The Startling Reality of a Love that Never Leaves You

Posted on Aug 17, 2023 Topic : Inspirational/Devotional, Men's Christian Living, Women's Christian Living
Posted by : Ruth Simons

Every journey is marked by distance and terrain. Distance tells you how far you have yet to go, and terrain indicates how much effort it’ll take to get to your destination. When traveling, we know we will be separated from comforts and the people we know and love, and we plan accordingly. In preparation for a journey, we pack survival kits, emergency contact cards, and try to minimize the unsettledness we inevitably experience when we’re far from home.

It’s not so different with our spiritual journeys. Whether we feel distant from or in close proximity to the things that give us assurance can be the difference between journeying in fear and anxious striving, or journeying from a position of courage and confidence.

We were made for the latter in our walks with God—a journey that traverses seasons of life and the difficult terrain of our hearts. It’s a journey that finds its purpose when we receive the gift of salvation through Christ and live as a new creation the rest of our days until we see our Savior face to face. The promises recorded for us in the Bible testify that while the journey is not easy, we do not walk alone.

So why do so many of us feel distant and alone? Why do we so often allow ourselves to believe that the distance between the God who rescues us and our sinful hearts is vast, when Christ erased the miles, the distance, and the eternal separation sin causes...and brought us near?

Maybe that’s why the apostle Paul so clearly addresses the true state of a Christ-follower’s nearness to God, and wrote in Romans 8:38-39, “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.”

Paul wouldn’t have spelled out all the ways we cannot be separated from God’s love if it wasn’t so easy to forget. As if death, angels, and rulers were not enough, Paul says “nor anything else in all creation” (read: nothing in all the world) is capable of removing us from the active love of God in our lives as believers.

My guess is that, like me, it’s much easier for you to remember the ways you’ve caused distance with God than to remember the ways God has bridged the impossible chasm with His love. That’s why Paul makes such a dramatic point about the inability for anything to remove you from God’s love.

“Never did His love begin and never can it cease. It is from eternity and shall be to eternity.”

–C.H. Spurgeon