Unfinished Faith: Relearning God.

Week 38:

The bit where I introduce:

Our hearts are fragile things. I’ll admit, sometimes mine can be a mess.

There’s a quote, “To love is to have your heart broken.” It certainly can be true.

Have you ever had your heart broken by someone or something? And if you have, did you find yourself protecting your heart afterwards, perhaps to the point where you began shutting people, experiences or even love itself out?

We have an extraordinary capacity to love, but our experiences can also shape our capacity to trust and receive love. What we have experienced, particularly in relationships, can influence the way we understand love, security and whether someone can be trusted with our hearts.

Everyone has their own story.

So perhaps it is okay for us to occasionally admit:

“My heart doesn’t trust love.”

But this is where if you believe in Jesus, the story becomes so different.

God’s love is not simply a bigger, better version of human love. It is something altogether deeper. The bible describes it as steadfast, faithful, enduring and not dependent upon our performance.

And dare I say, sometimes it can feel almost reckless to us because God continues to love in ways that seem completely disproportionate to what we think people deserve.

The bit where I refer to the bible and ask a few rhetorical questions:

Romans 8:37–39

“No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

I love this passage, among many others, but here’s why.

It begins with this extraordinary reassurance: we are more than conquerors.

I don’t know about you, but I could do with a bit of conquering in my life.

But Paul isn’t saying we conquer because we are particularly strong, resilient or capable people. Our confidence is not ultimately in ourselves. It is “through him who loved us.”

And then Paul gives us this remarkable picture of the reach of God’s love.

Death can’t separate us. Life can’t separate us. The present can’t separate us. The future can’t separate us.

Powers, heights, depths, nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God revealed in Christ.

Our circumstances don’t get the final word over God’s love.

But here’s where it gets interesting…

If nothing can separate us from the love of God, can we ever separate ourselves from it?

Some Christians read these verses as a profound statement about the perseverance and security of those who belong to Christ. And there is good reason for that confidence. God’s saving work is not ultimately dependent upon our ability to hold ourselves together. Yet the New Testament also contains serious warnings about unbelief, turning away and apostasy.

So what exactly is Paul saying?

Is he saying that God’s grace makes every possibility of final separation impossible?

Or is Paul making a more specific claim that nothing external to us has the power to separate us from God’s love, without resolving every question about human freedom, resistance and rejection?

I think this distinction matters.

God’s love can be completely unbreakable without us pretending that the Bible has no tension around human response, perseverance and apostasy.  (The meaning of APOSTASY is an act of refusing to continue to follow, obey, or recognise a religious faith)

Romans 8 is not necessarily giving us a simple answer to every question about whether someone can walk away from faith.

What it does give us is something incredibly powerful:

There is nothing in all creation powerful enough to make God let go of us. And perhaps that is the reassurance Paul most wants us to hear.

I have come to understand that God’s love is not fragile.

Human love can be fragile. People can leave. Relationships can break. Trust can be betrayed. People can change their minds. We can struggle to receive love because our experiences have taught us to protect ourselves from it. But God’s love is not dependent upon our circumstances or our emotional capacity to comprehend it.

Romans 8:37–39 tells us that suffering, persecution, death, failure and every power imaginable are not stronger than the love of God revealed in Jesus.

The emphasis is NOT ultimately on the strength of our grip on God.

It is on the extraordinary faithfulness of God’s grip on us.

And perhaps that is why this passage is so comforting when our own hearts don’t trust love. We may not always feel secure. We may not always feel worthy. We may even struggle to believe that we are loved. But the character of God does not change every time our feelings do. Our hearts can be fragile.

God’s love is not.

The bit where you get to think about stuff: Questions for the week:

Do we place more confidence in our ability to hold onto God, or in God’s ability to hold onto us particularly when life is going well and we don’t feel like we need to be held?

Can God’s love be completely unconditional while our response to that love still carries genuine consequences? How do we hold those two truths together?

Is the deeper mystery not simply whether God will let go of us, but what it means for us to freely respond to a love that refuses to stop reaching for us?