Let’s be honest about what we actually are in this relationship.

We mess up. We pray. We ask for forgiveness with full sincerity in the moment and full intention to do better. Then we go back out into the world and make the exact same choice we just repented of. Then we come back... Then we ask again... Then we promise again... Then we do it again. And somehow, with a straight face and a genuine heart, we kneel down and ask Him to get us out of the same mess we walked ourselves back into for the fourth time this month.

If this were a human relationship, someone would have been called us toxic, and the other person would have walked away by now.

So what makes God stay? What is it about His nature that keeps Him turning back toward a humanity that has been breaking faith with Him since the garden? This is not a small question. It is actually one of the most theologically important questions a believer can sit with, because the answer does not just tell us something about God’s feelings toward us. It tells us something about who God fundamentally is.

‘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.’ - Romans 8:38-39

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We Are the Cats

I have two cats. Inherited them when I married my wife and to be clear… the relationship has been complicated from the start.

No matter how well we feed them before bedtime, no matter how clearly we communicate the boundaries, no matter how many times they have experienced the consequences of getting caught, those cats will be back on the counter. They know they are wrong. I know they know they are wrong because the moment I stand up and move toward them, they are already airborne, hitting the floor running before I have taken a single step. The guilt is not the issue. The knowledge is not the issue. They simply cannot help returning to the thing they were told not to do.

I like those cats… I am also regularly furious at those cats. And somewhere in that tension, I find myself thinking about God.

Because are we not the cats in this story?

Did we not do exactly this in the garden? God gave humanity the entire expanse of Eden, every tree, every fruit, every pleasure the garden contained, with one boundary. One thing set apart. One command that was less a restriction than it was a test of whether we trusted the One who had given us everything else. And we went straight for it.

We have been going straight for it ever since. The fruit changes shape depending on the generation and the person, which is perhaps why Genesis never tells us what kind of fruit it actually was. Because the fruit is whatever we reach for when we decide our judgment is better than God’s. Fill in the blank yourself. You know what yours is.

The Uncomfortable Math

Here is the honest breakdown of where most of us actually are on any given day.

Roughly half of our daily decisions run on instinct, the automatic responses built into us as physical creatures navigating a physical world. Another portion runs on passion, desire, emotion, the things we want and feel and crave without always stopping to interrogate why. And somewhere in the remaining margin, we are genuinely, sincerely trying to follow the Word... sometimes… When it aligns conveniently with what we already wanted to do. When the cost is not too high. When following God’s way does not require us to give up something we were not ready to release.

Is this His bride? Is this what He is returning for?

We make decisions as though we are the gods of our own lives, operating on the same limited, flesh-bound intelligence as every other creature walking the earth, and then we are genuinely surprised when those decisions produce consequences. We are simple mammals attempting to be our own highest authority and wondering why it keeps going wrong.

And yet He stays.

His Grace Is the Only Explanation

The theological word for what God does in response to all of this is grace. But we have said that word so many times in church settings that it has started to lose its weight. Grace is not God looking the other way. Grace is not God grading us on a curve because He knows we are trying. Grace is the active, unearned, disproportionate, frankly unreasonable movement of God toward people who have given Him every justification to move away.

Paul writes in Romans 5 that while we were still sinners, while we were mid-mess, mid-rebellion, mid-fruit, Christ died for us. Not after we cleaned ourselves up. Not after we demonstrated sufficient remorse. While we were still in it.

Lamentations 3:22-23 describes His mercies as new every morning. Not annually renewed. Not available on a limited basis after sufficient waiting periods… Every morning. The slate is not just wiped clean. It is replaced entirely with something fresh before you have even had a chance to ruin it again.

This is the disproportionate, unfair, one-sided love of God toward humanity. We cannot earn it. We cannot match it. We cannot fully comprehend it while we are still in this flesh.

The only reasonable response is to stop pretending we deserve it and start living like people who are genuinely undone by the fact that we keep receiving it anyway.

He keeps coming back for us because that is what He is. Not just what He feels. Not just what He chooses in a given moment. It is His nature. And His nature does not change because ours keeps failing.

That is the only explanation that holds.

Next Monday, we keep going deeper. If someone in your life needs to be reminded today that God has not turned His back on them, forward this before you do anything else.

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