The Father Himself Loves You: Rediscovering God’s Eternal Heart

Growing up, I was taught that God is holy, and rightly so. His purity, His majesty, His consuming fire-like glory were emphasised in catechism classes, through liturgies, and especially through the sacraments. The wrath of God wasn’t just a doctrine; it felt real and near. Confession and penance made it tangible.

I remember sitting in the confessional, naming my sins, then walking out clutching a prescribed list of prayers, hoping that if I said them right, enough times, and meant them, God would finally be appeased and spare me.

Even prayer felt precarious. I could not imagine approaching the Father directly. A mediator was required. It wasn’t Christ, Mary (I know). And so, unintentionally but effectively, I learned to see the Father as far off: pure, holy, angry, and easily displeased because I am perpetually a sinner.

That view shaped me deeply. Even after coming to true faith in Jesus Christ, a suspicion of God’s grace lingered. I believe in the gospel. I trust Jesus as my Lord and Saviour. But deep down, I imagined Christ standing between me and an angry Father, calming Him down, absorbing His blows, turning away His fury.

It made my Christian life a balancing act: gladly approaching the Father in prayer on my good days, but hesitant and drowning in despair on my worst. I lived as though His love was fragile, easily lost, easily revoked.

How could I rest in His presence if one sinful thought or wrong motive might change His heart toward me? Sometimes that fear drove me harder: more striving for fervent prayers, straining to prove myself. Other times, it crushed me into despair. I knew the cross. But I did not know the Father’s heart.

While reading a book, “Communion with God” by John Owen, with a group of brothers and sisters, I stumbled across a truth I had overlooked for years. It wasn’t anything novel or hidden. It has always been right there:

“For the Father himself loves you…” (John 16:27, NASB95)

That sentence stopped me cold. I had read it before, but this time it felt personal. Clear. Undeniable. The Father Himself loves me. And He has loved me eternally.

The Eternal Love of the Father

John Owen writes,

“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.”

Those words struck me like a thunderclap. All my years of suspicion and striving weren’t just spiritual struggles; they were wounds to the very heart of God, who has loved me far longer and deeper than I dared believe.

By living as if His love were reluctant, fragile, or easily lost, I have been treating the Father’s eternal heart as though it were uncertain. My doubts suggested that His promises could not be trusted, that His affection must be earned, that His love was too thin to bear the weight of my failures.

Long before my fears and failures, long before my first sin, even long before the world itself was formed, He loved. “I have loved you with an everlasting love,” He declares (Jeremiah 31:3). Paul tells us, “He chose us in [Christ] before the foundation of the world… In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons” (Ephesians 1:4-5). Before creation. Before sin. Before time itself. He loved.

Love That Does Not Change

You may ask: But what about when I sin?

Many of us live as though God’s love rises and falls with our performance. When we do well, we imagine His smile. When we fail, we fear His love retreats. But this misunderstands both His love and His immutability. God’s unchanging nature doesn’t mean He is distant or cold. It means His love is steady, unshaken by our highs and lows. 

“Every good gift… is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17).

Owen again writes: “Though we change every day, He does not change. Our love is like a stream that is dried up in summer, but His is like a fountain always flowing.” His love does not flicker like a candle in the wind. It blazes like the sun, unmoved by storm or shadow.

Or you may also ask, what about Ephesians 2:1-3? Did He still love us while we were dead in sin?

Well, if God’s love were dependent on our worthiness, there would be no hope. But the next verse answers your question with breathtaking grace:

“But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ…” (Ephesians 2:4-5, NASB95)

Even while we were spiritually dead, His eternal love was at work, raising us to life in Christ. As one post I saw on Instagram puts it:

When God chose to set His love upon you, He did so with full knowledge of your foolishness.

Every sin, every failure was already accounted for, and yet He loves you still. His love is fixed. The Father Himself loves you. And he never changes.

Calvary’s Love: Expression, Not Cause

This is the staggering beauty of the gospel: the cross is not what makes the Father love us. It is what reveals how deeply He already did. As Owen puts it, 

Christ’s work did not purchase love from the Father, but made a way for that love to reach us without compromising justice.

The cross is where mercy and justice kiss (Psalm 85:10). Or as another hymn declares: “And God’s peace and perfect justice kissed a guilty world in love.”

It is where the Holy Father, who cannot ignore sin, meets the Loving Father, who would not leave us in our guilt. It is the peak revelation of God’s heart, a heart that has always burned with love for His people.

Jesus came, not to persuade the Father to love us, but to reveal the love that was already ours. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son” (John 3:16). “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son” (1 John 4:10). The Son was sent because the Father loved us, not so that He might start loving us.

When Jesus went to the cross, He wasn’t twisting the Father’s arm. He was displaying the very heart of the Father. As Jesus Himself said, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). At Calvary, we see not a rift between the Father and the Son, but a perfect unity of purpose and love.

Living in the Father’s Love

If we truly believe that “the Father himself loves us”, it will transform the way we live. This truth is not merely theological; it’s profoundly practical and life-changing.

1. Prayer becomes a delight, not a performance: We come as children to a welcoming Father (Matthew 6:8-9). We can speak freely, knowing you are welcomed, not merely tolerated.

2. Bible reading becomes a letter from a loving Father: His Word is not cold instruction, but a revelation of His affection. We are not just checking boxes. It is a delight.

3. Assurance grows strong and steady: His Love is not fragile or dependent on our performance. Our failures may grieve Him, but in His love, He disciplines us as sons and daughters (Hebrews 12:6). His correction is not the withdrawal of affection but the proof of it. Nothing can separate us from His love (Romans 8:38-39).

4. Sin loses its charm: How can we run after the very things that Christ died to free us from, when we are already embraced by perfect love? We fight sin not to gain His love, but because we are already loved.

5. Love for the church grows: If the Father loves our brothers and sisters, how can we not love them too?

6. Evangelism is fueled: We plead with the world, “See what kind of love the Father has given to us” (1 John 3:1) and be reconciled to God (2 Corinthians 5:20).

7. Perseverance in suffering is strengthened. When trials press hard, we remember that the Father’s love is not withdrawn in the storm. His eternal love steadies us, assuring us that even suffering is woven into His good purposes (Romans 8:28; Hebrews 12:6).

The Father Himself Loves You

I still feel the pull of my old doubts at times. There are days I find myself slipping back into performance mode, wondering if I’ve done enough to stay in the Father’s favour. But then I remember the words of Jesus:

“for the Father Himself loves you, because you have loved Me and have believed that I came forth from the Father” (John 16:27, NASB95)

Because we have believed in Christ, we have believed the Father’s own revelation of His love. Faith receives not only the Son, but also the Father’s heart in sending the Son. John Owen writes:

“The saints have communion with the Father in love… The love of the Father is the fountain from whence all other sweetness flows. This love of God is the first and chief gift, the fountain of all other mercies. He gives all things in love, and nothing in wrath.”

In other words, when you believe in Jesus Christ, you are not only escaping wrath. You are stepping into the eternal current of the Father’s love, the fountain from which every other gift flows.

Saint, have you lived your Christian life with a view of God the Father as distant or disapproving? Have you carried the weight of trying to earn His smile, fearing His love might be withdrawn? Have you measured your worth by your performance rather than His promise? Then let this truth settle deep into your heart: The Father Himself loves you.

Not just the future, sanctified version of you. Not the you that has it all together. Not the polished, put-together you. He has loved the faltering, doubting, stumbling you who is even now being conformed to the image of His Son.

He loved you before time began. He sent His Son because He loves you. And He has given you His Spirit as a guarantee of His love.

Let His eternal love calm your fears, lift your prayers, steady your assurance, ignite your zeal for holiness, and deepen your fellowship. “For the Father himself loves you.” Don’t just read it. Believe it. Receive His Love by Faith.