Our society conditions us to expect love in response to our performance. It's all too natural to want to be around the successful person, celebrating their victories, and basking in the light ourselves while ignoring or even trodding on the unsuccessful. Even the same person we celebrated one minute is forgotten or despised the next for failure to succeed.
- A local football quarterback in Texas is a celebrity one year, and the next he is booed and even harassed at his home (ahem, Texan fans).
- The student who struggles with learning only has his failure reinforced by the teacher, while the A student is held as an example.
- The child star who was once beloved is now headline news around the clock for days for breaking the law.
And our society moves on to the next person to idolize. Maybe seeing that person who succeeds gives us hope that we might contain the same seeds of success inside ourselves, and we hope they can inspire that seed to germinate. Their failures likewise may remind of us our vulnerabilities, and we want to believe they deserved their failure. We see the natural tendency in the book of Job when his companions want to find a reason for his suffering and place the blame Job's character and even blame his children for their own deaths (Job 8:4).
What is so unnatural about God's love is that He first loved us when we were too distracted and too subject to our sin nature to care for Him. "We love him because He first loved us" (I. Jn 4:19). The central moment in the Bible, the passion of Christ, is the penultimate expression of God's long-suffering exhibited in the preceding years to Israel and continued to today. This may sound fluffy and ethereal, but it's quite practical and affects our daily lives. God's love becomes manifested in people who he loves and spreads (I. Jn. 4:21). It is what inspires us to take actions that are unselfish without needing to justify our "goodness," since we know it's not our goodness but God's to begin.
God's love is what breaks the cycle of performance-based love and gives rest.
