The most important thing I’ve ever learned is that God’s love is unlimited and unconditional. We are loved right here, right now, just the way we are. This is the gospel—what the Greeks called the euangellion, the “good news.”

Of course I have also learned other important things too. I have learned that it is possible to be genuinely thoughtful, scientifically informed, and authentically Adventist—all at the same time. Fifty years ago, in the large classroom at the southeast corner on the main floor of La Sierra Hall, where the Stahl Center is currently located, Dr. Heppenstall used to say, “Of course it’s dangerous to think, but it’s more dangerous not to think.”

I have learned that to be most authentically Adventist is to be progressively Adventist—always on the lookout for better understandings of God, the world, and ourselves. As Ellen White once wrote, “Whenever the people of God are growing in grace, they will be constantly obtaining a clearer understanding of His Word. They will discern new light and beauty in its sacred truths. This has been true in the history of the church in all ages, and thus it will continue to the end.” Our theological heritage is not a stockade to imprison our thinking, but a platform on which to build.

I have learned that praying doesn’t keep bad things from happening. My freshman year at La Sierra was the first time since the second grade that I went to the same school with my brother Dick. At the end of the year I got a ride home to Michigan, while he stayed on campus to get out a summer issue of the Criterion. The day I left, we went to the room in Calkins Hall he had shared with Milo Loye, who graduated that year. Dick and I knelt beside the bunk beds and prayed that God would take care of each of us. It was nothing special, really. I got home as planned, but Dick was killed in a head-on collision on Highway 66 near Kingman, Arizona.

I have learned many things in 50 years as pastor, teacher, and theologian. But nothing else is as important as knowing that God’s love is unlimited and unconditional—that we are truly loved—right here, right now, just the way we are. This is the meaning of grace As the writer Philip Yancey put it:

Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more—no amount of spiritual calisthenics and renunciations, no amount of knowledge gained from seminaries and divinity schools, no amount of crusading on behalf of righteous causes. And grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less—no amount of racism or pride or pornography or adultery or even murder.²

A week ago yesterday, in a courtroom in Nevada, a 33-year-old woman was sentenced to spend the rest of her life in prison without the possibility of parole. Two months ago she had pleaded guilty to two counts of murder. She had grown up in a good environment. She was the adopted daughter of a Christian family. She attended church schools. For a short time she was a student here at La Sierra. But for some reason or other, things did not go well. She eventually married, but the marriage came apart. She became involved in various kinds of self-destructive behaviors. After she was arrested she spent time in jail, and under psychiatric care.

She was visited by family and friends, and by Albert Tilstra, a La Sierra alumnus who served for many years as a prison chaplain, and is now a pastor in Nevada. He encouraged her to think of other things besides herself, her predicament, and her problems. He also encouraged her to invest some time and effort in the workbook Experiencing God. Over a period of a year and a half she began to realize that God loved her unconditionally, and was still on her side. She realized that she was, as she says, “created to be God’s friend.” Another La Sierra graduate with whom she become acquainted was Bonnie Dwyer. She wrote to Bonnie: “God continues to amaze me every day [and] keeps teaching me new ways to grow in faith. . . . I am overflowing with joy, in the worst situation of my life.”

At the hearing just before her sentencing, she was not alone. Besides her attorney, Pastor Tilstra was there, and her family was there—her mother, her father, her sister, and her brother. In various ways they all said, for her and the court to hear: “We love her unconditionally.”

The sentence was not, of course, what she and her family and friends had hoped for. But that evening she called Pastor Tilstra and said, “I know that God is still on my side.” A couple of evenings ago she called here to say she wanted me to tell you her story. “I know God has a plan for my life,” she said. “It’s not God’s original plan. It’s plan B—or maybe plan F.” When I asked her about her future, all of which she will spend in prison, she said, “I want to tell other women in prison that there’s nothing God cannot forgive.” Of her parents, she said, “They taught me what true love is.”

We talked about stories of “jailhouse conversions” that don’t last, and of course we don’t know—she doesn’t know—what her experience will be two or twenty years from now. But we do know that it was right—it is always right for all of us—to say, “God is on my side.” That’s where God always is, because God “desires everyone to be saved” (1 Timothy 2:4), “not wanting any to per-ish” (2 Peter 3:9).

This is the most important thing anyone can ever know: God’s love is unlimited and unconditional. In a sermon here a couple of years ago, Pastor Chris Oberg put it even more plainly than Philip Yancey: “You can’t be bad enough to keep God from loving you, and you can’t be good enough to make God love you more.”³ God “makes the ungodly right,” because “Christ died for the ungodly” (Rom 4:5; 5:6).

This is the proper center of all our Christian beliefs and Christian living. This is the most fundamental definition of who we are. When we know this—really know it, believe it, and live it—nothing else matters decisively. Of course other things matter relatively. Our health matters; our careers matter; our children matter; our financial stability matters; people’s opinions of us matter. But nothing else matters decisively, ultimately. Nothing else defines us as fundamentally as this: we are loved unconditionally by the Personal Source of all reality.

This is the center of our theology, our thinking about God and ourselves. We understand the death of Jesus as the supreme revelation of God’s unconditional love. We understand and enjoy the Sabbath as an another expression of God’s unconditional love. We understand and live the Advent hope as a result of God’s unconditional love. We understand the continuing ministry of Christ for us in heaven as an ongoing actualization of God’s unconditional love.

This reality that God’s love for us is unlimited and unconditional is absolutely astounding.

The whole world loves a winner. We were reminded of this over and over again last month as we watched the Winter Olympics. We saw the world’s best skaters and skiers and snowboarders standing on the winner’s platform with smiles on their faces and flowers in their arms (and sometimes tears in their eyes) as they listened to their country’s national anthem and received their gold medals.

But while the whole world loves a winner, the good news—the gospel—is that God loves the losers just as much. God loves the dropouts, the academic failures, just as much as the valedictorians and the summa cum laudes. God loves us just as much when we mess things up as when we manage to do things right. So the meaning of our lives comes not from being winners but from being loved. Our security comes not from our success, but from knowing we are loved—right here, right now, just the way we are. We are loved with a love that is unlimited and unconditional—because it depends on what God is, not on what we do. This is why Chris Oberg and Philip Yancey are exactly right: we can never do anything bad enough to make God stop loving us, and we can never do anything good enough to make God love us more.

This is what Jesus told Nicodemus during their famous nighttime conversation. “God loved the world in such a way that he gave his unique Son so that whoever trusts him will not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” In other words:

What you need to know, Nicodemus, is how God loves the world. Well, here’s how—God gave his Son, his own self, really, to the world. And here’s why—so no one would have to be destroyed by sin. By believing in this Son, trusting that what he says about God’s love is true, anyone can have real life, whole and lasting life, eternal life. You see, Nicodemus, God didn’t go to all the trouble of sending the Son just to tell the world how bad it is, to tell people how defective they are. I should say not! The reason God sent the Son was to make people right by showing people how much they are loved.

This is what Jesus was telling Nicodemus. This is what the woman’s parents in the Nevada courtroom were telling her. This is what God is telling us all the time by the ministry and death of Jesus.

Nothing—absolutely nothing—I have learned is as important as this, spiritually as well as theologically. If we understand it, if we really believe it, and make it the center of our faith and life, it transforms the way we think and feel about God and ourselves and everyone else. It is a complete “paradigm shift”—a new, radically different perspective. It is a spiritual equivalaent of the “Copernican revolution”—experiencing reality from the opposite direction, experience God as the Savior who is always on our side, experiencing ourselves as loved unconditionally.

To get this message—to know it and believe it and live by it—is, as Jesus told Nicodemus, to be born again. It is to be born of the Spirit, to be born from above, to live in another dimension, As my scriptwriting friend Joel Garbutt says, it is a metamorphosis, a change from a caterpiller into a butterfly.

It means that we never again have to worry about being good enough. We never again have to worry about being acceptable, because we are already accepted. It means we never have to worry about being left out, because we are already in. And with this spiritual security, we can relax. We don’t have to worry, and we don’t have to pretend. We don’t have to live in the fast lane; we can get out of the “rat race.” We can be compassionate and generous. We can enjoy the evidences of grace in our lives—family and friends, flowers and music and good conversation.

One of the great treasures of our Adventist heritage is the little book Steps to Christ. It is widely recognized as a resource for Christian spirituality, and it is just as valuable as a resource for Christian theology. Here are four sentences from the first chapter:

The enemy of good blinded the minds of men, so that they looked upon God with fear; they thought of Him as severe and unforgiving. Satan led men to conceive of God as a being whose chief attribute is stern justice,—one who is a severe judge, a harsh, exacting creditor. He pictured the Creator as a being who is watching with jealous eye to discern the errors and mistakes of men, that He may visit judgments upon them. It was to remove this dark shadow, by revealing to the world the infinite love of God, that Jesus came to live among men.⁴

One of the great ironies of life—Christian life and Adventist life—is how difficult it is for us to believe that God’s love really is unlimited and unconditional—and how easy it is to forget it.

When we talk about God’s unconditional love, some people get nervous. Some evangelical Christians ask, “But what about sin? Doesn’t sin have to be punished? And what about justice? Isn’t justice as important as love?” Some Adventists ask, “But what obedience? Isn’t it important to keep the commandments? Doesn’t it matter how we act?”

These questions are understandable, and probably inevitable, because we live in a world where, like the Olympics, ability and performance count. When we apply to graduate school or medical school, or law school, the question is: How good are our grades and our test scores? When we want to buy a house or a car, the question is: How good is our credit rating? Much of the time, ability and performance do count. If I am having surgery, I don’t want a surgeon who got through medical school and surgical training “by grace.” I want a surgeon with recognized competence. If I am going to a concert, I don’t want to listen to an orchestra whose members got in “by grace.” As a matter of fact, andidates for positions in the Los Angeles Philharmonic audition behind a screen, so the judges don’t know the identity, or the appearance, or age, or gender, or ethnicity of any of the candidates. In these situations the only thing that counts is performance.

But when it comes to the ultimate value of our lives, what counts is the fact that we are loved with a love that is unlimited and unconditional. This is a value from another, transcendent realm. It reflects another dimension—something like a fifth dimension—of our existence. It does not negate the other dimensions of time and space, where performance counts, but it is a wonderful and necessary complement to them. Like time and space it is an essential aspect of our total reality. And like time and space it intersects all of our reality.

So the best way to think about the Ten Commandment (and all the other instructions in the Bible) is in relationship to God’s unlimited and unconditional love. As my classmates will remember, Edward Heppenstall used to explain the essential difference between Paul and the Pharisees: The Pharisees said, “I keep the law; therefore I am saved.” Paul said, “I am saved; therefore I keep the law.” In other words, the Pharisees said, “We do what God tells us to do, so we know God loves us.” We say, “We know God loves us, so we want to do what God tells us.”

God’s love is very much related to the way we live. But it is the motivation, not the result. God’s love and justice are not in tension with each other; they are not conflicting principles. Nor are they two equally basic principles vying for attention and status inside God: God’s love is more fundamental than justice. God’s love is the source of God’s justice, and God’s justice is the expression of God’s love.

In the Bible, the fundamental idea of divine justice is not a matter of punishment but a matter of making things right. To bring justice is to establish right relationships. Justice is not retributive but creative. And because God’s love includes everybody, it is the motivation for human justice too. When I remember that God loves everyone else just as much as me, I have to treat everyone with respect—even the bully in the big black SUV who cuts in front of my little white CRX on the freeway.

Back in La Sierra Hall, on the same floor, but in a classroom that was close to the main entrance, Tom Blincoe suggested one day that Hebrew text of Ten Commandments can be translated as a picture of life with God, rather than as a list of demands. “You won’t kill. You won’t commit adultery. You won’t steal. You won’t bear false witness. You won’t even covet.”

Some time later I learned about an interesting development in the language of the Bible. The Hebrew word torah originally meant “instruction”—the sort of thing one gets from a teacher. Then, when the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, torah became nomos, which meant custom, standard practice, regular procedure, the way things usually work. Later, when the Bible was translated into Latin, torah and nomos became lex, which meant a statute, the product of a legislative body. And finally, when the Bible was eventually translated Into English, torah, nomos, and lex became law, which meant an obligation, a requirement enforced by punishment, something we have to do, or else! So over time the gift of “instruction” became the demand of “law”—which feels very different, and is very different.

When I was in the third grade, I began taking violin lessons from Mrs. Van Ringelestein She was kind and patient, but also firm and demanding. She insisted that I work on bowing and fingering until I got them right. Practicing doing things her way was not always fun, but I knew that it was the only way to make the violin sound the way I wanted it to. Even when she thought I wasn’t practicing enough, I knew she was on my side. We both wanted the same thing: for me to learn how to play well.

The instructions in Scripture are for our benefit. “Do not steal” is not for God’s benefit (except that God wants what is best for us). Nor is it designed to test our loyalty to God, Nor is it intended primarily to help us develop character. All the instructions in Scripture are there to help us make our lives as good as they can be. When I was talking to Patty Cabrera a few months ago, she suggested that “somebody needs to write a book about the Ten Commandments with the title Ten Way to Have More Fun.” We follow God’s instructions because we want to get as much out of life as we can. There are all sorts of reasons for following God’s instructions, but getting God to love us isn’t one of them.

The past couple of Sunday mornings I watched some ABL (Adventist Ball League) games. The games I saw involved the “Minors”—boys and girls from 8 to 10—and the “Cadets”—5- to 7- year-olds. What impressed me most was not the ABL uniforms, which were classy, or even the ABL players, who were earnest and enthusiastic, but what I call the ABL theology.

In the Minors this year there are 14 boys and girls on a team. When a team is at bat, everyone on the team gets a turn. And when the team is in the field, everyone plays—the catcher and 13 fielders. If you are wondering why the pitcher isn’t one of the 14 players, that’s because pitcher is the coach of the team that is at bat. So the pitcher has a vested interest in as many batters as possible getting on base. (That’s something like God and us, isn’t it?) The pitches are slow and easy. And if the batter has trouble hitting the pitches, the umpire gets out a batting tee to hold the ball stationary right in front of the batter. The batting tee is adjustable so it can be put at the height where the batter will have the easiest time hitting it.

The umpires don’t just call the players safe or out; they help the players play the way they are supposed to. I watched David Venegas explain to the pint-size batters where and how to stand and hold the bat in order to have the best chance of hitting the ball. I watched him tell fielders how to hold their gloves in order to have the best chance of catching the ball if it came their way. I watched him show the catcher how to adjust her shin-pads so she wouldn’t trip on them. (That sounds something like God’s grace too, doesn’t it?) Grace is not just “unmerited favor”: it is God helping us do what we are supposed to do so we can have more fun.

At the end of the season, every player gets a trophy—every player, regardless of how many fly balls they didn’t catch, or how many times they threw the ball 6 feet over the first baseman’s head, or how many times they got called out for running outside the base lines. The trophy isn’t earned; it’s a gift. I’m sure the ABL Minors and Cadets aren’t perfect, but when things are working right, they are a theology of grace in action. These boys and girls are learning a great deal more than how to hit and throw and catch a ball.

There are just two kinds of people in the world: those who know that God loves them, and those who don’t. Unfortunately, the second group is much larger than the first. More than anything else, God wants us to be part of the first group, the people who know that they are loved unconditionally. God wants us to live in the freedom, joy, and generosity of that love. And God invites us to help make the first group larger and larger and the second group smaller and smaller. This is an invitation that is easy to accept when we remember what the gospel really is: that God’s love is unlimited and unconditional that we are loved right here, right now, just the way we are.

Fritz Guy
La Sierra University Church
March 9, 2002