God loves you. That is a dogmatic truth. To deny it is to deny the faith itself, but most of us do not really accept it. We do not feel that it is true. We feel that it could not be true, seeing what we are like. . . We feel that God does not really love us because, we think, He cannot be pleased with us. We are not pleased with ourselves, and ought not to be, and so we think God is not pleased with us. And if He is not pleased with us, we think, therefore He does not really love us. We put Him off every time He looks at us. Such thoughts and feelings as these are very harmful. Of course God is not pleased with us when we let Him down, but does that mean He loves us less? Does a good mother love her child less because he falls down sometimes? Does she love him less when, like the child he is, he is occasionally disobedient? She loves him all the more because he needs her help more, and she tries to train him.
God is love, and although He is omnipotent, He cannot possibly be anything but love. The only way God can look at you is with love. He may not love your conduct, but He loves you. If you fail from time to time, if you even commit sins from time to time, it does not cause God to stop loving you. He dislikes your conduct because it harms you, but His love is still there. When you fail God in some way, you should not feel tense or estranged from Him in any way. You should be sorry, very sorry, but not uneasy. . .
I think we need to remember that we have to love ourselves. We should love ourselves because God loves us. We should not love our bad conduct, but we should not hate ourselves because of it. As with others, so with ourselves, we must make a distinction between the sin and the sinner. In ourselves we are what God made and what God loves. At any moment, and certainly at this moment, God is looking at you with love. Supposing at this moment you were praying or doing something else and felt that you were not doing it very well. If that were your situation, you ought to feel that God loves you as much as ever. Whatever criticism your conduct calls for, do not let it color your idea as to how much God loves and accepts you.
Some people go through a devout life always feeling that they are not doing enough and that if only they did more they would please God and feel that He really loved them. Well, some people ought to do more, no doubt, but we ought not to do it in order to earn God’s love but in order to return what is already there for us. While we should want to become saints gradually, we ought not to feel uneasy in our contact with God in the meantime. God never frowns. He is light and life and joy and beauty and ecstasy, and this God loves you hear and now more than you can conceive. If only you would realize how great and genuine and deep and unrestrained that love is, you would be a different person. You would have a peace you never imagined before, peace that passes all understanding. You would wonder how you could ever be depressed again. . .
The beginning of the Good News is that God loves us, but it goes on to tell us that He not only loves us but that He saves us, that our failures and faults and sins do not any longer have to separate us from God’s love for us.
In our younger days, we were taught to make acts of faith, hope, charity, and contrition. These acts were short formulae or prayers that we knew by heart. We used to say them very often, and it did us a lot of good. If you make acts of faith, hope, charity, and contrition, these virtues themselves grow within you. At least they do if you really mean what you say as you pray these acts. You have to put some punch into them if they are really to have their effect. They need to be said with firm inner conviction. . .
At this moment, if you can say to God, and you ought to be able to do so, “My God, I firmly believe that you love me,” then any spiritual uneasiness that you may have should disappear. And if you repeat this act whenever you begin to feel uneasy spiritually, whenever you feel that you are not quite acceptable to God, then you will put things right. With reasonably devout people, the great barrier to spiritual growth is not their faults and failings and sins, although these exist and must always be fought against, but their feeling of uneasiness with God. They do not really feel that they are children of the Father who loves them, even when they say the Our Father.
Let us very often make this simple act of faith in God’s love for us: “My God, I firmly believe you love me.” If we do this, as it becomes a habit, it enters our heart, and no longer does God’s love for us reside in our heard as a bit of knowledge, but it enters our hearts as fire. This makes us love God much more, and out of love for Him, we find we want to make greater efforts to become more perfect. We make efforts, then, out of love and not out of uneasiness, and we live in a state of peace and tranquility, not tension. Our efforts to serve God better are real efforts but they do not make us tense, and our failings do not make us uneasy. They make us humble, and they make us peacefully sorry. We know we are accepted by God, and nothing can snatch us from His hands. We are in Jesus’ hands where God put us, and Jesus is God, and God is love. We are loved, and nothing can separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus.
