Proportionality and the Love of God

Copyright  by Shea Oakley

All rights reserved

God’s love for us is not only unconditional; it is also not proportional. He does not love us only as much as we love Him. His love for us is not dependent on, or measured by, our love for Him. This is a vital truth for the struggling Christian to know.

It is easy to look into our hearts and not see “enough” love. There are two primary reasons for this. One is that we are self-centered by fallen nature, and this nature is not suddenly and completely eradicated by our coming to saving faith in Christ. Our flesh continues to war against the new spirit within us and the flesh is all about concern for itself at the expense of our fellow human beings. Such concern limits our ability to truly care about others and caring about others is one of the principle definitions of love. As long as the flesh has a significant hold on our hearts love is crowded out by self-interest.

The other reason we may not find much love within is because we have not known much love from the most important people in our lives, or the love we once knew from them has been lost somehow along the way. The absence or loss of love directed at us during the time before we came to know God may have shriveled our own capacity to give and receive love. Love cannot be easily given from a heart that has been wracked by sorrow and rejection. Without the ongoing healing of our souls we can find ourselves loving only grudgingly, under protest of spirit, and this is not love at all.

So between our selfish tendencies and our wounds in this life we may feel like we have very little love to offer to God, and this can frighten us because we know we are commanded to love Him “with all our heart, soul, mind and strength”. When we sense we are doing a terrible job of that we tend to fear. Our assumption can be that he must not feel very loving towards us, considering how little love we are able to muster up towards Him.

But the nature of God is not like our nature. Our Lord is love, perfect love. He embodies it and He has an inexhaustible supply of it. This love is shed upon the entire human race, even on those whose problem isn’t too little love for God, but no love for Him at all. This immeasurable affection has been aimed at the whole world, but only those who have opened themselves up to Jesus have truly opened themselves up to the love of God, and are able to receive it.

However if we have received even a little of it we have the potentiality to receive far more divine love, and that potentiality is not limited by our own heart not being able to fully reciprocate. In fact full reciprocation is impossible because we are finite, and God knows this. His love for us is thus not directly yoked to our love for Him. We love Him because He first loved us and proportionality is not a condition of that love. We will always start as candles compared to the Sun that is our God and candles that can only be lit by Him. In time we may become blazing fires in His hands, but we will never be “the Sun” and “the Sun” doesn’t expect us to be so.

In this life we cannot ever match God’s love for us. We can only receive it to the degree God enables us as we become willing to open our hearts to Him. We then can give it back to Him and to others, but likely always on a smaller scale than it was received. This is the true difference between the finite and the infinite, the imperfect and the perfect, and the reality of this difference can set us free from fear, because our Lord’s infinite and perfect love ultimately casts that fear out of us.