Confessions of a Christian Who Struggled to Believe God Loved Them

I want to write something today that I have never written quite this directly before.

I am going to confess something.

For a long season of my Christian life — longer than I want to admit — I believed in the love of God without actually believing it was for me.

I could quote John 3:16 without hesitating. I could explain the atonement. I could tell you about the cross and what Jesus did and why He did it. I had the theology of God's love stored away in my head like furniture in a room I had never actually walked into. It was all there. None of it was touching me.

When I prayed, I approached God the way you approach a strict employer — doing my best to appear competent, hoping He would not notice the mess underneath. When I sinned, I did not run to Him. I hid. When I read about His love in Scripture, something inside me always whispered: that is for other people. People who have it more together than you. People whose sins are less serious. People who have not done what you have done.

I suspect I am not alone in this. In fact, I think this is one of the most common and most unspoken struggles in the church. Christians who can articulate the love of God theologically but cannot receive it personally. Believers who have the doctrine right and the experience completely wrong.

This blog is for those people. It is my confession. And it is what the Word of God finally broke through to teach me.

The Gap Between Knowing and Believing

There is a difference — a vast, painful, life-altering difference — between knowing that God loves you and actually believing it.

Knowing is intellectual. It lives in the head. It can be recited, defended, and explained to other people while you yourself are starving for the reality of what you are describing.

Believing is personal. It lives in the gut. It changes how you pray, how you confess, how you receive forgiveness, how you face the day. It changes what you do when you fail. It changes whether you run toward God or away from Him when you are ashamed.

I knew God loved humanity. I knew the cross was the proof. I knew all the right answers.

But there was a part of me — a deep, stubborn, wounded part — that could not quite believe He loved me specifically. That when He looked at me, He saw something worth loving.

And I want to be honest about where that came from, because I think naming it matters.

Where the Struggle Came From

For me, the struggle to believe God loved me came from several places at once, and they fed each other.

It came from a distorted picture of who God is. Somewhere along the way, I had picked up an image of God that was more like a performance evaluator than a Father. A God who was watching, assessing, tallying — pleased when I got things right and disappointed when I did not. A God whose love felt conditional even though I knew theologically it was not. I had the right doctrine and the wrong picture, and the picture was driving my experience.

It came from my own sin. There were specific sins in my past — some of them serious, some of them long patterns of behaviour I was ashamed of — that I had confessed a hundred times but still carried the weight of. I had intellectually received forgiveness. But I had not emotionally received it. The guilt had not left, and I interpreted that residual guilt as evidence that God had not actually moved on even though He said He had.

It came from comparing myself to other Christians. I looked at people who seemed to walk with God so naturally, who spoke about His love with such ease and warmth, and I thought: they have something I do not. There is a category of Christian that God really loves and I am not in it. Which is, of course, a complete lie — but a very convincing one when you are in the middle of it.

It came from a failure to distinguish between feelings and truth. I had unconsciously decided that if I did not feel loved by God, I was not loved by God. That His love was only real when it felt real. That the absence of emotional warmth meant the absence of the thing itself. And so on the days when I felt flat, I concluded I was unloved. And on the days when I felt close to Him, I felt temporarily allowed back in.

I lived in that cycle for years. Earning my way in on the good days. Hiding in shame on the bad ones. Never quite resting. Never quite free.

The Lie I Believed Most

Underneath all of those things was one core lie that kept the whole system running.

The lie was this: God loves you in general, but not in particular.

He loves humanity. He loves the church. He loves believers as a category. But you specifically — with your specific history, your specific failures, your specific ugliness — you are not quite what He had in mind. You are on the fringes of His love. You are included because He said so, not because He actually wants you.

I never said this out loud. I would have denied it if someone had named it. But it was there, underneath everything, quietly poisoning every prayer and every attempt at intimacy with God.

And it is a lie straight from the pit of hell.

Because the Bible does not describe a God who loves in general. It describes a God whose love is devastatingly particular.

What the Bible Actually Says

I want to walk through several passages of Scripture here not quickly, but slowly — because this is the medicine and it needs to be taken in full doses.

Jesus Knows You By Name

In John 10, Jesus describes Himself as the Good Shepherd, and He says something that I had read many times without it landing properly:

"He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out." (John 10:3, ESV)

By name. Not by category. Not "the flock." By name. He knows each one individually and He calls each one individually. The shepherd in this image does not stand at the gate and shout "sheep!" He calls each one by the name he has given it.

That is personal. That is particular. That is the opposite of a God who loves in general.

Jesus goes further in the same passage:

"I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep." (John 10:14–15, ESV)

I know my own. The same quality of knowing that exists between the Father and the Son — that eternal, infinite, perfect mutual knowing — is the knowing with which Jesus knows His sheep. He does not know you the way you know a face in a crowd. He knows you the way the Father and Son know each other.

And He laid down His life for you knowing everything He knew.

God Knew You Before You Were Born

Psalm 139 is the passage I return to most often when the lie tries to creep back in. It is the most exhaustive description of God's personal, intimate, particular knowledge of a single human being in the entire Bible.

"For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them." (Psalm 139:13–16, ESV)

You were not an accident to God. You were not an afterthought. He was present at your formation — knitting, weaving, seeing your unformed substance. Every day of your life was written in His book before a single one of them had arrived. Before you could do anything to earn His attention or lose it, He already knew every day you would live and He was already there.

That is not the love of a God who loves in general. That is the love of a God who has been paying particular attention to you before you drew your first breath.

The Father Runs

In Luke 15, Jesus tells three stories in a row about things that are lost — a lost sheep, a lost coin, a lost son. And the third story — the prodigal son — is the one that demolished the lie for me more than any other passage in the Bible.

You know the story. The younger son takes his inheritance, goes to a far country, wastes everything on reckless living, ends up starving in a pigpen. He comes to his senses and decides to go home — not hoping for full restoration, just hoping to be hired as a servant. He rehearses his speech on the way.

And then:

"But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him." (Luke 15:20, ESV)

While he was still a long way off.

The father was watching. He was watching the road. He had not given up. He had not written the son off and moved on. He was watching for him — and the moment he saw him appear on the horizon, still a long way off, still covered in the evidence of everything he had done, still rehearsing his shame speech — the father ran.

Fathers in the ancient Near East did not run. Running was undignified for a man of standing. To run, he would have had to gather up his robes and sprint down the road with complete disregard for how it looked. He did not care. He ran. He embraced him. He kissed him before the son could get a single word of his prepared speech out of his mouth.

And then before the son can even finish his confession, the father is already calling for the best robe and the ring and the sandals and the fatted calf. He is not receiving the son as a servant. He is restoring him as a son. Completely. Without condition. Without a probationary period. Without waiting to see if the son has really changed this time.

"For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found." (Luke 15:24, ESV)

Jesus told that story to describe what God is like.

Not a God waiting with arms crossed. Not a God who says I told you so. Not a God who puts you on probation after you come home. A Father who was watching the road the whole time, who runs when He sees you coming, who restores you completely before you have finished confessing.

When I finally let that story be about me — not just about humanity in general, but about me specifically coming home from my own far country — something broke open inside me that I had kept sealed for years.

The Love That Is Not Based on You

One of the reasons I struggled to believe God loved me was that I had subtly made His love conditional on something about me. Either my performance, my consistency, my level of spiritual maturity, or at the very least the severity of my sins relative to others. I was always running a calculation in the background: am I lovable enough right now?

But the Bible describes a love that does not work that way.

"But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." (Romans 5:8, ESV)

While we were still sinners. Not after we cleaned ourselves up. Not once we had demonstrated enough remorse. Not when we had made sufficient progress. While we were still sinners — actively, presently, unambiguously in rebellion against Him — He died for us.

The timing of the cross is the answer to every version of the lie. If God's love waited for you to become worthy of it, the cross would have come later. But it did not come later. It came when we were His enemies:

"For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life." (Romans 5:10, ESV)

While we were enemies. That is not the language of a God who loves cautiously or conditionally or after sufficient evidence of good behaviour. That is the language of a God whose love is the cause of our transformation, not the result of it.

He did not love you because you got better. He loved you in order to make you better. The love came first. The love always comes first.

What I Did With My Guilt

I need to talk about the guilt specifically, because I think this is where many Christians get stuck in the same place I got stuck.

I had confessed my sins. Multiple times. For some of them, dozens of times. And I believed intellectually that God had forgiven me — I knew 1 John 1:9 and I believed it was true in the abstract. But I kept returning to the same sins in my mind, picking them up, examining them, carrying them. Not as a spiritual discipline. As a kind of punishment. As if the ongoing weight of the guilt was something I owed.

What I did not understand for a long time is that returning to confessed sin — dwelling in it, re-examining it, re-accusing yourself over it — is not humility. It is a failure to believe what God has said.

Because He said this:

"As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us." (Psalm 103:12, ESV)

As far as the east is from the west. That is not a small distance. East and west never converge — you can travel east forever and never reach the point where east becomes west. The removal is total and directional. The sin is not merely covered. It is removed. It is gone in a direction that never ends.

And this:

"I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins." (Isaiah 43:25, ESV)

I will not remember your sins. God is not sitting in heaven with a file folder full of your confessed sin, occasionally pulling it out to review. He has blotted it out. He has chosen not to remember it. For His own sake — because His character is one that forgives completely and that forgiveness is an expression of who He is, not a favour He reluctantly extends.

When I understood this — really understood it, let it past my head and into my chest — the guilt I had been carrying lost its grip. Not because I stopped taking sin seriously, but because I started taking God's forgiveness seriously. And there is a difference.

Taking sin seriously is confession. Taking God's forgiveness seriously is receiving what He has already given and refusing to pick back up what He has already taken away.

The Voice That Told Me I Was Not Enough

I want to address something directly because I think it needs to be named. The voice that told me I was not loved, not worthy, not the kind of person God was really interested in — that voice was not the voice of God.

Jesus describes Satan plainly:

"He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies." (John 8:44, ESV)

The father of lies. And what are his lies aimed at? Your identity and your standing before God. Always. The lie that you are not loved enough. The lie that your sin is too much. The lie that other people are the real recipients of God's grace and you are on the edges. The lie that the Father's arms are crossed, not open.

These lies have a specific target: the place in your soul where the love of God is meant to take root and produce confidence, peace, and freedom. Satan knows that a Christian who knows they are loved by God is a dangerous person — someone who is free from the need for approval, free from the fear of failure, free from the power of shame. So he aims his lies precisely there.

Paul tells us how to deal with them:

"We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ." (2 Corinthians 10:5, ESV)

Take every thought captive. Every thought that contradicts the knowledge of God — every thought that says He does not love you, that you are too far gone, that your sin is the exception to His forgiveness — take it captive. Hold it up against what God has actually said. And when the thought does not match the Word, throw it out. Not because you are suppressing honest emotion, but because you are refusing to give authority to a lie.

The Night It Changed for Me

I want to tell you about a specific moment, because I think sometimes we need to know that breakthroughs are real — that the thing we are hoping for actually happens.

There was a night — I was alone, it was late, and I was in one of those seasons where the shame had been particularly heavy. I had been going around in circles for weeks, confessing the same things, picking them back up, confessing again. Knowing the theology and not feeling any of it. Going through the motions of prayer with the distant, managed God I had constructed in my imagination.

And something made me stop and actually read John 17 that night. Not quickly. Slowly. The high priestly prayer of Jesus, the night before He was crucified. He prays for His disciples. And then He prays for everyone who would ever believe through their testimony:

"I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word." (John 17:20, ESV)

That is me. That is you. Jesus prayed for us specifically the night before He died. And then He says this, a few verses later:

"I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them." (John 17:26, ESV)

The love with which the Father loved the Son — that exact love, that eternal, infinite, perfect love within the Trinity — Jesus prays that it would be in us.

Not a lesser version of it. Not a diluted version allocated to creatures. The same love. The love the Father has for the Son.

I had to put the Bible down after that and just sit in it. Because what Jesus is saying in that verse makes the lie impossible. The Father does not love His Son grudgingly, partially, conditionally. He loves the Son with a perfect, eternal, overflowing love. And Jesus says: I am asking that they would have that.

You are not on the fringes of God's love. You are in the middle of the love the Father has for the Son.

That is not something you earn your way into. That is something you receive — on your knees, undone, with nothing to offer — because Jesus purchased it with His blood and asked for it the night before He died.

For the Person Who Is Still in It

I want to speak directly to the person reading this who is still in the place I was describing. Still in the gap between knowing and believing. Still picking up confessed sin and carrying it. Still approaching God like a performance evaluation rather than a homecoming. Still hearing the voice that says you are not really the kind of person His love was meant for.

I want to say a few things to you.

You are not alone and you are not strange. The struggle to believe God loves you personally is one of the most common struggles in the Christian life. The fact that you are struggling with it does not mean you are not saved. It means you are human and you have an enemy who is very good at his one job.

Your feelings are not the final word. The love of God is not a feeling. It is a fact — a historical, covenantal, cross-shaped fact that does not change based on what you feel this morning. Feelings are real and God cares about them. But they are not the thermometer you should be using to measure His love. The cross is the thermometer. And the cross says that while you were His enemy, He died for you.

Confession is not the beginning of a probationary period. When you confess your sin, God does not put you on trial. He removes the sin. He blots it out. He does not remember it. The weight you are still carrying after genuine confession is not from Him. Put it down. It does not belong to you anymore.

Let yourself be the prodigal son. Not in theory. Not as a story about humanity. Specifically you — with your specific history, your specific sins, your specific distance from Him. Picture yourself on that road. And then let the Father run. Let Him embrace you before you finish your speech. Let Him call for the robe and the ring and the celebration before you have had a chance to talk yourself back to servant status.

That is not presumption. That is the gospel. That is exactly what Jesus said God is like.

"See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are." (1 John 3:1, ESV)

See what kind of love. John himself is astonished by it — he asks you to stop and look at it. The kind of love that makes you a child of God, not a servant, not a probationer, not someone on the fringes. A child.

And so we are. Not potentially. Not hypothetically. And so we are.

What Changed Practically

I want to close with something practical because doctrine without application is just information. What actually changed in my daily life once this started to break through?

I stopped hiding when I sinned and started running. The prodigal son turned around and came home. That is what repentance looks like when you believe you are loved. You do not hide in the shame because you know the Father is watching the road. You turn around and you run toward Him because you know what is waiting.

I stopped performing in prayer and started talking. When you believe you are loved, you do not have to manage your presentation before God. You can be honest. You can say: I am struggling. I am confused. I am angry. I do not understand what You are doing. Because the Father who ran down the road to embrace his returning son is not going to be put off by your honesty. He already knows everything you are about to say and He loves you before you say it.

I started receiving the Word as personal. Every promise in Scripture stopped being general and started being mine. When Romans 8:1 says there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus — that is for me. When Psalm 103 says He removes my transgressions as far as the east is from the west — that is my transgressions. When John 17 says the Father loves me with the same love He has for the Son — that is me He is talking about.

The shame lost its grip. Not overnight. Not completely. But there was a trajectory. The voice that said I was not loved enough started to lose its authority as I learned to hold it up against the Word and throw it out. It still comes. But it does not land the same way it used to, because I have a better answer for it now — not an argument I constructed, but a word God spoke.

The God Who Loved You First

I want to end here. With this:

"We love because he first loved us." (1 John 4:19, ESV)

He first loved us. Before we loved Him. Before we sought Him. Before we got anything right. He first loved us.

The love of God is not your response to something He did. It is His response to nothing you did — because before you did anything, He already loved you. Before the foundation of the world:

"...even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will." (Ephesians 1:4–5, ESV)

Before the world existed, He chose you. In love. Not because of what you would become. Not because of what you would achieve. In love — because love is what He is, and that love reached out and chose you before time began.

That is the God you are struggling to believe loves you. That is the God who knitted you together in your mother's womb. That is the God who watched the road while you were in the far country. That is the God who ran before you finished your apology. That is the God who prayed for you by name the night before He was crucified. That is the God who removed your sins in a direction that never ends.

You do not have to earn your way into this. You cannot earn your way into this. It was settled before you were born and confirmed at the cross and declared by resurrection and sealed by the Holy Spirit who lives inside you right now.

You are loved. Not in general. Not as part of a category. Specifically, personally, particularly, completely loved — by a Father who knows your name and calls you His child and will not let you go.

Let that in.

I am Michael. I follow Jesus Christ and the Bible alone. And I am a Christian who struggled for a long time to believe God loved me.

I am telling you — He does.

Amen.