He Loves Me: Grasping How Loved You Are By God

Ever played he loves me, he loves me not growing up? Plucking petals and hoping that the last petal would seal your future in love? Have you ever played this game with God’s love? Isn’t that what we do when we really don’t understand the depth of the love that God has for us? When our circumstances get tough, it’s hard to grasp feeling loved by God as we wonder if God is so loving and good why is this happening?

Rick Warren in his book: The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For, says “God is a God of love…[and that] this kind of love is difficult to fathom, but it is fundamentally reliable. You [and me] were created as a special object of God’s love! God made you [and me] so he could love [us]. The Bible tells us, “God is love.” It doesn’t say God has love. He is love! Love is the essence of God’s character. There is perfect love in the fellowship of the Trinity, so God didn’t need to create you or [me]. He wasn’t lonely. But he wanted to make you [and me] in order to express his love.” (p.28)

So Why Is It So Hard To Grasp How Much We Are Loved By God?

Francis Chan in his book Crazy Love says “Most of us to some degree, have a difficult time understanding, believing, or accepting God’s absolute and unlimited love for us…and the reasons we don’t receive, trust, or see His love vary from one person to the next, but we all miss out because of it.” (pp. 53-54)

Some like Chan have a hard time because of their relationship with their earthly father. Either they didn’t feel wanted, loved or cared for, or at the most painful level, they suffered emotional or physical abuse and that impacts their ability to see God as a loving Father. Others were raised fearing a punishing and judgmental heavenly Father unable to see past their fear to His abounding love for them. For a lot of us, we just didn’t grow up knowing about God or knowing that we were loved or could be loved so much by God.

How I Found God’s Love

Both my parents were involved in church as kids. They attempted to continue that involvement after they married and had four little babies all under the age of 3. But as time went on and we relocated to the north we became consistent Easter and Christmas Christians. A brief stint back to all things church happened when my dad had a brain aneurysm when I was 15, but that was short lived and our two time a year attendance returned until my parents divorce.

Our two times a year attending church growing up did not have an impact on me to grasp how much I was loved by God. It wasn’t until I was watching The 700 Club one day when I was 20 years old that I prayed and asked Jesus into my heart. The love of Jesus that Pat Robertson talked about that day caught my attention.

Growing up as twin number two and the last baby of the family with three older siblings and other family issues, I looked to silly games like he loves me, he loves me not to affirm or deny the love I so desperately wanted to feel. And when Pat Robertson talked about how much Jesus loves and wants all of us, I wanted that.

Why Do We Need To Know How Loved We Are By God?

Because your view of God determines your desire to have a relationship with Him and believe in His love for you. What you think about God matters.  If you view God in a negative way you are less likely to pursue a relationship with Him. If you don’t believe in or know that God loves you unconditionally (not based on anything you did or didn’t do), you are less likely to place your trust in Him or believe in His promises for you. 

Recently I asked my Facebook peeps to share with me why it is important that we grasp how loved we are by God and here are some of the responses:

“It is essential to our walk with God to know that God is love and He loves us. His motivation toward us is out of love. Knowing this, we can trust what He is doing in our lives even when we don’t understand. There is security in the love of God. He never changes and is faithful. We have confidence in His love.”
K. Wolfram

“God created each of us to be loved by Him so we could love Him in return. If we can’t completely accept and embrace that fact, we can’t fully experience, live, love and rejoice in His love as He intended for us. First, we must internalize and own the much bigger concept of love and that God IS love. Not just that He loves us. His love is unconditional and is not dependent on what we do or don’t do, or even if we love Him or not! Even if we never do anything for God, He would still take pleasure in us simply because of WHO we are. This realization frees us to love Him, depend on Him, and joyfully have a beautiful relationship with Him, which radically impacts our daily lives!”  B. Brand

He Loves…me, you, us!

No need to pluck a petal letting fate determine if you are loved. God tells us in His Word:

 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” John 3:16

God Is Love

⁷ Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. ⁸ Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.⁹ In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. 1 John 4: 7-9

God’s love for us does not compare to our understanding of human love and is beyond what we can even think or imagine.

If you want to know that love, feel that love and live that love you can do what I did and ask Jesus to come in to your heart by believing that He is your Lord and Savior, that you are a sinner (we all are) and that He died a sinless death on the cross for you and that He rose from the dead and is sitting at the right hand of God the Father in Heaven.

Praying that prayer brings Jesus into your heart and you will now know, feel and live out of His perfect love living inside of you!

It really is that simple!

Here’s a Prayer for Spiritual Strength to Grasp the Father’s Love for us from His Word

Ephesians 3: 14-21

¹⁴ For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, ¹⁵ from whom every family^[c] in heaven and on earth is named, ¹⁶ that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, ¹⁷ so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, ¹⁸ may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth,¹⁹ and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

²⁰ Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, ²¹ to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

Seal your future in His love.