In part 2 of our Unsubscribe series, we unpack 3 lies and the truth about God’s reliable and consistent love.
Three Common Lies About God and the Truth That Replaces Them
Most of us haven’t consciously decided what we believe about God — we’ve simply absorbed it. We picked it up from family, disappointment, unanswered prayers, and the particular kind of silence that follows a hard season. The lies about God that stick with us are rarely the ones we chose; they’re the ones we lived through. This post is an honest look at three of the most common misconceptions about who God is — and at the truth underneath each one.
Does God’s Character Hold Up When Life Gets Hard? Understanding Trusting God’s Character
There’s a moment most people hit at some point where trusting God’s character stops being theoretical. Maybe it was a relationship that ended badly, a prayer that went unanswered in the worst possible timing, or a season where doing the right thing seemed to produce exactly the wrong results. In that moment, the question isn’t philosophical — it’s personal. Can he actually be trusted?
This is not a new question. Genesis 2 records the earliest version of it: God gives Adam and Eve access to an entire garden with one limit. One tree off the entire menu. And what does the serpent say? “Did God really say you can’t eat from any tree?” It’s a small twist — just one word changed — but the effect is immediate. Suddenly God sounds arbitrary. Suddenly the limit sounds like deprivation instead of generosity.
That’s still the playbook. When life doesn’t go the way we hoped, something quietly rewrites the story: God must not care. God must not be reliable. God must be holding out. And once those seeds take root, trusting God’s character becomes almost impossible — because you’re no longer relating to God as he is; you’re relating to a version of him that was written in your worst moment.
Psalm 59:10 offers a different account entirely: “My God is changeless in his love for me.” Not my God is loving when I’m doing well. Not my God is changeless when the circumstances cooperate. Changeless. Full stop. Trusting God’s character doesn’t start with having all your questions answered — it often starts with being honest that you’ve been operating from a distorted picture.
One honest step: Write down the assumption about God you’ve been carrying. Not the one that sounds acceptable to say out loud — the real one. Name it before you try to argue against it.
Why God’s Boundaries Protect Us Instead of Limiting Us
The first lie is that God is unrealistic. It comes dressed in reasonable language: God’s expectations are too high. His rules don’t account for real life. He hands out desires and then puts them off-limits, which makes him either cruel or out of touch. Most people who’ve drifted from faith haven’t rejected God outright — they’ve simply concluded he’s unreasonable, and quietly stopped engaging.
Genesis 2 shows this lie at its origin. God tells Adam and Eve they can eat freely from every tree in the garden — an unlimited buffet — with one exception. One tree. And the serpent takes that single restriction and reframes the entire arrangement: “Did God say you can’t eat from any tree?” The implication is clear: God is holding something back. God’s boundaries don’t protect — they deprive.
But consider how God’s boundaries protect us by thinking about what a world without them would actually look like. Every good gift can be misused. Water sustains life and can also drown. Fire warms a room and burns a house. Food nourishes and can also destroy. The gift is real; the boundary is what keeps it a gift. When a parent tells a teenager to be home by 11, the teenager hears restriction. The parent knows something the teenager doesn’t yet — that the world outside at 2 a.m. carries a different weight.
God’s boundaries protect us in the same way. He’s not legislating against joy; he’s protecting the conditions under which joy actually lasts. The argument isn’t that God’s limits feel good in the moment — they often don’t. The argument is that his limits exist because he understands what happens when good things are misused, and he loves us enough to say so.
One honest step: Think of one area of your life where you’ve been interpreting a boundary as rejection. What would it look like to read it as care instead?
What Does It Mean That God Is Consistent When Your Experience Says Otherwise?
The third lie is perhaps the hardest to argue with, because it often shows up wrapped in evidence. God is inconsistent. He shows up for some people and not others. He answered that prayer but not this one. You can’t build your life on something that fickle. And if your picture of God was shaped by parents who were unpredictable — warm one day, absent the next — then this lie doesn’t feel like a lie at all. It feels like pattern recognition.
This is where Genesis 2 and the serpent’s strategy converge again. After questioning God’s generosity, the serpent moves to questioning God’s honesty: “You won’t die. God knows that if you eat from it, you’ll become like him.” The implication: God withholds. God misleads. God is not who he says he is. And once doubt takes root, it doesn’t stay quiet. It moves — from doubt to deception to destruction. Every time.
But the sermon preached on April 19, 2026 drew a distinction that cuts through the noise: we often project our experience of our parents onto God. If you grew up in a home where love was conditional or unpredictable, that’s the template your mind reaches for when you try to picture God. It’s not a character flaw; it’s just how people work. The problem is that it means you may have never actually encountered God as he is — only the version your experience built.
Psalm 59:10 says: “My God is changeless in his love for me.” That word — changeless — is doing a lot of work. It’s not “generally reliable” or “consistent on average.” It’s the same yesterday, today, and in the middle of the hardest thing you’ve ever been through.
One honest step: If you grew up with inconsistent love, name that. Then try asking, just once, whether God might be different from the people who shaped that expectation.
What Genesis 2 Reveals About God’s Love — and What Jesus Confirms
The scene in Genesis 2 is easy to read as a cautionary tale about disobedience. But look at the setup before the serpent arrives: God gives human beings an entire garden. Access to every tree. Life, provision, beauty, and relationship — all given before anything is asked in return. The one restriction isn’t evidence of a stingy God; it’s evidence of a God who created the conditions for real love by making real choice possible. Love that has no alternative is not love — it’s compliance. God built the garden with the freedom built in.
Jesus returns to this same logic in Matthew 10:29-31, speaking to people who felt like they didn’t matter. He asks them to think about sparrows — small, common birds worth almost nothing in their economy. Then he says: “Not a single sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it. And the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.” It’s a precise, almost startling argument. God tracks sparrows. How much more, then, does he see you?
| The Lie We Absorb | The Truth Genesis 2 and Jesus Reveal |
| God is unrealistic — his rules are too strict | God is loving — his limits protect his gifts |
| God is unreliable — he changes or disappears | God is consistent — changeless in his love |
| God is unconcerned — too busy for my small life | God is caring — he knows every hair on your head |
There’s a Whole City in Miami Carrying This Question
Southwest Miami-Dade is full of people who are high-functioning on the outside and quietly exhausted on the inside — people in Kendall, Westchester, Cutler Bay, and Palmetto Bay who know how to look composed and who carry real doubts about whether any of this is actually true. Miami is a city that rewards the appearance of certainty. Doubt doesn’t fit the aesthetic.
But Miami Vineyard has been in this community for over 35 years, and the conversation that keeps happening is not the polished one. It’s the honest one — the one where someone finally says what they’ve actually been thinking about God and finds out they’re not alone in it. If you’ve been carrying questions like the ones in this post, and you’ve never had a safe place to bring them, you are welcome at 12727 SW 122nd Ave. The building is ordinary. The conversation is real. Services are Saturday at 6:15 p.m. and Sunday at 10 a.m., 11:45 a.m., and 1:30 p.m.
You Don’t Have to Have This Figured Out to Come Home
Three lies — God is unrealistic, God is unreliable, God is unconcerned — and three truths to replace them: God is loving, God is consistent, God is caring. The sermon preached on April 19 ended not with an argument but with an invitation: come home to my love. Not to a version of God you’ve had to earn or impress. To the one who already sees you, already knows you, and has not changed.
If you’ve drifted, or if you’ve never been close at all, the invitation is still open. Take one step toward finding out what Miami Vineyard is about, plan your visit here and see what a Sunday actually looks like. And if you want to go deeper into the messages from the Unsubscribe series and others like it, find the full library and explore it here.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Is God unrealistic with his rules and boundaries?
A: The short answer is no — but it’s worth unpacking why the question feels so reasonable. When God places a limit on something, it’s not because he’s indifferent to human desire; it’s because he understands what happens to good things when they’re misused. Every gift — water, fire, food, relationship — can cause real damage without boundaries. God’s limits are the shape of his care, not evidence of his distance.
Q: Can I trust God to be consistent?
A: This is one of the harder questions, especially for people whose earliest experience of love was unpredictable. The honest answer is that God’s consistency doesn’t depend on your circumstances — Psalm 59:10 describes him as “changeless in his love.” That’s a different claim than “God will make everything go well.” It means his character doesn’t shift based on your performance or your season.
Q: Does God really care about my small problems?
A: Jesus addressed this question directly. In Matthew 10:29-31, he points to sparrows — birds worth almost nothing in his day’s economy — and says God knows when a single one falls. Then he says the hairs on your head are numbered. The argument is proportional: if God tracks something that small, how much more does he see you? Your problems don’t have to be significant by anyone else’s measure to matter to him.
Q: What if my image of God was shaped more by my parents than by anything else?
A: That’s more common than most people realize, and it doesn’t make you spiritually deficient — it makes you human. The way we were loved (or not loved) as children creates templates we apply without thinking. If you grew up with unpredictable, withholding, or absent parents, it’s worth asking honestly whether that template has been coloring how you see God. Recognizing the pattern is often the first step toward encountering something different.
Q: How do I actually start unsubscribing from lies I’ve believed about God for a long time?
A: It usually doesn’t happen all at once. It starts by naming the lie specifically — not a vague sense that something is off, but a clear statement of what you actually believe. Then it requires exposure to a different account of who God is, through Scripture, through honest community, and through the slow accumulation of experiences that don’t fit the old story. Unsubscribing from a long-held belief takes time, but it starts with honesty about what you’ve been holding.
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