This sermon wrestles with a big question: Is God’s love conditional or unconditional? Pastor Steve Taylor starts from the familiar idea that “God is love” (1 John 4:8), that He loved us while we were yet sinners, shows common grace to all, and saves us by grace when we were spiritually dead—strong reasons many Christians talk about God’s “unconditional love.” But then he walks through passages that sound very conditional: Jesus tying the Father’s love to our obedience (John 14:21-23), verses about God hating the wicked (Psalm 5, 11), covenant blessings and curses in the Old Testament, and John 3:36, where God’s wrath remains on those who reject the Son. That leads into warnings about how a sloppy “God loves everyone no matter what” can slide into antinomianism (license to sin) and even universalism.
To untangle this, he leans on D.A. Carson’s idea that Scripture speaks of different kinds of divine love: God’s providential/common grace for all creation, His saving desire that all would repent, His electing love for His people, and His covenantal, relational love that deepens with obedience. In that light, God’s love is “unconditional” in that it flows from His nature, and Christ has met all the conditions for our salvation—but experiencing that saving, covenant love is conditioned on faith and response to Christ. He illustrates this with Esau (who despised his birthright and became a picture of rejected grace) and with the “bummer lamb” that’s rescued, hand-reared, and comes to know the shepherd’s heartbeat. The sermon ends by urging hearers to stop presuming on a vague, fuzzy “unconditional love,” and instead receive God’s costly love in Christ, live as those truly born again, and rest secure in the Good Shepherd who will never let His own go.