man gospel girl, you ask the TOUGH ones dont you.. no softballs from you...

If he did, then he would never send us to hell.

How do we know in the first place? One thing that's always tugged at my brain is, if God truly loves mankind unconditionally, then why should anyone need to worship or even believe in God to be "Saved" from hell? In fact, if God truly did love all mankind unconditionally, then why would there even *Be* a hell?

I think we all at times take advantage of His love for us. We keep getting deeper and deeper in the hole. God gives us choices in life, but He expects us to grasp hold onto to Him. He desires for our hearts and minds to be set on Him. He loves us freely, but it is us that walks away from Him and Him not from us. The bible says, "Do not tempt the Lord your God". Love is definetly a big word. When somebody does us wrong, I believe we should still love that person. Does that mean we cut them off? not neccassarily. But then we have to ask ourself, "how can I show forth the love of Christ to them after what they did to me"? It's definetly a hard things to do without true guidance.

Yes, of course, but loving unconditionally does not means that we cannot take a stance on what is right and what is wrong. When God loves us unconditionally, it means that he loves us, even though we are born rebels against him, but he knows that us staying that way is not good, so he seeks to get us back into relationship with him, so that we can have full and abundant lives, transformed by his grace. It was to that end that he sent Jesus, to pay the price for out rebellion, that we could start anew, every person on the same footing. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Romans 5:8 A few years ago, my band went into prisons to sing and teach the prisoners. Believe it or not, it was fairly easy to go to the male prisons, because, as females, we were treated like gold, but then we got an offer from the women's prison. Before we went in, we were warned by a lovely lady preacher, a big Maori lady, an ex-con herself, that the women would be looking at us to see whether or not we were genuine, and that they could smell hypocrisy a mile off. If we weren't genuine in our love for the women, they would turn their backs on us. In her words "They will see you first as middle-class snobs, who are judging them." The thought was very scary, but made us do a lot of soul-searching before we went in. It wasn't hard to love the women, we found out. They were, in the main, sweet and very normal and, once we broke through and were accepted, they opened up to us about all sorts of things. We loved them unconditionally. I told one I talked to "I'm no different from you. We both made bad choices at points in our life, but you got caught for yours. That is the main difference between you girls in here and people on the outside." Now, loving them unconditionally did not mean that I wanted them to stay in prison, nor did it mean that I wanted them to stay addicts, or battered wives, or prostitutes, or murderers (there were some there). No. I wanted them to change. I wanted them to live full and abundant lives, in relationship with their Saviour and in relationship to other human beings. In short, loving unconditionally does not mean waving to a person as they drive towards a cliff. It means loving them enough to say" Stop. Danger ahead.