GOD LOVES US UNCONDITIONALLY
(Monday, November 18)
“If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, will he not also give us all things with him? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies; who is to condemn? Is it Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised from the dead, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us? Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, ‘For thy sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.’ No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Rom 8: 31b-39)
It’s hard for us, if we are feeling down, to accept God’s unconditional love for us without saying, “Yes, BUT…” This is why here St. Paul lists all conceivable (and not conceivable) obstacles to God’s love for us, to assure us that none of these, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God. We need such reassurances, when our own powerlessness obscures our view of the power of God; when our own lack of love for ourselves makes us doubt God’s great love for us.
Let me not project the limitations of our own, human love, with its oft-nonsensical demands and defeats, onto God. “We are more than conquerors,” the Apostle reminds me, in the whole business of love, not through our own, limited capacity to love, but “through Him who loved us.” It’s so nice that St. Paul calls us winners here, or even more than winners (“more than conquerors”), because in times of failure or rejection or persecution many of us may feel like losers.
This Monday let me love myself and others humbly, as God loves us. In practical terms, this means letting go of nonsensical and unreasonable demands and expectations of myself and others, doing the next right thing, simply and lightly. And let me let myself “more than conquer,” in Him, all that blocks me from the simplicity and clarity of love.
