On His last evening of freedom, Christ humbled Himself as a servant and washed the feet of His disciples. Then He sat down to speak quietly to them one last time before His execution. Even though He knew Judas was at that moment moving through the streets to betray Him to the authorities, Jesus expressed to His friends His deep love for them and urged them to love one another: “As the Father loved Me, I also have loved you; abide in My love” (John 15:9).

Even as these disciples demonstrated their characteristic misunderstandings, He called them His friends, not His servants. He knew his own execution was only hours away, yet He concerned Himself with comforting these flawed and stumbling men. He spoke of preparing them a place in heaven and about the coming of another comforter: the Holy Spirit. But again and again He returned to the theme of His constant love for them.

The apostle John summarizes: “Having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end” (John 13:1).

It didn’t matter that His soul was in turmoil, that He would soon perspire drops like blood as He agonized in prayer. He kept on loving—and not just the eleven disciples around Him. “I do not pray for these alone,” He said, “but also for those who will believe in Me through their word” (John 17:20). As this prayer indicates, His love reached across time to this moment—to you, to me. In the shadow of the Cross, the power of His love never waned for a second. In a world that was condemning Him, and with excruciating pain and cruelty facing Him, His uppermost thoughts were of love for us—of helping us to understand the love of God.

Nothing that happened to Jesus could dislodge His tenacious attachment to us. He is a living picture of the unchanging love we’re describing. His love is perfect and always has been perfect, meaning it never varies, grows, or diminishes. In other words, the love He will have for us in the future will never be greater or lesser than the love He has for us now. And His love for us now is no lesser or greater than it has been from eternity past. His love for us is nothing less than constant, unchanging, and eternal.

There is a good side and a better side to God’s unchanging love. The good side is that God won’t wake up in the morning and decide He’s had enough of us. The better side is that even when we wake up in the morning and decide we’ve had enough of Him, He will still love us.

When the Bible tells us that God’s love is unlimited, I think it means God’s love is something like the love of the mother in this story told by Michael Brown: