In this episode, I share more about how this truth has played out in my own life — and the steps you can take to make it real in yours.

Like you, I’ve experienced relationships where “love” wasn’t unconditional – it was transactional.
In other words, love wasn’t something I simply received.
It was something I had to earn – often at a very high cost.

For example, in 2010, my ex-husband announced that we were getting a divorce.
Not because the marriage was broken beyond repair, but because I wouldn’t agree to his condition that I automatically say yes to whatever he wanted, regardless of the harm it might cause me or others.
His so-called love had become purely transactional: available only if I met his demands.
But by that point, God had already been working in my heart for seven years. I knew that what my ex was calling “love” wasn’t love at all.
So, I said no — and had to start my life over from scratch.
Yet, even in that painful beginning, I found myself held by the one love that never asks for something in return: God’s.

I’m sure as a human – and especially as a woman – you can relate.
Whether it's been a parent, partner, boyfriend, friend, or someone else, transactional love can appear in various forms.
This is because we live in a broken world full of imperfect, wounded, and sinful people.

As Romans 3:23 (NLT) says, “For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard.”

And one of God’s glorious standards is consistent unconditional love. Not transactional love.
This might sound radical when you come from a place of religious performance. In other words, when you’ve been taught that you need to earn God’s love, favor, and provision through doing certain things.
But the Bible is clear: God’s love is not transactional.
In fact, God’s love is not about what we do at all – or even who we are. Instead, it’s entirely rooted in who He is.
This is clearly communicated to us within the Bible in numerous ways. The biggest being that Jesus died for our sins while we were still sinners.

Romans 5:8 (NLT) says, “But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners.”
Side note, please know that while God sent Jesus – His one and only Son – to be born into human history and die on the cross in our place, for our sins (past, present, and future), Jesus (as a member of the Triune God - God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit) did this willingly out of His deep unconditional love for us. In other words, He wasn’t abused or a victim of God the Father.

The fact that God sent Jesus to die for our sins when we were completely incapable of saving ourselves (e.g., earning our way out of the captivity of sin or our separated state from God due to sin) blows any idea of transactional love out of the water.
If God’s love was transactional, this is the place where it would be glaringly obvious.
And this is why, when a church or religion doesn’t keep Jesus as the center, we lose a vital mirror to God’s character.
If God’s love was transactional, He would have done something other than, in His unconditional love and goodness, pursue us and save us through sending His only Son to the cross.

This is why we have John 3:16-17 (NLT): “For this is how God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but to save the world through him.”
The Message translation says it this way (v16-18): “This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life. God didn’t go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help, to put the world right again. Anyone who trusts in him is acquitted; anyone who refuses to trust him has long since been under the death sentence without knowing it. And why? Because of that person’s failure to believe in the one-of-a-kind Son of God when introduced to him.”

Did you notice this sentence? God didn’t go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was.
Transactional love accuses, right? It says that you’re not doing something you should be doing in order to receive my love. What my ex-husband did was an example of that.
But God isn’t like that at all. We see it in this passage. And in others throughout the Bible – including how He’s never stopped loving or pursuing His people even when they completely turned their backs on Him.
And I’ve experienced His love over and over again in my own life. My life didn’t end with my divorce. God started a new era, providing what I needed along the way. And never once amid my mistakes and sin has He stopped loving me.