For most of my life, I thought I knew God well. I loved Him, or at least I thought I did. I preached, planted churches, discipled men, and poured my life into serving Him. I wasn’t pretending. I was sincere. I wanted the world to know His name, and I worked hard to make that happen.
But somewhere along the way, I confused working for God with walking with God.
I measured His pleasure in me by the results I could see: the numbers, the movement, the fruit. If the ministry was growing, then I must be pleasing Him. And in my mind, that was love. I didn’t realize that I was slowly becoming a servant who worked in the house of God but no longer sat at the table with Him.
Looking back, I can see that even my exhaustion had a holy purpose. God wasn’t punishing me. He was gently bringing me to the end of myself. He loved me too much to let me keep running on empty.
It took heartbreak, loss, and even illness to show me what success could never teach me. When everything I had built fell apart when I lost friends, ministry, reputation, and even the strength of my body, I discovered something I had never truly known before: I had never been unloved.
When you’re stripped of everything you think defines you, you finally find out what can’t be taken away.
In the hospital bed, with tubes in my chest and a quiet ache in my soul, I realized that the God I had served my whole life was right there, not waiting for me to get better or prove myself again, but sitting beside me in love.
I didn’t find God at the end of my striving. I discovered He had been there the whole time, waiting for me to stop long enough to notice.
The greatest miracle of my story isn’t that I came back to Him, it’s that I finally saw I’d never been away. His presence wasn’t lost; my awareness was.
For years, I had been trying to earn what was already mine. I kept thinking, “If I work hard enough, if I pray long enough, if I lead well enough, then maybe God will be pleased.” But in those quiet, broken moments, I heard Him whisper what my striving had drowned out: “I have always loved you.”
That’s when grace stopped being a doctrine and became my life.
I used to serve out of duty. Now I serve out of delight. I used to preach because I had something to say; now I speak because love has something to say through me. I used to measure my worth by how much I did for Him. Now I rest in what He has already done for me.
It’s not that I’ve stopped working. It’s that I’ve stopped working for love and started working from love. There’s a world of difference between the two.
You see, God never asked me to build something great for Him. He invited me to know Him, to trust that His love was enough even when everything else was gone.
The older I get, the more I realize that the Christian life isn’t about climbing higher for God but resting deeper in God. The love that carried me through the darkest season of my life isn’t fragile or conditional. It’s not based on my behavior or my record. It’s rooted in who He is.
When Jesus said, “As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you,” He was describing a love without gaps or pauses. It doesn’t begin when we start behaving or stop when we fall short. It simply is.
That realization has changed everything.
I don’t fear failure the way I used to, because failure can’t exile me from a love that never left. I don’t chase the approval of others, because I already live from the approval of the One who knows me best.
And I’ve learned something beautiful: when you finally rest in His love, you don’t lose your passion, you find it. His love doesn’t make you lazy; it sets you free. You start serving not to be accepted, but because you already are.
If I could sit across from you today, I’d tell you this: you don’t have to earn His love. You don’t have to prove anything. You don’t have to fix yourself before you sit at His feet. The love you’re looking for has already found you.
You can stop running. You can stop striving. You can rest.
Because the God who called you, who carried you, who refused to give up on you, He loves you now, just as He always has.
And that’s my real story. Not a story of success, but of surrender. Not a story of a man who finally reached God, but of a God who never stopped reaching for me.