Psalm 31:16b
God’s Unfailing Love
October 8, 2006
Save me in your unfailing love. (NIV)
The term used in our text for this morning–“love”–is a familiar one. It’s used anywhere and everywhere to describe just about anything and everything. In fact, it can have such a wide range of meanings that the term, when it stands alone, has become just about meaningless.
But when you add an adjective to it like the one in our text–“unfailing”–now the concept becomes a bit more narrowly defined–and therefore a bit clearer, a bit sharper.
“Unfailing love”–the writer of Proverbs says that “What a man desires is unfailing love” (Proverbs 19:22). Not “What a man desires is love”, but “What a man desires is unfailing love.”
And we do. We want a love that we can count on, and unfailing love. We want a love that will always be there, no matter what—a love that will be there when we are lovable, and one that will be there when we are unlovable. We want a love that does not change or shift. We want a love that we know will be there, a love that makes us feel confident, safe, secure.
But all too often we’ve experienced something far less than unfailing love. Too often we’ve experienced a failing, a fleeting, a false love. If I gave you a few moments here to dig into the depths of your person—and if you were willing to experience the pains again—you would be able to tell of instances in which you’ve been the recipient of a failing love.
Maybe you’ve got a yearbook from your freshman year in high school that someone signed “B/F/F” (Best Friends Forever), and as you look at the name, you painfully remember that they should have signed it “Best friends foraslongasyouearnmyfriendship” or “Best friends forrightnowanyway” or “Best friends for as long as it takes me to get into the cool group, and then I’m going to drop you like a bag full of maggots.”
Maybe you have a wedding album whose pictures were the record of the declaration of an unfailing love—and were later given divorce papers that were the declaration of a failed—perhaps epically failed—love.
Maybe you have a child who years and years ago declared their unfailing love to you—a love that you soon learned was pretty much dependent upon whether you gave them a bedtime snack or were as permissive as “everyone else’s parents” or were willing to bail them out of trouble for the 17th time.
Or maybe it’s nothing quite as dramatic—but, one might argue, no less sad—than that. Maybe you’re in a relationship in which you don’t ever quite know what to expect from the other person. Much of the time things are good, but periodically something will trigger an explosion—and so you feel like you have to be walking on eggshells in order to earn/maintain/avoid losing their love. It feels unsafe, shifting, changing, and not secure.
In fact, to some degree or other, that describes every love that you experience from others. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not saying that you have bad marriages, bad relationships or bad friendships. But they are not perfect marriages, relationships and friendships—and no matter how good they may be, the love there at least occasionally fails.
And for that matter, so does your love in those relationships. What makes that all the more disappointing, all the more humbling, all the more surprising is that you never thought it would.
You truly meant to be “Best Friends Forever” when you wrote it in the yearbook. And since you wrote it with no strings attached, you were under something of an obligation to be just that—a best friend to that person forever. But they changed, you changed, something changed—hey, it happens, right?
But the unfailing love you pledged to your spouse on your wedding day—that love was never going to fail. You knew it. You knew that this was the person who would finally inspire you, lift you up above the lovelessness that had so often been a part of you in the past. This was the person who would unearth the love that was deep within you, that had always been waiting for the right person to unlock it.
In the movie “As Good As It Gets”, in what surely must have been one of the oddest on-screen romance pairings in history, Jack Nicholson says to Helen Hunt, “You make me want to be a better man.” He believed that she would bring out the good that was always in him, that the insensitive jerk he had been in the past would be put to death by this angel of goodness that had entered his life. I guess it worked in the movie, because the curtain can fall before the rest of their lives had to happen.
But our marriages aren’t the movies. And although at times our spouse has made us want to be a better person, a person of unfailing love, too often we’ve been surprised—and horrified—to find out just what sort of a person we were, as our love still failed—sometimes spectacularly. And when our spouse’s unfailing love for us failed even for a second, we saw just how conditional our love actually was—as we responded in kind.
And the unfailing love you knew you would have for your child as he or she first stared up at you with those wide, new-to-the-world eyes—a love that would surely never fail this precious creature? After 54 “Are we there yet”s, it failed loudly, harshly, maybe even sarcastically. It was not merely a love of words without deeds, but now even the words themselves weren’t there!
Oh, we might try to claim that even while we were upset with our spouse or our children, even when we were saying harsh words to them, we still loved them. But that argument rings hollow, and deep down we know it, because the anger that was not only in our tone of voice but also boiling in our hearts confirms the hollowness of such an argument.
And it confirms the fact that we are undeserving of receiving an unfailing love, that we have been guilty of a love that has repeatedly failed others.
And that’s not merely humbling but it’s also frightening. Because when we have a failing love we have not only failed others, but we have also failed God. You see, in a sense, God doesn’t demand much of us. The Bible says that all God really expects of us is love. Jesus says one of the two greatest commandments–one of the two only commandments, really–is to love our neighbors. And the Bible says that “Love is the fulfillment of the law.” (Romans 13:10)
But make no mistake about it. God demands not an occasional love, not the sort of love that fades in and out like a cellphone in a deep valley. God demands an unfailing love. Jesus said that we are to–and here Jesus speaks the other of the two only commandments–“love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” In other words, our love for God is to be a love that never fails. Ever.
And if we have failed our spouse, our children, our friends spectacularly, we have failed God even more. Oh, the words, the pledges, the promises have been there. On our confirmation day, we promised God that we would be “best friends forever.” But then something else caught our eye, something that seemed more appealing, something that seemed more exciting, more exotic, more sophisticated than having an unfailing love for God and for him alone. And so we ran off, leaving God standing there like a 7th-grade girl left out of the cool group on the playground, wondering how someone’s words and their actions could be at such odds.
The words, the pledges, the promises have been there. We’ve sung that he should take our life and let it be consecrated to him, that he should take our silver and our gold, that not a mite would we withhold, that he should take our moments and our days and let them flow in ceaseless praise to him, the one whom we exist to love with an unfailing love. But then we’ve told him that there are certain areas of our lives that are just that–ours–and that we were going to live the way we were going to live. We’ve told him that our silver and our gold had been earned by us, and therefore he should be content with something of a half-hearted, half-trusting approach to honoring him with our wealth. And we’ve redefined “ceaseless” (or we might say, “unfailing”) praise to mean “60 minutes each Sunday morning.”
And we look at our failed love of God and of our neighbor, and we know that God is unfailing. Unfailing in his resolve to punish sin. Unfailing in his intent to reveal his justice as a God who brings unfailing judgment upon those whose love for him has failed.
And that condemnation falls on everyone, for everyone’s love has failed. No, we should not expect to find unfailing love from God any more than we should expect to find unfailing love from any human being.
Except for one. Except for Jesus. Jesus had an unfailing love. Read the gospels and hear Jesus’ love. Perhaps more important, see Jesus’ love–a love that was not a “love” of mere words, but also of actions–yes, a love of the heart. Eight times in the gospels Jesus is spoken of (or speaks of himself as having) “compassion” on people. (Mt 9:36; 14:14; 15:32; 20:34; Mk 1:41; 6:34; 8:2; Lk 15:20) Mind you, these were people who were demanding of Jesus’ time, who had their own needs and desires far more in mind than Jesus’ needs and desires. These were people who came to Jesus even as he was trying to get away with his disciples to get some much-needed rest. And yet he had compassion on them. That’s a word that speaks to the heart, speaks of love, doesn’t it? It’s not a word that speaks of obligation, of the need to put on a good show for those who might be watching. It’s a word that speaks of a pure heart, of an unfailing love.
Or consider the time a man came to Jesus and asked what he needed to do to gain eternal life. Jesus told the man that if he wanted to do something to gain eternal life, he should obey the commandments–do not murder, do not commit adultery, and so on. The man looked at Jesus and said, “Check. Check. Check. I’ve done them all.” How clueless this man was! How blind he was to his own spiritual condition! How unlovable he was in his spiritual arrogance!
And yet we read that “Jesus looked at him and loved him” (Mark 10:21).
And we may be sure that Jesus’ love was an unfailing love. On Maundy Thursday, the night he was betrayed, John says about Jesus, “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the last” (John 13:1, alternate reading taken from NIV footnote).
So many times Jesus’ love could have failed, but it never did. If it had, everyone around him would have understood. After all, everyone has a limits, everyone has a breaking point, everyone’s love eventually fails under the strain of dealing with unlovable people. But Jesus’ love never did.
On the one hand, that’s amazing. It’s amazing to think that Jesus was tempted in every way, just as we are, surrounded with just as many unlovable people as were are, and yet never failed in his love. And yet on the other hand, it’s not amazing at all. After all, Jesus was God’s son, and God is unfailing love.
Therefore we are able to pray confidently with the psalmwriter, “Save me in your unfailing love.” There’s no other reason for God to save us other than his unfailing love. We don’t pray “Save me because I’m sort of lovable.”
And yet God’s love is unfailing. In fact, “unfailing love” is so much a central part, an essential part of who God is that the phrase is used thirty times in the Old Testament to describe him. We know from the Old Testament that God’s love is unfailing because we see him showing that love to sinners like Adam and Eve, sinners like Abraham, like King David, like the nation of Israel.
And we know that God’s love is unfailing because in spite of the repeated falls, the repeated unlovableness of these individuals, he unfailingly kept his promise to send his Son to this earth to live a life of unfailing love in our place, to unflinchingly approach the cross in his unfailing love for sinners.
Yes, thanks be to God that his love is unfailing, that he has not–as the hymnwriter says, “left us oft as we have left him” (Christian Worship: 588, verse 4)–yes, has not left us even once, but will, as Jesus did with his disciples, love us to the end–or, as the hymnwriter says confidently, “On to the close, O Lord, abide with me.” How safe, how secure we are living in God’s constant, unfailing love. Thanks be to God that he has answered our cry, that he has saved us in his unfailing love.
And now that he has done so, now that he has erased the instances of our unfailing love, let the failing nature of our love in the past remain in the past today, and let us instead be motivated by Christ’s unfailing love to have that same sort of unfailing love towards others. To slightly reword the words of John, “We love [unfailingly] because he first [unfailingly] loved us.” (1 John 4:19) So let us love unfailingly. Let us, as Jesus himself urges, “Love each other as I have loved you.” (John 15:12) As Christ showed patience with his slow-to-understand disciples, let us show patience with our sometimes slow-to-understand children. As Christ showed unfailing love to one of the disciples who was closest to him, Peter, when he denied Jesus three times, let us show unfailing love when the person (or people) closest to us betray us. As Christ showed unfailing love to all, regardless of who they were, may we show unfailing love to those who deserve it, those who do not deserve it, those we know, and those whom we do not know.
How good it is to live in the security of God’s unfailing love! What a joy it is to show that unfailing love to others! Amen.