The Reminder We All Need: Why You Can Stop Trying to Prove You're Lovable

Last month, I got a card in the mail from a friend. It made my day, not only because I love some good old fashioned snail mail, but also because the note inside was so encouraging!

It was a prayer that in the coming weeks with my sister’s wedding, and Valentine’s day, and whatever else may happen, I would sense God’s love in a special way and take comfort in knowing He is love.

It’s perhaps the most basic of our beliefs as followers of Jesus: that God is love and that He loves us.

Having grown up in the church, and now teaching in kids’ ministry at my church, I’ve heard this truth taught early in song: Jesus loves me, this I know; and in memorized Bible verses: For God so loved the world… (Jn. 3:16)

It’s perhaps the most basic of our beliefs, yet so often we need to be reminded that, as another friend once titled one of her sermons, God loves you a lot!

I don’t know about you, but I often find myself operating not from a place of secureness in God’s love for me, but from a place of insecurity about my lovableness.

So as I worry about what others might think of me, as I fear disappointing the people in my life with any unmet expectations, as I hold back from being vulnerably myself, as I strive to correct and compensate for my flaws with perfectionism, I’m trying to banish the doubts of my belovedness by proving myself worthy of love.​

And this doubt that we’re loved and lovable can be not just in our relationships with other people, but also in our relationship with God Himself. Would one mistake too many cause Him to withdraw His love from me? Am I doing enough good things to earn His love, keep His love, repay His love? Is doing enough good things even enough, or am I just hopelessly, inherently, worthlessly unloveable? And even if God does love me, perhaps His love is more of a tolerance, and not an actual liking and delighting in me?

If you can relate to any of this, here’s that reminder again: God loves you.

How do you react to that statement? Are you able to accept it and believe it and bask in it? Or is your knee-jerk reaction to think, Yeah, but…, and perhaps turn your face away in shame?

Before you start thinking those thoughts, before the insecurities start whispering, before you begin stacking the scales to determine your worth and lovableness, I want you to say it out loud at least once, and more if needed for it to sink in and silence the shame: God loves me.

Did you do it? Did you actually say it out loud?

John was one of the fisherman whom Jesus called to “Come, follow me” (Matt. 4:19-22). And he was one of the disciples whom Jesus invited to His inner circle of friends and followers, who we now refer to as the Twelve Apostles (Matt. 10:1-4). As ones who had followed Jesus closely throughout His earthly ministry, learning from His teaching, witnessing Him perform miracles, and seeing the empty tomb and the resurrected Christ, these men (excepting Judas Iscariot who betrayed Jesus) were commissioned to lead the early church and bear testimony as eyewitnesses to Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and ascension.

Around 50 years after Jesus ascended into heaven, John wrote his account of Jesus’ life on earth.* Something that’s interesting in John’s gospel is that he never refers to himself by name, but instead as “the one Jesus loved” (Jn. 13:23, 19:26, 20:2, 21:7, 21:20). Talk about being secure in God’s love!

Perhaps there were days when John didn’t feel secure in God’s love. Perhaps there were times when he doubted his belovedness. Perhaps as he remembered and reflected on Jesus’ life on earth, and was inspired by the Holy Spirit to write “the Word became flesh” (Jn. 1:14), and to tell about the miracle of Jesus turning water to wine (Jn. 2:1-10), and the time Jesus ministered to a Samaritan woman at a well (Jn. 4:1-26), and how Jesus wept with Martha and Mary at Lazarus’ tomb (Jn. 11:1-36), and the way He used some of His last breaths to care for His mother (Jn. 19:25-27), and the forgiveness He gave Peter after his three denials of knowing Jesus (Jn. 21:15-23)… perhaps in remembering all this, John was reminded: God loves me.

And so perhaps he wrote of himself as “one Jesus loved” to rest in this truth, even if he didn’t always feel like it was true.

We don’t know the exact feelings in John’s heart as he wrote these words.

But from his words, which are really God’s Word given by the Spirit, we can know this: it’s okay to say, “God loves me.” It’s okay to say out loud and cling to and stand on and rest in this audacious truth that the Triune God who created the heavens and the earth, who is Lord of lords and King of kings, who is holy and majestic and glorious, who is perfect in all His ways, loves us.

In fact, it’s more than okay, it’s what God Himself wants for us: to be secure in His love; to be able to say with assurance and confidence, even in the face of doubts, fears, and insecurities, even when we’re just not feeling it: God loves me.

At some point (we don’t know exactly when),** John wrote a letter to believers who seem to also have needed the reminder that God loves you. In 1 John 4, we read:

“God is love. God showed how much he loved us by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. This is real love—not the we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins… We know how much God loves us, and we have put our trust in his love.”
​1 John 4:8-10, 16

There it is: the truth that doesn’t just tip the scales in favor of our lovableness, but completely does away with them: we don’t have to prove ourselves lovable, because God has already proven His love for us.

God loves us so much, He sent Jesus to save us from sin, restore us to wholeness, and bring us into love-relationship with Himself.

When shame and insecurities tempt us to prove our lovableness, instead of picking up the scales to measure our merits, we can point to the cross where “God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners” (Rom. 5:8). We can turn our gaze to our Father, whose love lavished on us is so great, He calls us His (1 Jn. 3:1). We can meditate on “how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ” (Eph. 3:18). We can speak the truth that “nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:39).

Friend, maybe it seems like I took a lot of words to say the same thing multiple times, but I know I so often need this reminder, and I’m thinking at least some of you do, too. And that’s the thing about God’s love: as we remember He loves us, the natural outpouring is to share that love with others. As we remind ourselves, God loves me, we’re compelled to remind others, God loves you.

So you can probably guess how I’m going to close this post:

Friend, God loves you.