Conditions of God's Unconditional Love

Over the Holiday's I was fortunate to have some time to connect with Mike and Candice (who I hope will post something to Tomorrow's Church soon, so everyone doesn't grow weary of Kevin's endless rambling and yes, I just referred to myself in the 3rd person). But Mike and I had some time to dialogue about church thought and I wanted to share some of the conversation.

We have a peculiar faith that intertwines the seeming dichotomy between the unconditional love of a Creator and the conditions of restoring the relationship between Creator and creation.

So, for those of us called and captivated by who the church is today and what it needs to be tomorrow, we have work to do in a world that shrugs absolutes. Our world is comfortable with the idea of a God who loves and who says there is nothing that can separate us from that love (Romans 8). However, our world disdains attaching any condition to that love. An example would be peoples comfort and respect for the man named Jesus, like they respect Gandhi and MLK, but are not comfortable with accepting claims that Jesus is more than a man or for that matter, the only way to God.

I recently had a conversation with a pastor, in his middle age, great guy, and we were discussing the swinging pendulum of imbalanced theology and Christian movements. Like a rubber band, we seem to go from one side, often erring on extreme, to the other side - reaching a whole other extreme. And we came to the story of the Rich Young Ruler (Luke 18) and Jesus' interaction with him. Jesus not only saw what was lacking in the young ruler's faith, but shot straight to the issue - didn't pretend, didn't glaze over the issue - and then was willing to let him walk away saddened.

This pastor rightly accused our younger generation of being unwilling to let people walk away saddened by the conditions and the reality of the Liberating King story. I believe we must seek a balance in being able to dialogue with the world, engaged in our culture and still maintain our absolutes and the conditions of the gospel. And as I said to him, we are only trying to respond to his generations all-to-willingness to let people walk away not only saddened, but also pissed off.

There are a lot of thoughts about this, but I will end it with this; We have to bring balance to our practical theology and interactions with the world we are called to make disciples of. Discipleship necessitates conformity on some level, necessitates abiding in and under the conditions of God's unconditional love. Our challenge lies in simplifying what our absolutes really are. We must resist denominationalizing/dividing/separating over peripheral theological issues and center again on the love and person of Jesus Christ.

Thoughts...responses...