How Does God Feel About You?

How does God feel about you? Have you ever thought about that?

Those words made up the first discussion question during Bible study this week. When our leader asked it over Zoom, I silently hoped that she wouldn’t call on me. She did. I had a hard time coming up with an answer, at least one that I wanted to share with the group.

It’s easy to assign to God the feelings that I have about myself. 

I see my weaknesses and inconsistencies, my impatience and my lack of self-control. The list could go on, but it’s not a very pretty rabbit hole.

Why do I go directly to the negatives and deficiencies? 

When I think about each of my children, my first thought is not to envision their negative qualities. I think of their smart minds, their kind hearts, their fun personalities, their diligence, and every other great quality that makes them who they are. Are they perfect? No. Could I list some negatives? Absolutely.

But as their mom, when I think of each one of them, I go right for the positives.

In Matthew 7:9-11, Jesus compared earthly parenting with heavenly Father parenting:

“You parents—if your children ask for a loaf of bread, do you give them a stone instead? Or if they ask for a fish, do you give them a snake? Of course not! So if you sinful people know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good gifts to those who ask him.”




This passage is speaking specifically about how we can trust God to meet our needs, but I wonder if we can transfer the same ratio of “parent care vs. God’s care” to how God views us. If we immediately think of the best in our children, wouldn’t God immediately think the best of us?

This is just my speculation, but definitely something to think about.

So what does the Bible actually tell us about God’s feelings toward us?
Here are just a few verses:

Psalm 139:17-18 “How precious are your thoughts about me, O God. They cannot be numbered! I can’t even count them; they outnumber the grains of sand!”

Zephaniah 3:17 “For the Lord your God is living among you. He is a mighty savior. He will take delight in you with gladness. With his love, he will calm all your fears. He will rejoice over you with joyful songs.”

I John 3:1a “See how very much our Father loves us, for he calls us his children, and that is what we are!”

Ephesians 2:10 “For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.”

Did you catch those words? Precious, delight, gladness, very much love, masterpiece. 

Wow, that's what the God of the universe thinks about us!

So now let's ask that question again.

How does God feel about you? 

Did you go to the positives first?

The faithful love of the Lord never ends! His mercies never cease.Great is his faithfulness; his mercies begin afresh each morning. Lamentations 3:22-23

Anchoring this Drifting Life

When the weather is nice, we sometimes go out on my in-laws’ boat and bring a picnic. We’ll sail around for a while, and eventually find a place to turn off the motor and float while we eat lunch. When we’re finished, my father-in-law starts up the motor, and we all hang on as we jet across the lake. At the end of the day, the boat is put back into the slip, raised up on the lift, and tied to the dock for good measure. Floating is great when that’s the intention, but no one wants an unmanned boat to bob away!

Right now, it can feel like we are adrift with no motor and no dock in sight.

In pre-quarantine life-

• When the kids were in school, I knew I had until 2:30 to get things done before getting into the car line. 
• The reward for making it through from Monday to Friday was a weekend!
• Weekends were for projects and having fun. The goal was to fit it all in before Monday came around again. 
• Holidays and breaks were measured by counting down days and weeks. 

When life was normal, we lived by the calendar and the clock.

Then our lives changed.

For the first few weeks, it was survival mode all the way. We navigated our days with the hope that this quarantine would only last a couple of weeks. Sure, it would be tough, but we could hang on for that long. Things got postponed, then cancelled, and here we are sitting squarely in the middle of a situation that was neither planned for, nor expected.

Life these days has such a strange feel to it.

In this alternative universe, we’ve tossed the clock out the window and we haven’t flipped a calendar page in two months!
Does it matter what time I wake up or what time we start school?
Do I really need to get dressed for the day?
Pajama day at school used to be a really big deal. Now it seems to be every day.

So how should I handle this feeling of weightlessness? (The irony is not lost.)

I wondered if the anchor I was looking for was a sense of accomplishment. Productivity seems exhausting right now with the absence of an endpoint.

I started looking for some great hints and ideas for maintaining productivity during this "drifty" time, but I came to the conclusion that a person’s productivity level might have a lot more to do with his or her personality or enneagram number than with a set of circumstances.

My “always productive” friends are thriving on all this extra time, while those of us who generally have a lower bar are congratulating ourselves for getting the dishwasher emptied and refilled sometime before midnight at the close of each day.

So I had to wonder, what is the one universal anchor that we all need during this uncertain time?

That led me to these verses in Hebrews-

Hebrews 6:18-19  “So God has given both his promise and his oath. These two things are unchangeable because it is impossible for God to lie. Therefore, we who have fled to him for refuge can have great confidence as we hold to the hope that lies before us. 19 This hope is a strong and trustworthy anchor for our souls. It leads us through the curtain into God’s inner sanctuary.”

There it is- a strong and trustworthy anchor for our souls.
The assurance of an unchanging God who keeps his promises.
The hope of refuge when we come to Him.
The confidence that hope lies before us. 

Jesus has opened up the way for us to come right into the presence of God the Father. My pastor uses a great word picture for this. Remember the famous photo of John John Kennedy peeking out from under his father’s desk in the Oval Office? That’s the kind of access we have to God. We can bring anything to Him- our worries, our fears, our disappointments (no shortage these days), our longings, and our hopes.

Psalm 90:12 says, “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

Wouldn’t it be great to walk out of this quarantine season with a greater heart of wisdom?

So perhaps the best use of our clock and our calendar is to spend our time in God’s Word and our days growing closer to Him. 

This is the real anchor that will help us feel secure during these unpredictable days. 

*A few interesting facts-

• The book of Proverbs has 31 chapters, one for each day of a typical month.
• If you read 5 Psalms a day, you can read the entire book in a month.
• More than half of the New Testament books have 6 or fewer chapters, so if you read a chapter a day, you can read through a whole book in less than a week.