Love For No Reason

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” (Jn 3:16) 

“For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.” (Rom 5:10) 

Recently it occurred to me that we love because. We love our wives because they are pretty, take good care of us, gave us wonderful children and on and on. We love our church and friends because… We love our children because… There isn’t anything in our lives that we love and don’t have a reason for why we love it or them. 

This attitude causes all sorts of problems for us that we don’t realize until someone points it out, like I’m hoping to do here.

Here’s the first problem that occurred to me, God loves us for no reason at all other than that he loves us. He does love us for a reason, but it has nothing to do with us. He loves us because he is love. This by itself isn’t a problem, in fact its kind of nice, but because we don’t love this way, we can’t or don’t realize how great the gospel really is. God loved us so he sent his son to die for us. When we were enemies, God sent his son to die for us. He loved his enemies and wanted to save them from judgement, so he sent his son to die for them.

Here’s where we get into trouble with this, because we only love when there are good reasons (in the beloved), we think that he loves because he has good reasons. We don’t know what those reasons are, but because there must be at least one, we think we earned his love, or at least that he made us loveable (he must have seen potential in us). There must be something good or even great is us if God would love us enough to send his son to die for us. And we strut off down the road totally missing the point.

From here we create a theology that says, because God loves me, and that means I’m pretty great, God owes me and wants to bless me because I’m so great. And Gospel gets compromised into something that leaves me in charge and not Jesus. I’m the Lord not Jesus. And the first place it shows itself is when we “invite Jesus into my heart.” This attitude or idea has ramifications for all of life. I’ll point out a couple below.

The point, I mentioned a minute ago, is that our relationship with God is totally because of Grace. When we forget that, we fall back (if we were ever out) into sin. When we think we deserved to be saved or that we somehow earned his recognition and love, we are still in our sins. In coming to Christ, we need to know—in our bones—that we were horrible and total losers and sinners. We need to know in our bones that there was and continues to be nothing in and around us that endeared us to God. We need to agree with Jeremiah when he said, “The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it?” (Jer 17:9). 

In one sense, our salvation is a miracle. Miracles are acts of God that he does totally out of the blue. They aren’t expected, don’t happen all the time, shouldn’t happen, but they do. We didn’t deserve God’s favor in any way and yet, here we are, walking into the throne room of God, dressed in righteousness. But it isn’t our righteousness we’re dressed in. It is Christ’s righteousness. If it weren’t for him, we wouldn’t be here. He died, so that we can stand before God and worship him (which we totally couldn’t do before), and praise him and sing hymns to him, and ask him for stuff. We get to have a personal with the God of the universe and it has nothing at all to do with how cute we are. It is totally because of the death and resurrection of Jesus. It’s all of grace from top to bottom.

And because we didn’t earn or deserve it in any way, Jesus is Lord of everything. Because our relationship with God is all of grace, we need to pour ourselves into learning what it means that Jesus is Lord and for the sake of this little article we need to learn what “love for no reason” really means.

Here’s another way that we get into trouble because we have no idea how to love without there being a reason. God calls us to love like he loves (Jn 13:34). This means that we are to love others for no other reason than that God loves them…for no reason. When we love for reasons, when those reasons go away or step out for a smoke, or were maybe never there, we think we can stop loving. But this denies the Gospel. A husband says, “my wife has become a shrew.” Therefore, he thinks he’s justified in not loving her anymore. The reason(s) he loved her before, are gone. But this kind of thinking is sinful. The bible tells him to love her. This isn’t because she is worthy of love, she might be a shrew, it is because God loves her (and him) and tells her husband to love her like Christ loves the church (Eph. 5:25).

Suppose a wife says, her husband is a total loser. He was all hunky, a star of his college basketball team, but now he just lays around all day drinking beer and scratching his belly. The bible tells her to love her husband (Tit 2:4), to respect him (Eph 5:33), and to submit to him as if he was the Lord himself (1 Pet 3:6). How can she do this if she needs to have reasons to do it before she will, or can, do it? By loving her husband like God loves her, for no reason other than that God loves him, and her.

What if, a boss turns out to think that he is the center of the universe and that he really has it in for you? Every chance he gets he says demeaning and insulting things to you. Whenever, he gets thirsty he tells you to get him a cup of coffee and how to make it. He gets on you about every little thing you do. There doesn’t seem to be a time at work when he isn’t watching you, waiting for you to make a mistake so he can loudly tell you about it. You go to your Christian friend at work and tell hm about it and his response is, “All that seems to be true, do you love him?” “No! Didn’t you hear a word I said? He’s a bad man. I hate everything about him, and he hates me with a vile passion.” “Yes, but do you love him?”

Of course, your friend is right. But how do you love someone who so vehemently hates you? How do you love someone who is so strongly your enemy? The biggest thing is how do you love someone when there are no positive reasons to love him? You love him like Christ loved the church (1 Pet 2:21-25). When we were enemies of God, Christ died for us. (Rom 5:10) He died for us to make us his friends (Jn 15:12-17). He lives in us so that we can be involved in making his enemies into friends (Mt 28:19-20). You need to love him like God loved you, for no reason other than that he is love and he has called you to join him in loving everyone around you with the same kind of love, for no reason.

Love like God loves—for no reason other than that God is love and you live and move and have your being in him.

I hope this helps.

Photo by Ryan Franco on Unsplash