Real Love, Without Conditions | A Virtual Pilgrimage for Advent & Christmas: Christmas Octave Day 2

ValLimar's second Christmas reflection proclaims the heart of the Incarnation: a God who loves without condition, who comes anyway, and whose love took on flesh so that nothing could ever separate us from it.

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Transcript

🎶 God gives me love.

God gives me love.

God gives me love.

God is good to me. 🎶 

“In this was manifested the love of God toward us: that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. Herein is love — not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.”

So many people have been loved wrongly so many times.

Love that comes with conditions. Love that says, I’ll care about you if you perform well.If you make me look good.If you don’t need too much.

That is really just an exchange. You give me what I need, I’ll give you what you need, and we’ll call it love.

Yes, I found true love in my husband, Frank. But I didn’t know the true depth of love until I had a child. The moment they placed my daughter in my arms, I felt something I’d never felt before. I loved her before she did anything for me — before she smiled or achieved or made me proud.

I loved her because she was mine. And I knew — I knew in my bones — that I would do anything for her, give anything, sacrifice anything.

This is how God loves. Not the broken, conditional love so many of us have learned.

God’s love is the kind that gives everything — the kind that doesn’t wait for you to deserve it, or earn it, or even want it. God showed this kind of love by sending Jesus, the only begotten Son of God.

This is love shown not just through a sermon, or a feeling, or a theological argument, but through action — through giving — through the Incarnation.

At Christmas, we celebrate God’s love becoming tangible, visible, touchable. You can’t argue with a baby. You can’t intellectualize away a manger. Love took on flesh and blood and entered our world — and nothing has been the same since.

The part that blows me away is this: God loved us first. God didn’t wait for us to reach out first. God didn’t wait for us to deserve it, or earn it, or even want it.

God loved us first. God loved us anyway. God loves us still.

I think about the world Jesus was born into — a world that didn’t recognize God, that had no room for God, that would eventually kill him. God made flesh. Jesus knew all of this. He knew every rejection he would face, every betrayal, every denial. He knew about Judas and the cross and the crowd screaming, “Crucify him!”

Jesus knew — and he came anyway.

This is love. Real love. The kind that counts the cost and pays it anyway. The kind that knows you at your worst and chooses you — still.

The Christmas story is about God taking the first step every time. Making the first move. Initiating the relationship. We didn’t climb up to heaven to find God. God came down to earth to find us.

We didn’t break through to God. God broke through to us.

Love came down.

The Incarnation is God’s ultimate expression of our worth. God didn’t come for perfect people. God came for broken people. God didn’t come because we had it all together. God didn’t wait for us to become lovable. God made us lovable by loving us.

This is love — relentless, pursuing, never giving up. God’s love isn’t based on our performance; it’s based on God’s character. God loves because that is who God is.

And nothing — nothing — can separate us from that love.

Christmas proves it: God with skin on. Emmanuel. Reaching out his hand to a world that would nail him to a cross. A love that doesn’t protect itself, doesn’t shield itself, doesn’t hold back.

Love that gives everything. Risks everything. Loses everything — and wins.

That’s right. In the end, love wins.

This Christmas, let us not just celebrate an event from two thousand years ago. Let us celebrate the ongoing reality of God’s love — love that came down then and is still coming down now. Love that meets us in our mess and says, I’m here. I’m not going anywhere. You are mine, and I am yours.

And nothing will change that.

Love came down at Christmas. And because of that, nothing — no shadow, no sin, no failure, no shame, no regret, no past, no present, no future — nothing can separate us from the love of God that came down in Christ Jesus.

This is love: not that we loved God, but that God loved us — first, last, always, forever.

Amen.

🎶 God gives me love.

God is good to me. 🎶