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You loved God more last year than you do today, and you know it. You have not walked away from Him, not exactly, but something has cooled, and you carry the quiet dread that He may be finished with you. Michael Durham says otherwise, and he says it from the mouth of God Himself.

We do not like to admit how far our hearts wander in even one good hour, let alone one bad week. Michael takes us to Hosea 14:4, where God says to His backslidden people, "I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely, for My anger has turned away from him." He shows us that spiritual declension is not an exception in the Christian life but the normal drift of a soul left to itself, the way a swimmer moving upstream slips backward the moment he stops fighting the current. We are not meant to merely believe our depravity as a doctrine. We are meant to feel it, so that the feeling drives us into a desperate dependency on the God who alone can hold us.

But the text does not leave us in our drift. It anchors us in a covenant that our failures cannot break. Michael traces the certainty of that healing and the love that motivates it from Micah's wonder that God would pardon iniquity to Christ's own prayer for a faltering Peter to the promise that God's attention turns most tenderly toward the child who is sick and unwell. The initiative is always His. He does not wait for us to find our way back to Him before He moves. He moves because His love will not let Him do otherwise, and He is moving toward you this day.

In This Episode

• Why does my love for Christ grow cold even when I have not consciously chosen to walk away from Him?
• Is it enough to believe my sinfulness as a doctrine, or must I actually feel my need for God?
• Can I trust that God has not given up on me when my devotion has been so inconsistent?
• What does it mean that God takes the first step toward the backslider, before any repentance has occurred?
• How does the covenant God made with Peter assure me that my own restoration is certain?

Backsliding is real, but the covenant standing behind it is more real still. He is not waiting for you to come find Him. He is already seeking you.