Sometime ago, around third or fourth grade, I remember being in Sunday school and the teacher asking a question. Eight and nine-year-olds are not equipped yet for deep theological questions, but the simple answer can be closer to truth than the learned theologian. Suffer unto me the little children, Christ said, and do not hinder them. Perhaps Christ was suggesting children are closer to God by what they know unhindered by what they will learn.
Because the other children in the class kept silent, fearful of giving a wrong answer, I risked embarrassment with my own uninformed answer. My best recollection is I answered with some if-then conditional statement about the particular passage the teacher had presented.
His response, “So, you think this is conditional.” I’m not sure I understood at that age the total concept of conditionality, but it seemed plain to me the passage suggested if God was going to do something, then I had something to do also.
Now that years have passed and I am hindered by what I have learned, when I reflect on this memory, I don’t think my answer missed the mark. For all the theology that preaches the truth God is unconditional, I suggest there is within the pages of the Bible a real call to conditionality. If I do not come to the Christian faith as an active participant, devoted fully to Christ’s teachings, actually doing what He says, there is no need for my belief in Him. God is unconditional because His character means He keeps His promises. This says something about God and nothing about us.
This idea we have a part in the matter might suggest to some our efforts in this relationship means we can earn salvation. As Dallas Willard wrote, “God is opposed to earning, not effort.” I agree. Effort, then, becomes the essential response we have to living a life in Christ.
God makes covenants and promises. These are unchanging and unconditional. But He also calls His children unto Him, and in the calling, we are to respond with effort. One such ongoing effort is repentance. Taking on the new life and leaving the old takes effort, repeated effort.
If we read scripture closely, alongside all those promises and covenants God makes, there is God’s message to us to remain in Him, both in the promise and in the covenant. The promise and the covenant are always there. But to experience and live in them, to live them out, we are to remain.
An example of remaining is in the book of John. In chapter 15, Christ uses the metaphor of the vine. In His telling, He says, “Abide (remain) in me.” Self-evident to me through my own experience is that remaining takes effort. Daily, I know this to be true.
Inherent in the unchanging character of God is that He remains. If He remains, so must I. Because he loves me, I choose to remain and will keep on making the effort to choose Him. This I know, unhindered.