The title of this book is God Loves You: He Always Has—He Always Will. All in favor of that proposition? I see every hand up. Any against? None. It’s not a title designed to stir controversy. The real issue is this: How deeply do we believe it?

Life experience persuades me to believe that one of Satan’s most effective strategies is to undermine our understanding of the love of God. He knows that our confidence in God’s love tends to be fragile, dependent on whether we think our lives are going poorly or well—that God loves us when we please Him and withholds love when we fail. Satan wants to keep it that way because, as soon as we stumble or encounter painful obstacles, he needs only to whisper a negative thought here, a half-truth there, and we find ourselves whittling the infinite love of God down to a poor substitute based on the assumption that the Lord of creation loves in the capricious way that humans do.

With this attitude, we begin to envision our loving Father as an impatient taskmaster, pushed to the edge by our missteps, ready to come down hard on us at any moment. Maybe once—possibly when we were children—we thought God could be affectionate. But much water has passed under the bridge since then. That was before we committed this wrong or made that mistake. We’re not sure just how much we’ve drawn from God’s love account, but we’re bound to be reaching the bottom. We must find some way to earn our way back into His good graces.

That’s how love might function with your friend or even with a spouse or parent. But it’s never how love works with God. Before, during, and after your stumble, and through every stumble to follow, His love remains intact and perfect. If you could somehow chart the love of God, it would show as a straight line across the top of the graph, never dipping, never plunging, but remaining constant, with a value of infinity. Any variance is simply imaginary, the result of our ignorance or inability to feel His love.

As I write this book, the e-mails flow in from people in pain, people who believe that God had good reason to write them off long ago. Many of these people know their Bibles inside out, and they still manage to miss the Bible’s central message: You cannot keep God from loving you. You can know this truth clearly with your mind and never have it penetrate your heart. While I firmly believe that Christianity is rational, I also believe it must involve our emotions. As the French mathematician Blaise Pascal said, “It is the heart which experiences God, not the reason.”2 We need to feel the deep and abiding love of God.