Can God require obedience and love us unconditionally?

Why does God ask us to do certain things?  To be obedient?

Some suggest that this means that a God who requires this is a God who loves conditionally.

I believe God loves me unconditonally, but He also asks or even demands certain things of me.  How can it be both? 

In one of our Latter-day Saint scriptures, Moses 1:39, it says, "For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.”

If I look at everything that God does is to help His children to live with him eternally, does that change what I think of His laws and ordinances? 

God sees us and cares about us individually, but there is also an element of being saved together.  The last verse of the Old Testament, Malachi 4:6 says, “And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.”  In the Latter-day Saint temples, people are bound to each other forever.  Though it begins with family units, as people marry and have children who also marry, these family units extend endlessly until ideally, all are sealed or bound together.  

We are also commanded to meet together to worship, both at church and in the temple.  We need each other.  Connection is important both right now in this life, and with those who have passed on or are yet to come.  A personal connection is important both with one another and with God and the Savior.  

Our prophet, President Nelson often speaks of our covenants as “covenant relationship.”  

Being obedient and participating in ordinances gives us the building blocks and the binds for these covenant relationships with God, the Savior, and each other.  

It is also interesting to look at the word “man” in this scripture.  It refers to “humankind”, but leaving it in a singular form, I believe it means not just humankind, but each person individually.  We each have our own journey, but it also intertwines with the journeys of others.  And God’s plan provides the healing of Christ’s Atonement for the inevitable hurt that comes.  

Obedience and ordinances provide us with the growth and capability to receive all of God’s blessings and for us to enjoy each other amid our imperfections.  Just like we don’t send a preschooler to graduate school to learn, we are not able to learn all God wants us to learn or to hold all His blessings until we have extended our capacity.  I believe this is what His laws and ordinances teach us to do.