When Did God Begin to Love You?

Does God really love me? When our circumstances don’t feel lovely, we can begin to question God’s love.

Maybe you’ve sung about Jesus’ love since you can remember. You know the verse that says that God so loved the world, but you wonder if God so loves you.

When life implodes in grief or pain, does it seems like God’s love has skipped you? Or maybe it has slowed or stopped altogether? Maybe you used to feel God’s love but He seems distant in your current pain or maybe you’re worried your choices have cooled God’s love for you.

I saw a quote last weekend that stopped me short.

“When did God’s love for you begin? When He began to be God. When did He begin to be God? Never, for He has always been without beginning and without end, and so He has always loved you from all eternity.” St. Francis de Sales

God’s love, like God himself, has always existed. God’s love is not a mood or a feeling but part of His character. It’s who God is and as such, it is unchangeable. Nothing within God and nothing outside of God, neither person nor circumstance, can alter God’s love for you.

God’s love for you is everlasting. It has always existed without beginning and also without end. That means God’s love doesn’t start and stop. It’s not less one day and greater another.

There has never been a moment from eternity past, present, or future that you have not been lavishly loved by God.

It’s not based on your performance. Neither your actions nor inactions impact it. You can’t earn God’s love and you cannot therefore lose God’s love. You cannot achieve your way into His love and you can’t fail your way out of it.

God does not wait to love you when you become worthy or when you feel it. Instead, it’s God’s love through Christ’s atonement on the cross that makes us worthy and that enables us to feel his love. (1 John 4:10)

God loved you when your body was yet unformed, before any of your days came to be. His love wrapped you in the womb and when through faith His love is trusted, it will bring you home to heaven.

God’s love for you is not a tale as old as time, but a truth that pre-exists time. Before light in this cosmos, there was love. “I have loved you with an everlasting love; Therefore I have drawn you with lovingkindness.” (Jeremiah 31:3)

You will never be outside the reach of God’s love. And you will never sink to a place so deep that God’s love is not deeper still. “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39)

Oh, how deep the Father’s love for you.

When did God begin to love you? He has always loved you from all eternity. And He always will.