LOVE OF GOD

 God is love 
So God does not unconditionally love everybody in the sense that everybody will go to heaven. God is love. And because He is love, He cares about who we are and what we do. Because He is love, He hates evil. God’s love of what is good must lead to His judgment on what is evil, otherwise His love is empty. Yet there are a few ways in which God’s love is unconditional. God “is kind to the ungrateful and the evil” (Luke 6:35). He “desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4). When we become believers, we know that God has loved us with a special kind of unconditional love. His love for us is not based on anything that we did, but flows from who God is, because “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:9).

Abide in His love

But even when we are Christians, we can easily go wrong by talking about God’s unconditional love. Jesus tells us “abide in my love” (John 15:9). We can move away from God and experiencing God. God’s love for us is linked to our obedience. Jesus says there are two conditions for us if we want to be loved by God: loving Jesus and keeping His commandments – and these really are one and the same – (John 14:21). So we should not go through life thinking “God loves us- everything will be okay, it doesn’t matter what I do.” That is a wrong understanding of the love of God.