Believing God loved me was not hard for me to accept at all. But believing God liked me – that took many years to accept.

Because of my sin, I grew up misunderstanding the nature of God‘s love for me. See, I thought He kind-of had to love me.

You know, since God is love, and since Jesus already paid the price for my salvation, I just thought God had to love me – the same way we have to love some… special people in our families :-)

Do you have any special people in your family? Maybe an uncle or cousin in your family that… you just don’t really enjoy? They’re a part of your family, so you “love“ them, right?, but you don’t really like them…

For a long time, that’s how I felt God‘s love towards me must be. Because He is true to His Word – and because He is true to Himself – and because the Bible tells us over and over that God is love – I thought, “He has to love me… He’s required to love me… but He doesn’t have to like me…”

Y’all, how incredibly wrong and unBiblical was my thinking on this.

As I got into middle school and into early high school, I had volunteer youth leaders who showed me in black-and-white, right there in God’s Word –

  • how God chooses me,
  • how God delights in me,
  • how God thinks about me, all the time!,
  • and how those thoughts about me that He has all the time make Him happy!

This is the second simple-yet-profound reality that I want to explain to you today: God loves you, and, He also really likes you!

Look at Psalm 139:17-18 – “How precious concerning me are Your thoughts, O God! How vast is the number of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand.”

How many grains of sand are there in the whole world? Psalm 139:18 here tells us that God thinks about us more often than there are grains of sand in the whole world!

One of my most cherished verses of Scripture is Zephaniah 3:17 – it says, “The Lord your God is with you; He is mighty to save. He takes great delight in you; He quiets you with His love; He rejoices over you with singing.”

1 John 3:1 says, “Behold what manner of love the Father has lavished upon us, that we should be called the sons and the daughters of God – and that is what we are!”

That doesn’t sound like the language of obligatory, forced love to me – that sounds like a Father who treasures and delights in His kids!

Psalm 42:8 says, “Each day, the Lord pours His unfailing love upon me! At night, His song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life.”

And John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world that He gave is one and only Son, that whosoever believes in Him would not perish but have eternal life.”

Y’all, God doesn’t just love the world, he SO loves it!

Because of my sin – because of my faults and my addictions – because of the evil and sinful and selfish thoughts in my mind and intentions in my heart – I spent a lot of years knowing and believing that God loved me, but also thinking He must be

  • disgusted with me,
  • ashamed of me,
  • only loving me out of obligation to His Son and His Word and His own loving character…

For many years, I prayed prayers like this: “God, thank You for loving me… Oh Jesus, thank you for saving me! But how can You stand me?! You must be so ashamed of me, God… I must be such a disgrace to you… just a gigantic disappointment to you…”

And – He had to break that in me. He had to teach me, lovingly, over time, patiently, that He not only loved me, but that He also liked me, and enjoyed me, and delighted in me – that He does not look on me with disappointment or disgust, but with affection in His eyes, and with joy in His heart.

And that’s the way God looks at you: not with a glare, not with disgust – but with a smile – both on His face, and in His heart!

My friend Bart Scarborough likes to say, “Jesus is very fond of you.”

God loves you, and God also really likes you!