Nothing Can Separate You from the Love of God... Except...

stop saying "except" when you read Romans 8

Nothing Can Separate You from the Love of God... Except...

Except nothing.

Noting can separate you from the love of God. Period. That’s it. Do not pass Go; do not collect $200.

Anytime I would read Romans 8, I would say something like this:

“No, in all these things we are more than victorious through him who loved us. For I am convinced 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 8:37–39).

Notice, brothers and sisters, that the only thing missing from this passage is yourself. Nothing can separate you from the love of God except for yourself.

No wonder I was so miserable!

This interpretation ruins the whole point that Paul is making.

Do you live in the present or in the future? Are you part of creation?

If so, then your part of the stuff that Paul says can’t separate you from the love of God.

In fact, Paul already said, “Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1).

How much condemnation?

None.

We don’t ping pong in and out of salvation every time we have an impure thought or slip up and say a dirty word. God doesn’t flip Divine Love on and off like a light switch every time we mess up.

This is the exact mindset Paul is trying to destroy Or, to put it another way, Jesus came to destroy the works of the Devil, and this is one of them (1 John 3:8). In fact, this might be the chief one.

In Roman 7, Paul laments that we want to do good and can’t do it, and we also want to stop doing bad but do it anyway, but Paul did not say that this state of spiritual anxiety is a permanent fixture of the Christian life.

May it never be!

Instead, Paul claims that Jesus has released us from this body of death (Romans 8:24-25).

Try if you like, but you can’t make God stop loving you.

In fact, God didn’t start loving you because of Jesus.

Let me say that again, it is not as if that one day God didn’t love you but now does because of Jesus. Jesus didn’t come to change God’s mind about you; he came to change your mind about God.¹

One of the most famous passages in the world shows this: For God so loved the world…

In Romans 5, Paul said that Christ died for us while we were sinners, ungodly, and enemies of God. He goes so far as to say that we were reconciled to God “while we were enemies” (Romans 5:10).

Coming to understand this is the baptism of the Spirit.

Why?

Because Paul said, “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Romans 5:5).

And what is that message?

God loved you even while you were in your deepest, darkest place. God loved you while you were running away from the Father, Son, and Spirit at full speed.

And now that God has reached you through Jesus, the Holy Spirit pours out into your heart this message continuously, “God loves you, and there is nothing you can do about it.”

Can we enter back into our delusion and trick ourselves into thinking that God doesn’t love us? Preachers tricks us into this all the time—preachers like me. Shoot, I trick myself into this all the time.

I’m not worthy.
I’m not good enough.
I’m not special.
I’m not loved.
I’m not, I’m not, I’m not.

Jesus, as the Eternal I AM, entered into this delusion and obliterated it. We don’t have to live this way any more.

He took on flesh, showed us God’s love, and the whole world crucified him.

God so loved the world that he gave us his Son, and we took him, rejected him, and poured out our wrath on him in the most humiliating way possible.

And as he died, Jesus said, “Father, forgive them for they don’t know what they’re doing.”

In the depth of our wickedness and delusion, Jesus showed us through radical forgiveness, grace, and love that there is nothing we can do to him (even put him on a cross) that would make him stop loving us.

Throw the “except” away. God loves you, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Allow Jesus to grab you delicately by the hand, bring you out of the bushes in the garden, and clothe yourself in his love so that you can see God as he sees God, and so that you can know once and for all that the Father, Son, and Spirit love you endlessly just as they loved each other before the world began (John 17:26).

If you’d like to share a version of this post in video form, here you go:

You might also like my sermon on a similar subject from Sunday:

1. Brian Zahnd made this point in Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God (Chapter 4, p. 83).