Gifts 2—Unconditional Love and Grace, episode 89

0:00 If you love a prodigal, you can discover, help, and hope for your wilderness journey right here at When You Love a Prodigal. And also help and hope for your own life journey. Today, we continue our wilderness exploration looking for treasured gifts. Were you able to see God's mercy in your life from last week? Were you able to extend that mercy to your loved ones? So as you listen this week, be sure to jot down any aha moments you have about possible gifts and how they might affect your relationship with your prodigal.

0:50 Several times on this podcast, I have mentioned this statement that I received directly from God. By definition, unconditional love doesn't require love in return. I know it's true. God loved me first, long before I loved him, when I was definitely living in my sense. And even after I responded to that love and accepted his gift of salvation, I haven't always loved him well, you know, by obeying him. But he has never quit loving me. That is unconditional love.

1:31 Parents learn this early. Even before a baby is born, they love her. And the moment they see her, they are head over heels in love. And that's a good thing because that baby demands everything and gives no love in return for quite a while. Unfortunately, they grow up and usually learn to love. Unfortunately, when they become teens, sometimes they break our hearts with words like, leave me alone. I hate you. Or in our case of our adopted son, you're not my real mother.

2:13 Our son often made it hard to love him. Many of his actions were enough to eradicate all my love for him. But they didn't. And I thought I was loving unconditionally. He first came to us because his birth mother couldn't care for him. And he was hurt and confused. He couldn't call me mom and he couldn't love me. That would be betraying his real mother. As the years passed, though, I grew to love him deeply. But as he grew, he had much pain to work through. He made lots of negative choices.

2:55 He was trying to figure out who he was and loving me was not a priority. And sometimes that was painful to me. And I would say to God, would it be so hard for him to be able to say, I love you to me just once on a birthday card or a Mother's Day card, not even real words? And the Lord responded so clearly, Judy, unconditional love doesn't require love in return. Yes, we can desire it, but it's not guaranteed at all. And if our love stops because we don't get love back, then it wasn't really unconditional.

3:41 What a gift Josh gave me, helping me begin to understand the depth of God's love for me. If I never loved him in return, God that is, or did what he asked me to do, or lived in a Christ-like manner, or even if I committed a terrible crime, God would keep loving me. I couldn't make him quit loving me. That's the kind of love, truly unconditional, that God asks us to have for our prodigals. When I began to understand that, I began to just keep on loving, no matter what he did.

4:27 I will never forget the day Josh said, I love you. Those words came from a painful situation of his own. I was grateful for the I love you that day. And I am grateful even now when those words come easily off his lips and are proved in his actions day after day. But it was a long wait, like 12 years, before he could say that to me. And I thank God that he used this boy, now a man, to teach me the real meaning of unconditional love. Most of us, we have some conditions, and we want this to happen, or this to be said, or this not to happen, and God says.

5:14 Those may not be good behaviors, but they don't affect my love for you. And I will give you my unconditional love and let it flow through you for this loved one who is causing you pain. So that's another gift. Mercy we looked at first, love, unconditional love, and then a gift of grace. And you think these all seem related. Well, they are all related. So let's look at grace. Grace was not a word in my early life that I knew anything about. I wanted my own way and pursued it relentlessly.

5:55 I wasn't mean usually, but I had no concept of what grace was. So what is it? It's a hard word to get your head around. In the dictionary, it is defined with words such as favor, goodwill, kindness, charity, love, mercy, pardon, reprieve. Grace is in all of those. In scriptural terms, we learn that grace is the merciful kindness of God to love us, pursue us, extend forgiveness, draw us into a relationship with him.

6:38 We can't earn it. It is a gift. It is the gift of Jesus dying on the cross to pay the penalty for our sins. It is the gift of God meeting needs and pursuing our hearts and giving us the ability to keep loving and giving grace to our prodigals who cause so much pain. When I met Jesus in high school, I began to get a little glimpse of grace. After all, I was saved by grace through faith, and that began a journey of beginning to understand it.

7:19 Looking back over the years, I see how the grace of God protected me from wrong choices. He extracted me from the wrong crowd in high school. He said if I married the good man I was engaged to, I wouldn't be able to do what he wanted me to do. I see now that those were his grace to let me be able to make wise decisions. I remember sitting by the pool at Arrowhead Springs in California, looking out over the valley asking, why me, God, why am I so blessed? He really showed me this was his grace, that he had given many things to me.

8:03 The work God called me to, what an incredible gift of grace. Living my dream to be a magazine writer and editor for him. The amazing privilege that I had of working with the crew founder Bill Bright, of meeting humble servants of God, of writing about what God was doing in people's lives all over the globe. So much grace. I didn't deserve that. God was kind and extended grace to let me have the dream of my heart serving him. It didn't feel like grace when I waited and waited through five years of dating for Steve Douglass to decide he could, should, would get married.

8:52 But when he finally proposed to me, I was overcome with God's grace to give me such a man. And oh how I miss him now. Children are great grace instructors. It took a lot of grace to make it through my first daughter's first months. She had a hurting tummy and cried constantly and hardly slept at all. Gratefully, daughter too slept much of her first year, a kind grace from the Lord after the first one. And they both have been grace to me throughout their lives. And even in especially in the past couple of months.

9:36 My greatest teacher about grace, our son Josh. Oh such grace I have learned. God gave grace first to this boy to lift him out of his unstable situation into a home where he received love and security and many advantages. Though it took a while for him to grasp that. It took God's grace to give me understanding of his grace. I needed to go much deeper into grasping how God had shed his grace on me and how needy this boy was of a lot of grace.

10:16 Grace to endure and persevere through Josh's wilderness journey for me. Grace to rise above what he thought he would be into something that God had planned for him. Grace for me to give, extend, repeat, offer sometimes grudgingly, sometimes through tears, but increasingly freely and joyfully grace to this boy. As is true for all of us, comprehending something of the grace of God takes a journey. Sometimes a long one, but God never gave up on me.

10:56 He kept pouring it on, opening my eyes and my heart to see grace and even showed me how to give grace to others. The grace to give and to receive that I learned from Josh has been extended broadly and deeply to family, friends, co-workers, and strangers. I understand more each day that God calls us to be his arms of grace to all those that we encounter. And yes, to me, oh the grace that he keeps giving. So what has it been for you?

11:38 When has it been challenging for you to keep loving your prodigal? How could you apply unconditional love to the situation? To love even though they don't deserve it? To love even though they throw it back in your face? Unconditional love, it goes hand in hand with the grace that God has poured on us and given us through Jesus. How have you seen grace in your life through loving your prodigal? Where have you given unexpected grace, surprised your prodigal, or others who were watching?

12:20 When might you give grace today? Write it down. You've heard me say it week after week after week. I think I'm going to remember something that God touched my heart or my mind with, but if I don't write it down, it's usually gone. And next week, well, we're going to explore deeper in the wilderness and look for some more gifts that will transform our lives and the way we relate to our prodigals. Be sure to check out the show notes. We'd love it if you subscribed to this podcast.

13:02 That would bless me, give some grace to me, and really love it if you would tell others as well or even write a review. Thank you. Bless you.