Can we ever go so far from God that we cannot come back? Consider what Jesus told Peter in Matthew 18:21-22:
Then Peter came up and said to him, “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy-seven times.”
If we’re told to “be holy as God is holy (1 Peter 1:15),” if we’re told to conform ourselves to the image of Christ (Romans 8:29), if we’re told to love one another as God loved us (John 13:34-35), then can we ever believe that Jesus is applying a standard of forgiveness to us that does not reflect the grace and mercy of God Himself?
Is there anyone who cannot repent and return?
God calls us continually to repent – and that call goes out to everyone who is lost, everyone who is outside of God’s grace, everyone who has allowed sin to separate themselves from God. God puts no qualifiers on that sin – either in frequency or severity.
The problem for us often is that we are afraid of the work. We think to ourselves how hard it will be to put away the lusts and corruption that we’ve accepted in our lives. It’s just easier to accept our fate, to fall back into our sin, to see ourselves as irredeemable. We have a tendency toward a destructive form of shame, which is the shame that compels us to run from God instead of running TO God. We see it from the very beginning in Adam and Eve, hiding from God in the garden because they had sinned, and they feared the consequences.
Adam’s mistake was that he believed that hiding would somehow change the reality of his situation. Don’t we often do that? We don’t want to conform to God’s will, so we decide we don’t want to believe in “a God who would do….”. We are afraid of failing or unwilling to change our lives to seek God, so we simply declare ourselves “beyond hope” and thereby relieve ourselves of the hardship we imagine will come in our return to God.
Hiding from God doesn’t fix the problem
But none of those approaches change the inescapable fact that I am separate from God, and I don’t have to be separated from God. Jesus presents the Father as a man waiting anxiously for his son to return to Him, knowing the depravity and corruption that the son has indulged during his time away from home. But once the son returns, none of that matters anymore.
God’s grace is there for us each and every time we falter. The question is not whether God will take us back. The question is simply this: How important is it for me to come back? Would I rather be living in sin among the rest of the world? Or do I value an eternity with God above everything else in this life? Ultimately that’s what it takes for me to be right with God: I have to want it more than anything else.
“He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” – Romans 8:32
God didn’t save us for us to fail
If we’ve been baptized into the death of Christ (Romans 6:3-5) as a result of our faith (Acts 8:12) that Jesus is the son of God, the promised lamb that takes away the sins of the world (John 1:29), then there is nothing that will cause me to be lost other than my own unwillingness to come back home.
