Does God love me personally — not just humanity in general, but me specifically? If you’ve ever quietly asked that question, you’re not alone. It lives in the background for a lot of people, believers and skeptics alike. And it matters more than almost any other question you could ask.
The question “does God love me personally” is easier to push aside than to actually answer. Most of us know what it feels like to be seen only partially — to have someone know your good days, your polished version, the things you choose to share. And most of us also know the particular ache of wondering: if they knew everything, would they still stay? That fear doesn’t disappear when you come to faith. For many people, it quietly follows them right into it.
Why it’s hard to believe God loves you personally
It’s one thing to believe God loves “the world.” It’s another to believe he loves you — that he sees the private version of you, the version you’d never post, and still chooses you. That gap between intellectual assent and actual felt belief is where a lot of people quietly live. They’d never say God doesn’t love them. They just can’t quite take it in as personally real.
Part of why this is hard is that our usual frameworks for love don’t scale well to infinity. Human love is finite, selective, and conditional in ways we can feel. We assume God’s love must work similarly — divided up, rationed out, given more generously to better people. But that assumption doesn’t hold once you start looking at who God actually is.
What does it mean to say God desires the good for you?
One of the most clarifying ideas I’ve encountered comes from Thomas Aquinas: to love is to desire the good for the other. Not to make them comfortable. Not to give them whatever they want. But to genuinely want them to become what they were made to be — fully, completely, without holding back.
That means God’s love for you isn’t a feeling he has on good days. It’s a will directed toward your flourishing. It’s him wanting you to become the fullest possible version of what it means to be human. And because God is infinite — because his love isn’t limited or subdivided — there’s no version of that logic where he loves humanity in the abstract but runs short on love for you specifically. You get all of him. That’s not sentiment. It’s theology.
How close is God actually — and does that change anything?
Here’s the part that changed things for me: God isn’t watching you from a distance, deciding whether you’re worth knowing. He’s closer than that — philosophically, necessarily closer. Because God is existence itself, not a being who has existence the way you and I do, everything that exists is being held in existence by him right now. Including you. Including every thought you’re having as you read this.
You cannot be more fully known than that. There is no version of you that exists outside his awareness. He’s not peering in through a window catching glimpses. He is sourcing you at every moment. And the fact that you still exist — that he hasn’t stopped willing your existence into being — is itself a kind of answer to the question “does God love me?” He keeps showing up for you even when you’re not thinking about him at all.
And then there are the smaller things. The sunrise that hits you unexpectedly. A song that fills you up without warning. The warmth of a relationship that feels almost too good. None of that had to be there. The world didn’t have to be beautiful. That it is — that beauty keeps breaking through — is worth taking seriously as a clue about the kind of God who made it.
In Episode 5 of Barriers to Belief, Carey Walton, Ph.D. and I work through all of this — including the personal side. Carey shares how she wrestled with this question herself for years, knowing God loved people but not quite being able to take it in as personally true. And we talk through what actually shifted that. Watch it here:
If this is the question underneath your questions — if the real thing you’re trying to figure out is whether any of this is actually personal to you — that’s exactly the kind of thing we work through in coaching and in our classes. You don’t have to keep holding that question alone.
Written by Kristen Davis, Ph.D. | Founder, DoubtLess Faith
