God’s love was revealed among us in this way:
God sent His One and Only Son into the world
so that we might live through Him.
Love consists in this:
not that we loved God, but that He loved us
and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
(1 John 4:9-10 Holman Christian Standard Bible)

Do you believe in God’s love? Not just in love as an attribute of God, an essential part of His character – but, do you believe in God’s love for you?

Back in December, we celebrated the incarnation: God taking on our form in Mary’s womb; the little baby laid in a stable’s feeding trough being God-in-the-flesh.

We sang this truth back then and rejoiced – but do we understand its implications?

In 1 John 4:9-10, the apostle John helps us to understand one key implication: The incarnation and sacrifice of the Son display the love of God like nothing else.

In His great plan of redemption, God determined to create for Himself a people for His own possession, children in His family, a Bride for His Son, those over whom He will rejoice with loud singing (Zephaniah 3:17). The Son left His glorious throne, came to life as an apparently illegitimate son to a poor couple in a Roman backwater, lived a perfect life, yet died penniless, exposed, and naked on a cross – the most shameful death of his day. He did this – for you – if you will only believe in Him, trust Him, and treasure Him. He did this so that you might be His treasure, His joy.

So the seventeenth century scholar John Owen comments on John 16:26b-27a (“I do not say to you that I will ask the Father on your behalf; for the Father himself loves you”), saying the disciples, while assured of Jesus’ love for them, doubted the Father’s love:

Saith our Savior, “Take no care of that, nay, impose not that upon me, of procuring the Father’s love for you; but know that this is his peculiar respect towards you, and which you are in him: ‘He himself loves you.’ It is true, indeed (and as I told you), that I will pray the Father to send you the Spirit, the Comforter, and with him all the gracious fruits of his love; but yet in the point of love itself, free love, eternal love, there is no need of any intercession for that: for eminently the Father himself loves you. Resolve of that, that you may hold communion with him in it, and be no more troubled about it. Yea, as your great trouble is about the Father’s love, so you can no way more trouble or burden him, than by your unkindness in not believing of it.” So it must needs be where sincere love is questioned.

Or, as R.J.K. Law renders the end of that paragraph:

The greatest sorrow and burden you can lay on the Father, the greatest unkindness you can do to Him, is not to believe that He loves you.

God has demonstrated His love for us unmistakably in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of His Son. So do not grieve God the Father through disbelief in His love! Reflect on the incarnation, contemplate Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection – and believe that God the Father Himself loves you.

(The John Owen quote is from Communion with God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost (1657), Part 1, Chapter 3; the entire work is available online for free at this link. R.J.K. Law’s excellent paraphrase and condensation of this work is published as Communion With God (Banner of Truth, 1991). Another paraphrase and condensation by William Gross (2003) is available online for free via this link).