeemer”.
In Jeremiah 31, God tells His people “I have loved you with an everlasting love”. And in Romans 8, one of my personal favorites, we find in verses 38 and 39
“For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
God’s Unconditional Love
Our sin, which left undealt with has the power to separate us from the eternal presence of God and from a right relationship with Him, can’t interfere with the love He has for us. It’s because of that unconditional love He has for us that Peter could write that God does not desire that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance, that is, that all would believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.
God Will Never Stop Loving Us
So the more complex answer to our original question is no, we can never do anything to cause God to stop loving us, His love is unconditional. That said, God’s love isn’t what saves us, it is only what provides the way by which we can be saved. Ephesians 2:4-5 puts it so beautifully,
“But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ – by grace you have been saved”
Paul would write a little later in verse 8
“For by grace you have been saved, through faith. And this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God”
If you would like to know more about how you can know God’s love for you through faith in Jesus, please contact us. You can do so by email to mail@fbhinternational.com or by phone at 1-800-567-1218.
Stephen March
Stephen March is the President of FBH International and HopeStreamRadio. He graduated from the Broadcasting Program at Niagara College in 2001, and has previously worked in television production and post-production.
Stephen lives in St. Catharines, Ontario, with his wife Corinne and their four children.
Read and hear more from Stephen March on his contributor’s page. Stephen currently has 5 Programs on HopeStreamRadio:
- Please Forgive Me
- Isolation Chronicles
- Faith By Hearing – The Twelve
- Bibles and Baseball
- Bible Tech Talk
More Podcasts Below:
More Blogs:
Palm Sunday, The Coming King, and the Last Week of Christ
Images courtesy of:
Woman in Flowers – StockSnap
Woman Seated on Step – StockSnap
Leave a Reply