Truth: You Already Have God’s Love
If you’ve been drawn to this blog post, it’s probably for one of two reasons:
One, you’ve been taught that perfectionism - in whatever exact format that’s been specified as - is required in order to earn God’s love, affection, favor, etc. Which means you’ve been constantly struggling to achieve and maintain that perfectionism.
Two, maybe you haven’t been striving for perfection. But you’ve been under the impression that God needs you to be “good enough.” In other words, you need to be better than you are right now.
You may even be somewhere in-between where you started out striving for perfection. But when that seemed hopeless, you lowered your expectations to being “good enough.”
Whichever bucket you’re in, here’s the underlying issue: you’ve been taught that you have to earn God’s love.
To put it another way, you’ve been operating under the belief that God’s love is not freely given.
Now the why behind this is may have been explained to you in various ways:
God’s character is such that He’s cruel, harsh, and judgmental
God’s love is not unconditional
You need to be "worthy" of God’s love by earning it through works, to-do lists, avoiding sin, being perfect, etc.
These ideas (which are false) put the weight of being loved by God squarely and fully on your shoulders. It’s all up to you, right? That doesn’t sound very loving.
And yet something in you has been desperately yearning for God’s love. Even though you’ve been feeling confused, hopeless, or depressed. Even though something about the way this is supposed to work just doesn’t add up.
Friend, your desire for God’s love - and to have a safe, healthy relationship with Him - is spot on.
Your inner compass is pointing due north to the God who uniquely created you. It’s the information that’s incorrect.
And this brings us to the major mic-drop / breakthrough moment of this post. Are you ready?
You don’t need to earn God’s love. You already have it.
I mentioned this in last week’s blog post, but it bears repeating here: God’s love for you actually existed before He created not just you - but the world itself!
Ephesians 1:4-5 (NLT): “Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure.”
Friend, let that sink in. God loved you before He even created the world you and I would eventually be born into! Meaning, He loved you before He created the sky, or clouds, or the seas, or the animals.
God loved you before you even existed!
This means you already have His love! There is absolutely no reason to earn His love.
To help you really soak in this truth, let’s look at two other items that further prove that this is true.
God Moved Towards Us First
When we’re taught that we need to earn God’s love, what we’re effectively being told is that we need to move towards God before He’ll move towards us.
In other words, we need to constantly make the first move. Or the move that makes us “worthy.” Or the move that somehow magically compels God to move toward us.
That big idea is entirely false. The truth is that God moved towards us first - and He will continually pursue us because that’s how much He loves us.
In the book of Genesis, we read about the Garden of Eden. God created this beautiful garden for Adam (and Eve) to live in, giving clear, honest communication for their own good:
In Genesis 2:15-17 (NLT), we read, The Lord God placed the man [Adam] in the Garden of Eden to tend and watch over it. But the Lord God warned him, “You may freely eat the fruit of every tree in the garden— except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If you eat its fruit, you are sure to die.”
That's a crystal clear direction, right? Yet in Genesis 3, both Adam and Eve sinned by eating from that tree - thereby causing sin to enter the world.
Ever since then, every single human being has been born inherently bent away from God (who is without sin or wickedness) and toward sin.
Because God is holy (meaning 100% without sin or any kind of evil), we were destined to die and to be eternally separated from His presence.
It wasn’t just us or the world that was broken; it was our relationship with God.
Now, in this situation, God could’ve chosen to just throw up His hands, turn around, and walk away - leaving us to our dark fates.
Considering what Adam and Eve had done - which ultimately came down to wanting to be their own god versus respecting their Creator God - He would have been justified in leaving them to their own devices.
But that’s not who God is. He’s just, yes. But He also loves us. So He immediately put certain things into action:
In Genesis 3:22-24 (NLT), God removes Adam and Eve from the garden so they can’t make things worse by eating from the tree of life, thereby living forever separated from God. He even goes so far as to station mighty angels to guard the garden and a flaming sword in front of the tree of life.
In the Old Testament, God directed the Israelites to make sacrifices to atone for their sins. Meanwhile, the prophets prophesied about the coming of Jesus.
In the New Testament, Jesus is born into human history and ultimately dies on the cross, in our place, for our sins past, present, and future. He is the final atonement. If we chose to believe in Him - and the fact that He died for our sins - then God sees us as clean (i.e., holy and sinless) through the blood of Jesus. Jesus also defeated death by rising from the tomb three days after He was laid to rest there.
And God’s plan to sacrifice His own Son? (Which, by the way, Jesus - being part of the Trinity - willingly did.) That was foretold by God Himself back in Genesis 3:14-15 (NLT):
Then the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, you are cursed more than all animals, domestic and wild. You will crawl on your belly, groveling in the dust as long as you live. And I will cause hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.”
In verse 15, God is referring to the virgin birth of Jesus and His crucifixion.
So you see, friend, God not only loved you before He created the world. He immediately kept moving towards you in love even after the betrayal in the Garden of Eden.
He wasn’t going to be separated from you; that wasn’t acceptable to Him.
If We Had to Earn God’s Love, The Bible Would Be Very Different
If there’s one common theme that’s predominant throughout the Bible - which is one overarching story that comprises 66 books - it’s God consistently moving towards us, loving us, and keeping His promises despite humankind’s constant sin, betrayal, and wickedness.
No one in the Bible is perfect, or sinless, or earned God’s love because he or she managed to be “good enough.”
As we looked at earlier, God loved us first. Which is a very good thing because if that wasn’t true - if God’s character was vastly different - then the Bible would read very differently. In fact, it probably wouldn’t even exist.
Why? Because the other predominant theme running throughout the entire Bible is God revealing His character to us. Who He is. How much He loves us. (It’s not always easy to recognize or understand, being that the Bible isn’t an easy read. But it’s there.)
Friend, if God didn’t already love you - if He hadn’t already been pursuing you with love and truth - then why would He facilitate the creation of the Bible and its continued existence over thousands of years?
And why would that massive book continually reveal who He is; and how He loves and protects and works through His imperfect, broken, and sinful people; and provides a way out of the mess they made through Jesus; and ensures us over and over again that He’s with us.
That’s the truth of the Bible. And, friend, if you’ve been taught something different, it’s not accurate.
If God wanted us to earn His love - like some harsh, cruel master - then the Bible would be more like a short booklet that dictated what we needed to do in order to please Him.
Yet instead, we have a book that shows us how much God loves us - and that He’s our hope in this crazy, sinful, broken, and chaotic world that will eventually be reset to be the way it’s supposed to be.
And by the way, as a side note, God gave the Israelites the Ten Commandments and, later, the Mosaic Law for their own well-being. And to show them (and us) that we can’t earn our way out of sin. So if you’ve been pointed to these things and told they are examples of God wanting you to earn His love, for example, that’s not correct. In fact, one of the reasons Jesus was angry and frustrated with some of the Phariasees during His ministry was because they had taken what God meant for good and turned it into something that was weighing down the people.
In any case, the big idea here is that the entire Bible speaks to the fact that God’s love is not something we need to earn.
Over and over again, we read of people and situations in the Bible where God’s people sin or outright turn away from Him. And while He lovingly corrects them - as any good father would do - He never stops loving them.
Because it’s not about who they are; it’s about who God is.