Can God Really Love Me When I Know How Broken I Am?

What You’ll Learn

• See why God’s love for you started before you did anything right or wrong
• Find a way to love the people you honestly find hard to love
• Understand why feeling overwhelmed by God’s love means you’re finally getting it

Most of us have wondered whether we’d still be loved if people saw the worst parts of us. This message looks at a love that starts before we exist, sees the ugly parts, and stays anyway. If you’re skeptical, curious or just worn out, here’s what that love looks like and how it changes the way we treat each other.

Does God love me before I get my life together?

Yes. Pastor [Preacher Name] tells a story from college about walking into an art studio late at night and finding an older man staring at a giant pillar of clay. A few days later he was chiseling it, and a week later it was a finished face. The sculptor wasn’t looking at what the clay was. He was looking at what it could become. That’s how God sees you. In Ephesians 1:4, the Bible says God chose us “before the creation of the world.” Before you were born, and before you did anything right or wrong, God decided to love you. As one writer put it, “A thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed, but a thing created is loved before it exists.” You don’t earn your way into God’s love. Love is the reason you exist at all.

What does it mean that “you are what you love”?

Whatever you love shapes who you are on the inside, and sooner or later it shows on the outside. If you love camping, you buy a tent and head for the woods. If you love hiking, you buy the shoes. What we love doesn’t stay hidden. In Ephesians 3:16-17, a man named Paul prays that God would “strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.” Paul isn’t asking for outer strength like muscles or willpower. He’s praying that the center of who we are, our heart, would be shaped by the love of Jesus. When that happens, it doesn’t stay inside. It changes how we treat people at work, at home and down the street.

Why is it dangerous to bond with people over who we don’t like?

Have you ever grown closer to someone after finding out you both dislike the same person? It happens. Pastor [Preacher Name] is a proud Green Bay Packers fan, and he jokes about a church he served in Chicago where half the congregation cheered for the Packers and half for the Bears. On rivalry Sundays, the Bears fans had to take communion from the Packers pastor. It was all in fun, but it points to something real. When a relationship is rooted in shared dislike instead of shared love, we start seeing people as enemies. That can creep into churches too, where people bond over a mutual dislike of someone else in the room. The danger is that we fixate on other people’s brokenness while ignoring our own. Jesus’ love leaves no room for “those people.”

How do I love someone who’s really hard to love?

Start by remembering that they’re made in the image of God, just like you. Pastor [Preacher Name] shares a quote from Anthony of Sourozh, a church leader who compared every person to a damaged icon: a sacred painting worn down by time, by circumstances or by hatred. If someone handed us a damaged work of art like that, we wouldn’t focus on the damage. We’d treat it with tenderness and pay attention to the beauty that’s left. That’s how we’re invited to see people. Everyone is broken, including us, and every one of us has been loved anyway. As the pastor puts it, “We are restored and made beautiful because we are loved. We are not loved because we are beautiful.” When you see a difficult person the way God sees you, grace gets much easier to give.

If Christians are just as broken as everyone else, what makes them different?

Honestly, it isn’t that they sin less. Every single person in church is broken. What’s supposed to set Jesus’ followers apart is how they love each other. Jesus said it plainly in John 13:35: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” That’s the test. It’s love, not a spotless record. And it isn’t a shallow love based on who you happen to like. It’s a sacrificial love that wants good things for the people around you and works toward healthy, right relationships with them. That’s the hardest thing to do. It’s possible because people who follow Jesus have first received an enormous amount of love themselves, and that love flows back out.

Does God’s love depend on how well I behave?

No. Most human love comes with conditions: “I’ll love you as long as you stay in line.” God’s love is different. The Bible says that before we knew God, we were his enemies, actively working against what was good (Romans 5:10). What did we do to fix that? Nothing. What did God do? He gave his Son, Jesus, to die for us, so that people who were once his enemies could become his children. That’s the love Jesus shows. It’s a love that says, “I’ve seen the ugly parts of you and I’m staying no matter what.” In Ephesians 3:18, Paul describes a love so wide, long, high and deep that there’s nowhere you can go where Jesus can’t reach you.

Why is God’s love so hard to understand?

Because it’s bigger than our minds can hold. In Ephesians 3:18-19, Paul prays that people would “have power… to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge.” Notice that he prays for strength just to understand it. If we fully grasped how much God loves us, we couldn’t handle it. So if you struggle to put God’s love into words, Pastor [Preacher Name] has good news for you: congratulations, you’re starting to understand a fraction of it. In his words, “When it comes to God’s love, bewilderment is the true comprehension.” Feeling overwhelmed doesn’t mean you’re missing it. It means you’re finally seeing how big it is.

What does the cross have to do with God’s love?

Everything. Pastor [Preacher Name] calls the cross of Jesus the beginning and the ending of God’s love. Where do you see how wide, long, high and deep that love is? On the cross, where Jesus died for broken people who did nothing to deserve it. And the cross was always the plan. In Genesis 22, God tests a man named Abraham by telling him to take “your son, your only son, whom you love” and offer him as a sacrifice. God stopped him before any harm was done. Remarkably, that verse is the first time the word “love” appears in the Bible, in a story about a father and the son he loves. It points ahead to the cross, where God gave his own Son, his only Son whom he loves, for the people he loves. That includes you.

Key Scripture: Ephesians 3:14-19 (NIV)

“For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”

Paul, an early leader of the Christian movement, is praying that God would change people from the inside out, so that Jesus’ love becomes the root system of their whole life. He also admits that this love is too big to fully understand, and that being amazed by it is part of really knowing it.