God’s love doesn’t depend on how well we love Him back. It doesn’t depend upon whether or not we let go. We don’t earn it, deserve it, or maintain it. Yet His love is wrapped around us, reinforced by His promises. It holds us perfectly and permanently. We may slip and fall, but we are not lost. As Paul wrote to Timothy, “If we are faithless, He remains faithful; He cannot deny Himself” (2 Timothy 2:13). Whatever happens, the rope holds fast. Nothing can separate us from His love.

The apostle Paul, writing from the inspired insight of the Holy Spirit, knows us pretty well. He understands that we struggle with this concept of the durability of God’s love. Why? One reason is that what we know of love we learn from other people. People stop “loving” one another for just about every selfish or faulty reason imaginable. Marriage vows are signed with vanishing ink. Friends fall out. Even parents and children become irreconcilable. Most human love is conditional and limited. Fail to meet the conditions, and the “love” is withdrawn.

Another reason we have trouble believing in the tenacity of God’s love is the sense of our own sin. We can’t quite believe we are lovable. How could God love us after what we’ve done? We know that we are not worthy of His love, and it’s hard to believe that God will not give up on us.

These human impediments to love do not affect God one iota. With Him, the cord of love is unbreakable. Unlike human love, it has no conditions and no limits. Yet think of the mental energy people needlessly expend in anxiety over messing up and somehow losing His love. If we think some sin in our past has caused Him to fold His arms and turn away, Romans 8 should banish that idea forever. We must listen to what Paul tells us: Nothing can separate us from God’s love. What part of “nothing” don’t we understand?

In Romans 8:35–39, Paul confronts one final reason why we might be tempted to doubt God’s love: suffering. In these verses, the apostle tests the sticking power of God’s love against life’s heaviest burdens. He mentions seven of these—tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, and sword (the threat of death). He is countering the false assumption that if we find ourselves in any of these traumatic situations, then the love of God must not have held. That assumption misses the point: God’s love is not a “trouble-be-gone” spray to fend off pain and trouble; it’s a glue to keep us bonded to Him when trouble comes. A glue that holds no matter what.