You Are Loved

and when I tried to shame myself once more from His presence,

God showed me his compassion and spoke a divine truth,

“I made you, dear, and all I make is perfect.

Please come close, for I

desire

you.”

Teresa’s poem captures the hesitancy we have in accepting the love of God. She looked at what she had done and wondered how she could look into God’s omnipresent eyes, eyes that have seen everything we have ever done—including our worst sins.

But what does God do? God sings! God sings to her “a song even sweeter.” But what does Teresa do? She tries to shame herself once more. But God gets the last word: “I made you, dear, and all I make is perfect.” God does not say, “All I make can be perfect.” God says, “All I make is perfect.” But this perfection is not the morally impeccable, flawless performance kind of perfection I used to pursue. This has to do with the perfection of our being, not our doing. As made by God, we are made exactly as God intended, and in this sense we can say we are “perfect.”

We can be perfect in our being, even when not perfect in our doing, because we are made exactly as God intended.

I love how the poem ends: “Please come close, for I desire you.” This is perhaps the most difficult thing for us to believe, those of us who lived for years with an angry God on a swivel chair. We can maybe accept that God loves us because, well, God is God and can do anything. But surely God does not like us! The God who spoke to Teresa is the same God who speaks to you and to me. Maybe we cannot hear it audibly, but if we are honest, we can hear it in the cry of our hearts, the longing that we desperately have for this to be true.

One of the most powerful statements in the Bible is this: “God is love” (1 John 4:8). Three little words: God is love. Notice that it does not say, “God loves”—it says, “God is love.” This means that love is not something God does at one time and does not do at another. Peter van Breeman explains, “If we think of God as a person who can divide his love, then we are thinking not of God but of ourselves. God is perfectly one, the perfect unity. We have love, but God is love. His love is not an activity, it is his whole self,” because God is triune, three persons who are in an eternal relationship of love.

This is foreign to us because human love is divided. We can and do divide our love. We love sometimes, and sometimes we do not love. But that is not possible for God. The Greek words for this verse are theos agape estin, literally “God love is.” What kind of love is the love of God? It is agape love. There are four common Greek words for love, all describing different kinds of love (eros, romantic or sexual love; phileo, friendship love; storge, family love). Agape is “love that wills the good of another,” to use Dallas Willard’s definition. God’s love is agape love because God always wants the best for us and will go to any length, even self-sacrifice, for our well-being.

But God’s love for us is also phileo (Jesus said in John 15:15 [CEB], “I call you friends”) and we are members of God’s family (storge), and God’s love for us is also erotic, though not sexual, as seen in the last three words of Teresa’s poem: “I desire you.” Saint Bernard of Clairvaux wrote dozens of sermons on the Song of Solomon, comparing the love between lovers in that book of the Bible to the love between us and God. My point is that God loves us in every possible way love can be expressed. The best love felt between friends, the most passionate love between lovers, the most committed love between family members, are all reflections of God’s love. What is different about God’s love is that it is complete and never-ending. Passionate love wanes, family love can be strained, and friendship love does not always endure. The love of God is unlimited and eternal. It is the love we have all been longing for.

Reflect on the fact that you can do nothing to change God’s love for you.

A few years ago I dug up an old tape of one of Henri Nouwen’s talks, one that had spoken deeply to my heart so many years ago and sustained me in ways I never knew. I listened to the talk anew and found my heart soaring once again. Henri preached,

We love because he first loved us. You and I are called constantly to claim that first love. The spiritual life is a life in which you more and more hear that Voice that says, “I have called you from all eternity. I have loved you from all eternity. You belong to Me. And I am your lover. And I love you not because you do good things. Not because you have a lot of things. Not because people speak well about you, not because you are so exciting or have so many talents. I love you because I love you because I love you.”

The Spirit spoke anew to me through this old talk, as if Henri was speaking to me from the other side of the veil.

And yet it is hard to believe we are the beloved. Love like this is so immense that it is difficult to bear, as William Blake wrote: “And we are put on earth a little space, / That we may learn to bear the beams of love.” We must learn to “bear” love because it is hard to accept being really loved in this way. I find the love of God to be overwhelming. In many ways, my need to hear that I am loved by God is greater than I can understand, and yet God’s love is also greater than I can accept. This is where the vicarious humanity of Jesus is so crucial. Jesus became human in order to do for us what we could not do for ourselves. As the early church father Irenaeus (AD 130-202) said so clearly: “Because of His measureless love He became what we are in order to enable us to become what He is.”

Jesus does for us what we could not do on our own, and that includes believing we are God’s beloved daughters and sons. Jesus, in his full humanity, has done this vicariously for us. We struggle to believe that we are the beloved because of many voices that shout that we are “no good,” or “not enough.” Jesus faced this struggle, and he succeeded in believing he was the beloved on our behalf. According to theologian Thomas Smail, “Jesus needed, not once, but again and again at each stage of his mission and each crisis in his living and dying, a freshly confirmed knowledge of his own identity.”

At Jesus’ baptism, which marked the beginning of his ministry, Jesus heard these words: “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17; Mark 1:11; Luke 3:22). My friend Trevor Hudson points out, “In stark contrast to ourselves, when Jesus needed to know who he was, he listened to his Father’s voice, trusted that voice and claimed its truth for his own life.” If Jesus needed to hear, again and again, that he was God’s beloved in whom God was well pleased, then there is nothing wrong or weak about us needing to hear it as well.

Jesus listened to the voice of the Father for us. You and I will fail to do this perfectly. We may believe it one day, then deny it the next. Jesus has listened and believed on our behalf. Jesus even faced the temptation to define himself on the valuation system of this world: what we do, what we have, what others say of us. The same Spirit who descended on Jesus at his baptism led Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted (Mark 1:12). Right after hearing, “You are my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” Jesus went into the desert to face Satan’s temptations to prove he was worthy of being loved. “‘Turn stones into bread . . . jump from a high tower . . . bow to me and you’ll be rich and powerful,’ the Enemy whispered. Jesus was clear in his response: ‘I don’t have to prove that I am worthy of love. I am the Beloved of God, the One on whom God’s favor rests.’” When I fail to believe I am the beloved—and I often do—I am comforted in knowing that Jesus always believes I am the beloved.

The apostles knew this truth about our identity, and proclaimed it in their letters. Peter, John, and Paul, who wrote most of the New Testament, communicated the truth that we are the beloved in their letters, or Epistles. In eleven of those letters, the term beloved is used forty-seven times. Paul calls the recipients of his letters “beloved” eighteen times, John uses it ten times, Peter six times, James seven times, and Jude four times (in one short epistle). Here are two that I find encouragement in:

As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. (Colossians 3:12, italics added)

To those who are called, who are beloved in God the Father and kept safe for Jesus Christ. (Jude 1, italics added)

The apostles learned that they themselves were the beloved—despite their failures and sins and betrayals—and they told the early Christ-followers that they were also the beloved. What is important to note is this: flesh and blood did not reveal this to them, but only by Jesus through the Spirit did they come to this understanding. But the frequency of this term, beloved, should alert us to the fact that the New Testament is unequivocal about our identity. We are sinners, to be sure, because we sin. But that does not negate our identity as beloved.

I suspect that many of you reading this are saying, “This is not news to me. I have heard that I am loved by God.” If this is true for you, I am glad. But it may be that you, like me, need to hear it anew, and hear it in new ways.

Imagine a child is walking with her father. The father picks her up, hugs her and kisses her on the forehead, looks her in the eyes, and says, “I love you so much. You are so precious to me. I love just being with you. Do you know that?” The little girl blushes and smiles and kisses her dad on the cheek. So here is a question: Did she learn anything she had not known before? Was she given some new information about her father in that moment? Probably not. She is not given a new idea—but an old idea, one she has known and longs to hear, becomes new.

That is what the love of God is like for me. I need to hear it again and again. It is not new news; it is good news said in a new way. Every sunset, every act of kindness from a stranger, every piece of art or music that moves me, I now see as new ways God is loving me. Simone Weil said, “The beauty of the world is the tender smile of Christ to us through matter.” I am learning to see and feel that smile every day—and I need to see it over and over.

Do you need to hear it said again in a new way that God loves you?

One of my favorite verses is 1 John 4:19: “We love because he first loved us.” God loved us first, by sending his Son for us (1 John 4:10). But, as Kierkegaard pointed out, God does not just love us first one time. God loves us first every single moment of every single day. “When we wake up in the morning and turn our soul to You . . . when we withdraw from the distractions of the day and turn our soul toward You, You are the first and thus forever. And yet we always speak ungratefully as if you have loved us first only once.” God is always present, loving us first each and every moment. I, for one, need to hear it again and again.

In the last few years, I have developed a deep love for 2 Corinthians 3:18. I believe it is the foundational verse for Christian spiritual formation. It is about looking into a mirror, but instead of seeing our face in the mirror, we see Jesus’ face:

And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit. (2 Corinthians 3:18)

In this spiritual mirror we see “the glory of the Lord.” And “the glory of the Lord” is “the face of Jesus” (2 Corinthians 4:6). So what we see as we look into this mirror, by the Spirit, is not our face but the face of Jesus. And as we look into this mirror, beholding the glory of Jesus, we are transformed “into the same image.” Love is the mechanism of change when we gaze on the face of Christ.

When we behold the face of Jesus, we see absolute love, and that love inspires love within us. This is how God communicates that we are his beloved. Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote, in what is one of my favorite quotes:

In this face, the primal foundation of being smiles at us as a mother and a father. Insofar as we are his creatures, the seed of love lies dormant in us as the image of God. But just as no child can be awakened to love without being loved, so too no human heart can come to an understanding of God without the free gift of his grace—in the image of his Son.

God, our Creator, the Creator of all, the “foundation of being,” smiles at us. Read that again: God smiles at us. Can you imagine God smiling at you? This is hard for many of us who were raised with a lot of false, toxic narratives about God. And those toxic God narratives have led to a lot of toxic self-narratives.

Can you imagine God smiling at you?

But imagine God, in the face of Jesus, smiling at you. When by the power of the Spirit we are enabled to see it, the image of God in us is awakened, like a seed that lay dormant. Just as a child needs to look into the smiling eyes of a parent or caregiver to awaken love, so too we, in our spirits, need to look into the face of Jesus and see a smile. It is the face of Jesus, looking at us, that can transform us. That is because Jesus, unlike the others in our lives, knows us completely (sins and all) and knows us accurately (he is not prone to error), and is the only voice powerful enough to penetrate our hardened hearts.

In the opening of this chapter I shared the story of how my father failed to acknowledge my outstanding performance on the basketball court, and instead focused on the little thing I did wrong. I shared this story with my counselor, who said, “I imagine you were hoping for something different.”

“Yes,” I said. “I was hoping he would say, ‘Wow, what a great week, pal. You played so well! Fifty-one points!’”

“That must have really hurt,” he said. I nodded yes. Then he said something that never occurred to me. “I think it is fascinating that he asked you about your feet.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because your father was in the stands looking at your feet. He was wanting so badly to help you, he was even watching your feet. He couldn’t help you from the stands, but he was doing the one thing he could do—he was looking for ways to help you. That is why he asked you if you knew why you missed the free throws. He was trying to help you. But that is not what you heard. And he should have said what you needed and deserved to hear: ‘What a great game—let’s go have a steak!’ and then, only then, should he have said, ‘And hey pal, maybe later we can work on your free throws. I noticed something with your feet.’”

I began to sob as he finished that sentence. My dad really did love me, but he was not always great at showing me in the ways that I needed to hear it, and I was not always great at listening in ways I could hear it. This is one of the great things about our heavenly Father. We may fail to hear his love, for all the reasons I have written about in this chapter. But God keeps on coming to our games, and keeps on watching our feet, and never fails to love us in the ways we need to be loved.