God’s Contraconditional Love

” The Gospel is better than unconditional love. The Gospel says, “God accepts you just as Christ is. God has ‘contraconditional’ love for you.” Christ bears the curse you deserve. Christ is fully pleasing to the Father and gives you His own perfect goodness. Christ reigns in power, making you the Father’s child and coming close to you to begin to change what is unacceptable to God about you. God never accepts me “as I am.” He accepts me “as I am in Jesus Christ.” The center of gravity is different. The true Gospel does not allow God’s love to be sucked into the vortex of the soul’s LUST for acceptability and worth in and of itself. Rather, it radically decenters people- what the Bible calls “fear of the Lord: and “faith”- to look outside themselves. ”
-taken from the Journal of Biblical Counseling Volume 13- number 2- Winter 1995- author- David Powlison

I read this recently and am still setting in the beauty and the truth of it. The world loves to tell me messages like, “I love you unconditionally, you could never do anything to keep me from loving you!” It comforts a heart yearning for acceptance. I know that I am God’s daughter and fully loved. Yet, in my sin, not accepted. My sin is not acceptable. However, “In Christ,” I am acceptable.

But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. Romans 8:10

The cross isn’t just a demonstration that God loves me, says Powlison. It loses its force as the substitutionary atonement by the perfect Lamb in my place, who invites me repentance for heart-pervading sin.

Life and freedom and GRACE is found only at the cross of Jesus. It is repentance to see sin, to confess, to walk in the light(sharing struggles with others), and experience heart change. But, what is the goal of it?

1 Peter 1:8 Though you have not seen him, you love him Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, 9obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

There will always be more sin to see. Lately, there is more sin to deal with in my heart that is acutally possible to understand. Yet, God promises me that I am righteous, “In Christ!”

Reminder of grace: Ephesians 2: 4But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, 5even when we were dead in our trespasses made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— 6and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in not your own doing; it is the gift of God!

As I ponder the riches of the Cross, I am in awe of my Lord Jesus’ gifts to me, even today. I am thankful that God’s love is contraconditional, that “in Christ,” I am accepted, holy, righteous, whole, loved, beautiful, and it is all GRACE.

Filed under Uncategorized |