God is Spirit and Love (John 4:24 & 1John 4, 8). Love therefore, is not a feeling or emotion, but a being that is God. The Spirit of God is like force or energy, which we cannot see; yet they control every aspect of our life and the universe; and are critical for our survival. His Spirit however, is infinitely greater than just force or energy, because, He is intelligent, merciful, loving, forgiving and life giving. In fact He is the creator of force and energy. His Spirit is Love, which speaks to every human heart, constantly persuading us to be selfless and righteous. His Spirit moves human heart to great holiness. His Spirit is also the force that leads human beings to charity, mercy, forgiveness and hope; and the energy that sustains us during our trials, tribulations and works.
We experience God, when we experience the spirit of love in human beings and in our own heart; we see God when we see acts of unconditional love in the world; we touch God when we selflessly reach out to others in love; and we communicate with God when our thoughts are fixed on love and forgiveness. We see fullness of God in Jesus. Although we were unfaithful to Him and betrayed, abused and killed Him He did not back out from the covenant of love He made to us. On the contrary, He humbled Himself to take a human form and sacrificed in life in order to compensate for the sins we committed against Him. Those who have truly accepted Jesus in to their life, likewise, are forgiving people who have dedicated their lives to serve others, and do not back out from their covenant of love with their spouse and commitment to others in the face of unfaithfulness, betrayal, abuse or hurt. * Their acceptance of Jesus sets them free from hate, greed, lust, anger, revenge and jealousy.*
I don’t believe human beings are capable of unconditional love. They say they are, thye think they are, but when tested, they fail every time… Only God loves that way. And those who love Jesus will try to love that way but will usually fail.
What about Mother Theresa?
What about Father Kolbe who took the place of a Jew in a concentration camp to die in his place?
What about parents’ love for their children?
People fail, yes they do, but that is not the point. The point is all in the intent and the trying.
Forgiveness is the greatest expression of love. I fail regularly, but I don’t set out to fail. I have hoped for forgiveness and mercy from people and sometimes I get it and sometimes I don’t.
A mind that cannot accept people as flawed from the outset sets the bench mark too high, no-one will ever live up to those sort of expectations. To love is to not expect, to forgive when sinned against, to persevere in faith and to hope of peace and forgiveness for all.
It doesn’t matter if I personally am not loved by anyone but God, it only matters that I love in my flawed human nature and considering the grosseness of this broken humanity a little seed of love is a great stride…
If loving is to be constantly unfailing then no man can do it, but that is not love. Love is not to be taken on appearances, because if that was the case Jesus death would have seemed the biggest failure that ever happened to humanity, that is if folks didn’t stick around to find out what happened next. All too often people do not stick around to find out what will happen next, they see the so-called failure and do not want to know anymore. The sticking around is an act of love itself.
People love unconditionally, but it all depends how each person perceives love in order for them to understand each other and each others actions.
Failing is not the end, more often than not God will bring a great goodness out of an apparent failing, even habitual faults in each person.
It’s having the good intent to love and the persevering that matters, that is an act of love in and of itself because it is a great trial and strife to some people and they only put themselves through this persevering because of love and loving.
To forgive is the greatest Christian teaching and to forgive is purely an act of unconditional love.
I hope you consider what I and others have posted here.
I agree that those people loved unconditionally. What i should have said is that people r not capable of loving unconditonally unless they know Jesus. I’m sorry for this oversight. I guess i have so many people in my life who r not on the same page with Jesus, that i had lost sight of… well, certain things…
Maybe i need to ask you to pray for me. I am trying to weed out of my life (my immediate “life”, that is) those who refuse to accept Jesus… “If your right eye offends you pluck it out… If your foot causes u to stumble, cut it off…”
i agree with virtually all you say. What really struck me was the part about how it is all about how a person perceives love…
To me, Jesus is the only One who loves uncondtionally and at all times. But i do realize that people in love with Jesus r also capable of this kind of love… It is a reflection of where i’ve been/who i am that i say no one loves this way. I didn’t mean it absolutely speaking. I was in a negative place the day i posted that… But it is true (& what i meant to say) that people without Jesus cannot love this way…
please dont get me wrong… but i was also thinking that by “weeding” out the people refusing to accept Jesus or follow his teachings, i was doing something good. but now i realise that i was not. Jesus did not come to the world to save the good, he came to save the sinners. so i believe that so long as we do not allow them to influence us, we should keep them in our lives so that we can show them by example what it means to be living in Jesus.
A child without any disability wasn’t born knowing how to walk, after months of laying on their backs they first learn to crawl (bottom shuffle etc). Their parents didn’t say at this stage ‘You can’t walk, you’re a crawler, the rest is a waste of time, you’ll never do it, you keep falling over, so we’ll push you aside and lose hope in you because you’ll always be a crawler’, that really would be a harsh judgement to pass!Instead the parent encourages them to reach the next stage of their development and gives them every tool and aid to attain that next stage.
In the same way God does this with our spiritual development, that is our growth in love. We are not born walking spiritually, we are back-layers, rollers, bottom shufflers and crawlers of the knowledge and practise of love that is faith.
The parent has great patience, love and kindness with the little child who is struggling so hard to develop. This is also true of God’s patience, love and kindness with His Children and so those people who have been blessed with the grace of faith must exercise great patience, love and kindness.
It’s true that the only Jesus some people may ever know is the one that you show them in your love, patience, mercy and kindness to them.
We are all learning from the Divine Teacher and as in all things people learn in different ways, at different paces, with different set backs and different leaps of progress.
I don’t know anyone who isnt a sinner, we are all shuffling, some days we shuffle better than others so best not to judge and best to work on our own shuffling!
I don’t think these peoples loved uncondtionally… they’re just commom people made heroes… (probably by our need to create heroes)
Have you ever heard about parents killing, hurting, … their children? This is not a ‘general’ feature of human “parents”…
I think we are not capable of “unconditional love”… but we MUST try. It’s like going to heaven… we really CAN’T get there by ourselves… but we NEED to try.
If someone is good and they do good and they love then that cannot be because out of our own selfish need to have a hero or heroine they therefore become one. In this world it is so hard to make a good thing happen that it cannot be chance and it cannot be looked at cynically as all good proceeds from God.
Most parents do not kill their children, nor hurt them, most parents struggle in a hard world to raise their children against the tide of secularism and hatred for all that is Truth and is good.
And if a person forgives another, isn’t that unconditional love?
Sometimes tough and unjust things happen to people (that is the nature of the Cross) and that can mislead them to believe that there is no such thing as true love from humans in the world, that is unconditional love, but they do not see that we all owe each other a debt as well as to God and that that debt is in our own crosses united to the Cross of Christ.
After a great deal of heartache they can harden their own hearts and refuse to see the love that is in the world, they dare not love themselves and judge people by a standard that asks them to be without fault altogether or they do not believe that someone can purely love, they judge and misjudge peoples motives and intent as though they can know another man’s heart because they are afraid of being hurt themselves.
This is a bitter world view.
The news is not a good thing to watch. It doesn’t tell you about the little girl who walked through spikey brambles to pick a single beautiful flower for her mother. It doesn’t tell you that a father wept for love after not seeing his daughter for a long time. It doesn’t tell you that a man washed and changed and fed his dying wife every day for 10 years in the last years of her life. It doesn’t tell you that a whole family and all of their friends supported, raised money, understood, sacrificed for and truly loved a boy with leukimia. It doesn’t tell you of the motehr lying awake in a hospital ward holding the tiny hand of her three week old baby praying to God that her child does not have meningitis and dare not sleep or leave her side. It doesn’t tell you about the Priest who gets up in the morning and dies to himself and lays his life down for the flock to serve them daily spiritually and practically, who gives his all to his flock and never says a word of how tired he feels, the injustices he bears, his worries, his loneliness nor do they know he has a serious illness. It doesn’t tell you about the old couple who still hold hands after 60 years of marriage. It doesn’t tell you of the tender first kiss of the boyfriend and girlfriend who will go to hell and back for each other. It doesn’t tell you of the time and effort given by those who knowing they have more give of their time or of what they have to help those who have less, such as the homeless.
I am tired of a world that condemns itself. I am tired of a world that only seeks to do each other down.
People are beautiful, not to be condemned, but to be saved.
I see unconditional love everyday, so I wonder why other people cannot see it.
It was not that Christ needed to die for our sins, it was that humans demanded it and still they do not believe in love nor that any man can aspire to love. If you are looking for a great act of unconditional love you may look at the Cross of Christ but from us that are not yet divine you must not look for a great act of unconditional love, you must look for the many tiny small acts of unconditional love that during a lifetime make a great mountain of love. Love is in the small things of life.
People can either look for the darkness or they can look for the light but they will always see what they look for. We are what we seek.
I didn’t mean people are unable to love. I’m talking about unconditional love. We are really able to forgive one another… but we don’t forgive everyone, everytime… our love is thus conditional and limiter, as we are.
I am talking about unconditional love too. Love is not love unless it is unconditional.
Here realistically you can speak only for yourself as I can speak only for myself. You cannot know who or what people forgive.
That is besides the point, we are not called to forgive selectively, we are called to forgive everyone. Even still for one single person to forgive once is to practise unconditional love and therefore it cannot be said that no-one loves unconditionally. And what about the grace of the one who forgives the other for not forgiving them? God’s Love which is unconditional is always operating and no human opinion can say God’s Love is dead in men and does not live in them because to say men have no unconditional love is to say that God is dead in them because such is the Love of God. To say as such is to say that Jesus is not alive in men and is dead.
If you believe that no-one loves unconditionally you are free to believe that, I just don’t share that view of my brothers and sisters with you; I believe Christ Jesus is in them and He lives in them and His Word is alive and active in them.
But, in my personal experience, I think we are not able to love unconditionally out of God’s Love. And, in my personal experience, we are not able to be connected to God all the time…
Romans 7,19 “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.”
I don’t know what you mean and I’d like to understand.
Are you saying that because we sin we cannot love unconditionally? Or are you saying that we do not love unconditionally all of the time? Or are you saying that people who do not have faith in God cannot love unconditionally?
I believe we are all, believer and unbeliever, connected/make communion/ strive to union and full union to God all the time or we would not live, but there are varying definintions of the depth of those connections or union to God, in other words no-one is outside of God’s Love, He loves everyone equally. Are you talking about sin as a disconnection (fall from union with) from God?
Is it possible for a person who by their own conscience (because no other person can judge the state of their soul) can say that they have committed mortal sin and still for them in this state can make an act of unconditional love? I would say yes it is and therefore sin cannot stop unconditional love because it’s source is God and is God and God upholds all men, what do you think about that?
I am looking forward to your thoughts because I would like to understand you and what you mean. Thank you in advance for your reply.
what is meant is that one shouldn’t get “intimately” involved with people who don’t follow Christ. It brings me down & the scriptures tell us not to be unequally yoked with unbelivers. I pray for them, though. I pray for and love everyone. But i will not let someone cause me to stumble. I stumble enough on my own…
I think u mean that we are not able to FEEL totally connected to God all the time. I feel more or less connected with God all the time. Of course, it takes a lot of prayer/meditation and adoration to get to that point. When i am out in the world, i sometimes feel very separated from God… but i’m not sure that means that i truly AM separated… or just distracted…
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