Cross Rhythms '97 is privileged to be giving a platform to American author and speaker Brennan Manning. Here Brennan looks at misconceptions we have about whom God really is and his love for us.

The parables of Jesus reveal a God who is consistently over-generous with his forgiveness and grace. He portrays God as the lender magnanimously cancelling a debt, as the shepherd seeking a strayed sheep, as the judge hearing the prayer of the tax collector. In Jesus' stories, divine forgiveness does not depend upon our repentance, or on our ability to love our enemies, or our doing heroic, virtuous deeds. God's forgiveness depends only on the love out of which he fashioned the human race.

God does not condemn but forgives. Sinners are accepted even before they repent. Forgiveness is granted to them, they need only accept the gift. This is real amnesty - gratis. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is the love story of God with us. It begins with unconditional forgiveness: the sole condition is trusting faith. Christianity happens when men and women experience the unwavering trust and reckless confidence that come from knowing the God of Jesus. There is no reason for being wary, scrupulous, cautious, or afraid with this God. As John writes in his first letter: 'In love there can be no fear, but fear is driven out by perfect love: because to fear is to expect punishment, and anyone who is afraid is still imperfect in love' (1 John 4:18, JB).

God's love is based on nothing, and the fact that it is based on nothing makes us secure. Were it based on anything we do, and that 'anything' were to collapse, then God's love would crumble as well. But with the God of Jesus no such thing can possibly happen. People who realise this can live freely and to the full. Remember Atlas, who carries the whole world? We have Christian Atlases who mistakenly carry the burden of trying to deserve God's love. Even the mere watching of this lifestyle is depressing. I'd like to say to Atlas: 'Put that globe down and dance on it. That's why God made it.' And to these weary Christian Atlases: 'Lay down your load and build your life on God's love.' We don't have to earn this love; neither do we have to support it. It is a free gift. Jesus calls out: 'Come to me, all you Atlases who are weary and find life burdensome, and I will refresh you.'

When you visit a home for the mentally retarded, like Jean Vanier's L'Arche, the Ark, in Mobile, Alabama, you see people who have no worth in our productive society. They don't do anything. They are just there. Yet you never doubt that God loves them. The handicapped make us realise our handicaps. They strip off the masks we wear; the roles we play that give us a sense of earning our position with God and man. They challenge us to let go of everything we have taken literally, all our lives, to find our own symbols of the Holy One, to open ourselves to the mystery of the gracious God within us.

The unearned love of God can be disturbing. The idea of reward without work might put a brake on our dedication to the Gospel. I mean, why struggle to do good if God loves so recklessly and foolishly? It appears to be a sensible, valid question.

But those who truly know the God of Jesus are not likely to ask why they should be labouring for the kingdom while others stand around all day idle. They want life and they have found the fullness of life in God himself.... The rest of us may ask why we should bother to live uprightly if God is going to be so generous, but not those who have found the God of Jesus. Only when our inner vision is blocked by resentment, outrage, anger, or envy do we find ourselves threatened by God's love. The last prayer of Jesus on the cross, 'Father, forgive them. They know not what they do', is a testament from one who knew what God is like.

The love of God embodied in Jesus is radically different from our natural human way of loving. As a man, I am drawn to love appealing things and persons. I love the Jersey Shore and Clearwater Beach at sunset, Handel 'Messiah', hot fudge sundaes, and my wife, Roslyn. There is a common denominator or better, a common dynamic in all of them. I am attracted by certain qualities that I find congenial. When I love as a man I am drawn by the good perceived in the other. I love someone for what I find in him or her.

Now: unlike ourselves, the Father of Jesus loves men and women, not for what he finds in them, but for what lies within himself. It is not because men and women are good that he loves them, nor only good men and women that he loves. It is because he is so unutterably good that he loves all persons, good and evil.... He loves the loveless, the unloving, and the unlovable. He does not detect what is congenial, appealing, attractive, and respond to it with his favour. In fact, he does not respond at all. The Father of Jesus is a source. He acts; he does not react. He initiates love. He is love without motive.

Jesus, who lives for those in whom love is dead, and died that his killers might live, reveals a Father who has no wrath. The Father cannot be offended, nor can he be pleased by what people do. This is the very opposite of indifference. The Lord does not cherish us as we deserve - if that were the case, we would be desolate - but as he must, unable to do otherwise. He is love. Hard as it is for us to believe -because we neither give nor receive love among ourselves in this way - we yet believe, because of the life-death-resurrection of the Carpenter-Messiah, that his Father is more loving, more forgiving, more cherishing than Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob could have dreamt.
What this says simply is that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is gracious. His love is gratuitous in a way that defies our imagination.

It is for this reason that we can proclaim with theological certainty in the power of the Word: God loves you as you are and not as you should be! Do you believe this? That God loves you beyond worthiness and unworthiness, beyond fidelity and infidelity, that he loves you in the morning sun and the evening rain, that he loves you without caution, regret, boundary, limit, or breaking point?

I am not asking: Do you believe in love? That is abstract ideology. Agnostics and atheists can say that. What I am asking is: Can you say with conviction what the apostle John writes in his first letter: 'I have come to know and believe in the love God has for me.' The last four words - God has for me - turn an abstract proposition into a personal relationship. This love is the content of our faith: it is a magnificent summary of all we believe. 'The love God has for us' constitutes ultimate meaning and brings the peace and joy the world cannot give.

To believe means to realise not just with the head but also with the heart that God loves me in a creative, intimate, unique, reliable, and tender way. Creative: out of his love I came forth; through his love I am who I am. Intimate: his love reaches out to the deepest in me. Unique: his love embraces me as I am, not as I am considered to be by other people or supposed to be in my own self-image. Reliable: his love will never let me down. Tender.... Tenderness is what happens to you when you know you are deeply and sincerely liked by someone. If you communicate to me that you like me, not just love me as a brother in Christ, you open up to me the possibility of self-respect, self-esteem, and wholesome self-love. Your acceptance of me banishes my fears. My defence mechanisms - sarcasm, aloofness, name-dropping, self-righteousness, giving the appearance of having it all together - start to fall. I drop my mask and stop disguising my voice. You instil self-confidence in me and allow me to smile at my weaknesses and absurdities. The look in your eyes gives me permission to make the journey into the interior of myself and make peace with that part of myself where I could never find peace before. I become more open, sincere, vulnerable, and affectionate. I too grow tender.

Several years ago, Edward Farrell, a priest from Detroit, went on a two-week summer holiday to Ireland to visit relatives. His one living uncle was about to celebrate his eightieth birthday. On the great day, Ed and his uncle got up early. It was before dawn. They took a walk along the shores of Lake Killarney and stopped to watch the sunrise. They stood side-by-side for a full twenty minutes and then resumed walking. Ed glanced at his uncle and saw that his face had broken into a broad smile. Ed said, 'Uncle Seamus, you look very happy.' 'I am.' Ed asked, 'How come?' And his uncle replied, 'The Father of Jesus is very fond of me.'

If the question were put to you, 'Do you honestly believe that God likes you' - not loves you because theologically he must -how would you answer? God loves by necessity of his nature; without the eternal, interior generation of love, he would cease to be God. But if you could answer, 'The Father is very fond of me', there would come relaxedness, serenity, and a compassionate attitude toward yourself that is a reflection of God's own tenderness. In Isaiah 49:15, God says: 'Does a woman forget her baby at the breast, or fail to cherish the son of her womb? Yet even if these forget, I will never forget you" (JB).

This article is an extract from the book The Relentless Love Of Jesus by Brennan Manning, publisher Hodder & Stoughton. It is reprinted with permission.