Does God Still Love Me? He Came Looking First

Yes. God still loves you, and He did not wait for you to come back before He proved it. If you have ever asked whether God still loves you after the way you left, the answer sits in two places: a story Jesus told about a son who walked out, and a letter that says God sent His Son looking for us before we ever turned around.

Start with the story, because most of us recognize ourselves in it. The prodigal son in Luke 15 is a study in rebellion, pride, and their steep price.

Rebellion's Power: Why Walking Away Always Looks Like Freedom

You know how it opens. A son looks over the ridge and longs to be away. The siren call of freedom draws his heart away from the father who loves him.

That is rebellion's power. It draws. It entices. It never tells you to count the cost. Quite the opposite. Rebellion wants you to rush in and skip the debate, because everything out there looks enticing and liberating.

So, the son went to his father and asked for what he had coming. Put that request in context. The father was still alive. Asking for your inheritance early amounts to wishing your father dead so you can gain from his passing. This is a parable rather than a real event, and even so, we catch that face in our own mirror sometimes, don't we? Rebellion's power is what caused a restless son to slip away.

Rebellion's Reward Is Real, and It Is Short

For a while, rebellion paid. Things were great. Money bought food, friends, and a fabulous time.

God never said sin wouldn't be fun. He said it wouldn't last, and that it wasn't worth it. The reward showed up. It just didn't stay long.

Rebellion's Regret Sounds Like Fear Whispering

When the end came, the crash was hard. Abandoned, alone, and with his inheritance squandered, the son had to make his own way for the first time in his life. His remorse kept finding new lows. The lowest arrived when he was feeding swine and wanting what they were eating.

Going home would be painful, he thought, but it couldn't be worse than this, could it?

Then fear whispered into his heart. He won't take you back. You wished him dead. Why would he love you? Why would he care about you? He has already forgotten you. You mean nothing to him anymore. What if you make that long trip and he rejects you and sends you away? What if he has declared you dead and gone on living as though it were true?

Notice the timing of those questions. Rebellion never asks them at the beginning. They only come afterward, when you are sitting alone with the pigs. And they only get answered when we decide it is worth the risk to return to the father.

Does God Take You Back After You Walk Away?

Yes, and the parable is blunt about it. What the son had no way of knowing was that day after day, the father waited, looking down the road, hoping today would be the day his son came home. Things could never be exactly like they were before. Even so, the heart of the father was ready to welcome him. All the son had to do was reset his rebellion toward obedience.

You know the ending. The son arrives with a speech prepared. The father runs to him, wraps an arm around him, and while the son tries to spell out those rehearsed lines, the father hears none of it. He says they will rejoice today, because his son who was dead is now alive.

If Jesus ever told a story closer to the heart of God than that one, I don't know what it is. We have all been that rebel. We have all been the child who walked away and then wondered why God abandoned us, when we were the ones who abandoned Him.

Does God Still Love Me? He Came Looking First

Here is where the parable stops short of the whole story. In Luke 15, the son has to return home before he can know the father. God did something else entirely, something so extraordinary, so exceptional, and so transformative that 2,000 years later we are not over it. I hope we never are.

Instead of waiting for the prodigal to return to Him, God sent His Son looking for us.

What 1 John 4:9-10 Says About the Love of God

Two of the most theologically profound verses anywhere in the New Testament sit in 1 John 4:9-10. If you are someone who underlines in your Bible, these are worth the ink.

God is love, and the love of God "was made manifest among us," which is to say revealed and poured out, in that He sent His only Son into the world so that we might live through Him. And this is love, "not that we have loved God but that He loved us," and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

Boil it down to one line. The Father's heart was always for His child.

What Does It Mean That God's Love Was Made Manifest?

The Father's heart was always for His child, and God took special pains to make that clear. The word translated "made manifest" in verse nine strains the English language. Our vocabulary fails to carry the depth of the outpouring it contains. The picture behind it is God holding a massive bucket and pouring it out over each of us so that we might understand just how loved we are.

The idea was to make His love so clear, so plain, and so obvious that it would be impossible to miss. That is God's passion revealed for us in the sending of Jesus, and it was the only way to life.

Knowing about God was good. Experiencing God's love is far, far better.

What Does Propitiation Mean?

Propitiation is an odd term. It shows up only a couple of times, in John's writings, and it carries the idea that a ransom has been paid. We had been kidnapped. We were being held hostage. God paid the ransom to get us back.

That single word answers the question underneath every prodigal's fear. The father in the parable waited at the window. The God of 1 John 4 went out and paid.

Your Response to God's Love Reveals Who You Are

Our response to God's love reveals our identity the same way sending Jesus revealed His. As we respond to that love, we adopt His identity, and His identity becomes ours.

We can choose to receive what has been offered to us, or we can choose to reject it. When we choose to receive God's love and actually experience it, we can be certain we will be changed by it. It reshapes us from the inside out. True love for God leads us to speak true love to others, and true love is never static or inactive.

Why the Cross Still Matters

God wanted us to understand this so badly that He paid the ransom Himself. This, friends, is why the cross still matters. It is where Christ paid our penalty.

Which leaves the choice with us. The far country still calls, and the road home is still open, and the difference between the prodigal son and you is that you are not making the trip alone. He already came looking.