Hello my dear Rosary lovers. In this post we will answer the question: does God love me personally?
ABSOLUTELY!
YES. YES, YES, YES, YES, YES, YES. YES 100%.
No ifs or buts.
God absolutely LOVES YOU. He ADORES you. He created YOU. He made YOU. He formed YOU.
He CARES about you more than your parents, or your spouse or boyfriend/girlfriend. Or your pet. Or your closest friends.
God loves you FAR MORE than you even love yourself.
He knows you more than you know yourself.
Proof 1 that God loves you: He made you
The proof that God loves you is twofold.
Firstly, God created you. You only exist because God created you.
Your existence is no accident at all. God planned for your existence before the beginning of time! How amazing is that?
The Bible says, ‘God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world’ (Ephesians 1:4-5). So God has ALWAYS been planning your arrival into the world.
Go and read Psalm 139, and see how much you mean to God, how carefully he planned your formation in your mother’s womb.
So God is your Creator and Father, whoever you are. He adores you and will never stop loving you. You are his own special work and creation. You are his child, created by his love and grace.
God loves ALL that he has made. He loves his entire creation, and he has mercy on us all.
God is Mercy, and God is Love.
Proof 2 God loves you: Jesus died for you
The other way you can know for sure that God loves you is that he sent his Son to rescue you. He sent his Son, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, into this world to die on the cross for you.
‘God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in him might not perish, but have eternal life.‘ (John 3:16). This is the most quoted verse in the whole Bible. It has been translated into more languages than any other part of Scripture.
‘This is love: not that we loved God, but he loved us, and sent his Son to be the one who cancels out our sins.‘ (1 John 4:10).
‘God shows his own love towards us in that whilst we were still sinners, CHRIST DIED FOR US!‘ Romans 5:8.
One of my favourite phrases in the Bible is: ‘The Son of God loved me and gave himself for me.‘ So says St Paul in Galatians 2.
You see how Jesus didn’t just die for the world, and didn’t just love the world. Jesus loved Paul and gave himself for Paul.
Jesus loves YOU and gave himself up to death FOR YOU, whoever you are.
‘I have loved you with an everlasting love‘, Jeremiah 31:3.
God will never stop loving you, because he has always loved you. God has loved you as long as God has existed. Which is always.
God has thought about YOU from all eternity, as long as God has been. Which is forever.
The Gospel
Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, died for us all, and loves us all. He calls us all back to God the Father through his death on the cross and his glorious resurrection.
‘I am the Resurrection and the Life,’ says Jesus (John 11:25).
Jesus Christ is ALIVE! He rose from the dead on the 3rd day after his death, and he lives forevermore.
Jesus is our access back to God. Jesus calls us back to God, to live with God forever.
God has done it all for us! All that is required of us is that we do not reject God’s love for us.
All that God asks of us is that we acknowlege our sins, stop living for ourselves instead of for God and others, and ask God to have mercy on us in Jesus.
The Necessity of the Church
To show our desire to get right with God, he calls us to be baptised into his one, holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. If you have never been baptised, then seek to be baptised. I recommend approaching a Catholic priest. There is probably one local to where you live.
If we have already been baptised, but have gone away from God, he calls us back into communion with his Church, through Confession of our sins to a Catholic priest.
Confession is a place of Mercy, not of judgment. We come to Confession judging ourselves, by telling God where we’ve gone wrong, but he approaches us with nothing but love and mercy. And joy that we’ve chosen to so humble ourselves and get right with him!
Then we ask a Catholic priest if we can take the Holy Eucharist, so that we might have Christ’s life in us (John 6:51-53).
Listen to the priest and see what he says. He may ask you some questions, so that he can make sure you enter the Church properly and receive God’s love and grace properly.
This is how we accept God’s love for us. This is how we do not reject God’s love for us.
This is how we get our sins forgiven and can be assured of heaven and eternal paradise.
I hope this helps. Please never doubt God’s tremendous love for you. He loves you more than you can possibly imagine.
There are two great sins. One is to think that God doesn’t love you or care about you. The other is to presume upon God’s mercy, ‘God will always forgive me, that’s his trade.’ This attitude is very wrong.
We don’t deserve anything from God. He has given us far more than enough. And we should never simply presume that he will forgive us or have mercy on us. We don’t deserve this.
But God is GOOD. He is Goodness itself, and in Jesus, he longs with all his heart to be merciful to us.
But we do have to do something. We have to come to God through Christ and his holy Catholic Church. We have to request baptism, we have to make ourselves known to the Church and the local priest, we have to conform ourselves to God’s way of salvation.
This is what faith is. It is trusting in Jesus’ established path of salvation. And that path is found in the holy Catholic Church.
This is what Jesus meant when he taught his apostles: ‘Make disciples of all nations, baptising them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you. And I am with you always, to the end of the world.‘ (Matthew 28:19).
Two things are therefore necessary to become a Christian and a follower of Jesus:
Baptism and being obedient to the teachings of the Church, the Catholic Church.
There is no other way to ‘obey all’ that Jesus commanded us, because all of Jesus’ teachings have been preserved in the Catholic Church.
Jesus is still with us, in his Church. Jesus teaches us how to obey him: through his Church, which is the Body of Christ, and the fullness of him who fills all in all (Ephesians 1:23).
God bless you all and if you have any questions, please feel free to get in touch.