You Are Not Too Far Gone

I know the sentence you have been saying to yourself.

Not out loud. You would never say it out loud. But it runs under everything, quiet and certain, and it goes something like this. Grace is real, and God is good, and all of that is true. For other people. Not for me. Not after what I have done. Not again.

You have a list. You know exactly what is on it. The thing nobody knows. The thing you swore you would never do and did anyway, and then did again. The years you cannot get back. The person you hurt. And somewhere along the way you decided the list is now too long, that you have crossed some line, and whatever door grace comes through, it closed behind you a good while ago.

I want to take that sentence away from you, because it is a lie, and it is built on one wrong idea that poisons everything downstream of it.

The lie assumes you were supposed to qualify.

It assumes grace is a reward for the men who cleaned themselves up enough to earn it, and that you have simply dropped below the line. But that is not how any of this ever worked. Look at what God actually did.

"But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us."

Romans 5:8, NASB 1995

While we were yet sinners. Not after. Not once we had our act together and brought God something worth loving. While we were still in the middle of the mess, still on the wrong side of it, He moved first. The love came toward you before you were anything a man would call lovable. So the whole idea that you have to get worthy before grace will have you has the story exactly backwards. There was never a moment you qualified. That was the entire point.

Now let me introduce you to the man God chose to prove it on.

There was a man who hunted Christians. Dragged them out of their homes, threw them in prison, stood and approved while they were killed. If anyone ever had a list too long, it was him. And God did not just forgive him. God took him, of all people, and made him the man who would write half the New Testament. Here is what that man said about himself years later, and notice the tense.

"It is a trustworthy statement, deserving full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, among whom I am foremost of all."

1 Timothy 1:15, NASB 1995

Foremost. The worst. Not "used to be." Am. Paul did not file himself away under the almost-good. He called himself the chief of sinners, present tense, and then staked the reliability of the whole gospel on it. And he told us exactly why God did it that way. So that he could be the example. The test case. God ran grace on the worst man He could find, on purpose, so that no one who came after could ever say, but my case is different. Your case is not different. You are not the exception grace cannot reach. You are the exact man it was built for.

Jesus said the same thing, and He said it at a dinner table full of the wrong kind of people, while the religious men stood outside scandalized that He would even eat with them. It is not the healthy who need a doctor, He told them, but the sick. He did not come to call the righteous, but sinners. Sit with that, because it turns your whole fear upside down. Your sin is not the thing keeping you out of the room. It is the reason the Doctor walked into it. You are not interrupting His work. You are His work.

But I know the fear underneath the fear. It is not really that God cannot forgive. It is that it is too late for you. That you had your chances and you burned every one of them.

So let me show you a man who had no chances left at all.

There was a criminal dying on a cross next to Jesus. No time. No years ahead to make anything right, no restitution he could ever pay, not one good thing on his record to hand over. Nothing but a few hours of breath and a whole life of wreckage behind him. And with what little he had left, he turned his head and said this.

"Jesus, remember me when You come in Your kingdom!" And He said to him, "Truly I say to you, today you shall be with Me in Paradise."

Luke 23:42-43, NASB 1995

Today. Not someday, if he could somehow prove himself first. Today. A man with nothing to offer but the ask, received on the spot, at the last possible second of the last possible day of his life. If the door stood open for him, brother, it has not closed for you.

Now here is the one I most need you to hear, because your fear might not be that you never came to God at all. Your fear might be that you came, and then you blew it, and you have gone back and forth so many times that you are sure you have finally worn out your welcome.

Peter denied he even knew Jesus. Three times, the first time to a servant girl, and by the end cursing to make it sound convincing, on the worst night of Jesus' life. And after He rose, Jesus did not corner Peter and read him his failures. He made him breakfast, and He handed him back the job. Tend My sheep. The man who blew it the worst got the assignment.

And underneath that is the truest thing I can hand a man who keeps failing.

"If we are faithless, He remains faithful, for He cannot deny Himself."

2 Timothy 2:13, NASB 1995

Read that slowly. When you go faithless, He does not go faithless back at you. His faithfulness does not rise and fall with yours, because it was never resting on yours to begin with. It rests on who He is. The grip that is holding you is not your grip. And a grip like that does not slip just because your hands are shaking.

I have to say one more thing, because some of you are carrying a specific terror. You have heard there is one sin that cannot be forgiven, and in your worst moments you are certain you have committed it, whatever it even was.

Hear me carefully. The very fact that you are afraid you have gone too far is the strongest evidence that you have not. A truly hardened heart, one that has genuinely turned its back on God for good, does not lie awake at night grieved that it has offended Him. It does not care. The grief you feel, the pull to come back, the fear itself, none of that is the sign that the Spirit has left you. That is the Spirit, still in you, still working, refusing to let you go. The door you are terrified is locked is the one you are standing at right now, knocking.

Let me be clear about one thing, so you do not walk away with a cheap version of this. I am not telling you your sin does not matter. It mattered enough to cost the cross. And grace is not a shrug. It does not leave a man where it found him. It puts a new heart in him and calls him by a new name. But that is the good news, not a new bar for you to clear. You do not clean yourself up to come to grace. You come, and grace does the cleaning.

Which is where the man who comes finally gets to stand.

"Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus."

Romans 8:1, NASB 1995

No condemnation. Not less of it. None. And that is not a door you have to be good enough to walk through. It is the room you end up standing in the moment you stop trying to earn your way and simply come.

So come. That is the whole thing. Not clean yourself up first, not prove you mean it, not wait until you have strung together enough good days to feel like you have earned the right. Come the way the thief came, with a sentence and nothing else in your hands.

You are not too far gone.

That line was written for exactly the man who is most sure that he is.