7/28/26

Day 28: The Unbroken Cord

What Brokenness Cannot Sever

"And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God's love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow — not even the powers of hell can separate us from God's love. No power in the sky above or in the earth below — indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord." — Romans 8:38-39 (NLT)

Paul had experienced enough brokenness to write from authority. He lists his credentials in 2 Corinthians 11: beaten five times with the thirty-nine lashes, three times beaten with rods, once stoned, three times shipwrecked, a night and a day adrift at sea, in danger from rivers, robbers, countrymen, Gentiles, false brothers, toil and hardship, sleeplessness, hunger, thirst, cold and exposure. This is not a man theorizing about brokenness from a comfortable study. This is a man whose life had been a sustained experience of it.

And from that experience, he writes with absolute conviction: nothing can separate us from God's love. Not death — the most final separation. Not life — the ongoing demands and sufferings of it. Not angels or demons — the spiritual forces that may war against us. Not present fears or future worries. Not the powers of hell. Nothing in all creation. The list is so comprehensive that it is almost as if Paul is trying to cover every category of 'what about this?' that a suffering person might raise.

The love of God is not conditional on your intact condition. It does not require you to be whole, functioning, spiritually performing, or emotionally stable. The cord of God's love does not fray under the pressure that breaks everything else. The brokenness that dismantles your self-sufficiency, your identity structures, your carefully maintained spiritual exterior — that brokenness does not damage your connection to God. If anything, it removes the interference between you and Him.

The unbroken cord is the ground of everything else in this month's journey. You can endure the potter's wheel, the threshing floor, the furnace, the pit, the denial, the midnight prison — because none of it can touch the essential thing. The thing that defines you most fundamentally — that you are loved by God in Christ with an unbreakable, unconditional, unvarying love — remains intact through every season of dissolution.

This is not a guarantee against pain. Paul's comprehensive list of sufferings makes clear that God's unbreakable love does not insulate His servants from profound suffering. But it is a guarantee that the suffering is not evidence of abandonment. The presence of brokenness does not mean the absence of love. The two can coexist — indeed, the love is often most palpably present in the breaking, because it is in the breaking that we discover we cannot be separated from it.

In the broken place, you are not less loved. You are not less known. You are not less held. The cord that was unbreakable before the crisis is unbreakable in the crisis. Lean on it with your full weight. It will hold.

Reflection: In your current season of brokenness, what does it mean practically to believe that you cannot be separated from God's love? Where do you need to lean on the unbreakable cord today?

"The love of God is the one thing in all the universe that brokenness cannot damage. It is the cord that holds when everything else has torn. — Timothy Keller"