Does God Like Me? Why His Delight Is Hard to Experience
Does God like me?
For many people who follow Jesus, that question feels strangely uncomfortable. We know the expected answer. Of course God loves us. We have heard the verses, sung the songs, affirmed the doctrine, and perhaps taught it to other people.
But like feels more personal.
Love can sound like a theological obligation, something God extends because love is part of His nature. Like suggests enjoyment. Fondness. Delight. It implies that God does not merely tolerate our presence, forgive our failures, or patiently wait for us to improve. He actually enjoys being with us.
That possibility reaches into places that familiar statements about God’s love sometimes do not.
Why the Question Matters
At Soil & Roots, we are seeking genuine spiritual formation from the inside out. This is not self-help, self-worship, or an attempt to polish a few personality quirks. It is the slow journey of becoming more like Jesus as we increasingly learn to think, act, relate, and love as He does.
That journey eventually requires us to explore the hidden life.
We need to notice the ideas, desires, wounds, fears, stories, and patterns that continue shaping us beneath our conscious beliefs. That is part of why self-knowledge is essential to Christian discipleship. We cannot surrender what we refuse to see, and we cannot invite Jesus into places we insist are not there.
Yet this inward journey creates an immediate problem. Why would we allow Jesus into the most vulnerable places of our hearts if we assume He will meet us there with disappointment, criticism, or disgust?
The question Does God like me? is therefore not sentimental or secondary. It helps determine whether we will hide from Him or become honest in His presence.
Self-Forgetfulness Requires a Self We Know
Christians often emphasize self-denial and self-forgetfulness, and rightly so. We are invited to turn outward in love, service, generosity, and attention to others.
But self-forgetfulness assumes there is a self we have come to know.
We cannot surrender a false identity we have never identified. We cannot release patterns of control, performance, resentment, fear, or self-protection if we remain unaware of them. In many cases, the journey outward must be preceded by, or at least accompanied by, an honest journey inward.
This is not an invitation to obsess over ourselves. It is an invitation to become integrated enough that love can flow more freely.
Author and psychologist David Benner asks an unsettling question: If encountering divine love is genuinely transformational, why do so many of us encounter it and remain relatively unchanged?
His answer centers on vulnerability. Love changes us only when we risk receiving it. Knowing that unconditional love exists is not the same as allowing ourselves to be known and loved without hiding, performing, or controlling the encounter.
That difference matters enormously.
The Risk of Being Loved as We Are
The phrase “accepting ourselves as we are” can raise alarms in some Christian circles. We are accustomed to reminders that Jesus loves us where we are but does not want us to remain there.
There is truth in that statement. Jesus intends to transform us.
But transformation does not begin with pretending we are already somewhere else.
It begins with reality.
Jesus does not love an imaginary, future version of us. He meets us as we actually are: anxious, controlling, generous, frightened, angry, compassionate, wounded, funny, selfish, courageous, confused, and often a strange mixture of all of them.
If we believe we must improve before becoming fully known, vulnerability becomes impossible. We present the acceptable parts of ourselves while concealing whatever we fear may threaten belonging.
This can happen in prayer, church, friendship, marriage, counseling, and spiritual direction. We speak truthfully, but selectively. We reveal enough to appear honest while protecting the places where shame remains strongest.
Yet deep transformation requires the experience of being seen without being abandoned.
Performance Anxiety
Performance-driven faith is one of the more insidious expressions of the gap between information and transformation. It appears throughout modern Christianity, often disguised as zeal, discipline, faithfulness, or urgency.
A few years ago, I attended a conference hosted by a large Christian organization. The organization had developed its own evangelism method, complete with scripts, training, and performance measurements. Staff members were expected to track how often they shared the Gospel, and only the organization’s approved method seemed to count.
Personal testimonies, alternative approaches, or conversations that did not “close the deal” were treated as insufficient.
At the end of one training session, the speaker passionately asked, “If you get to heaven one day and have only led one or two people to the Lord, do you think Jesus will tell you, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant’?”
I was mortified. Looking around the room, however, I seemed to be in the minority. Several younger staff members nodded while their faces revealed something else: fear that failing to sell Jesus effectively might result in His disapproval.
That kind of religious culture does more than encourage evangelism. It teaches people that God’s fondness rises and falls with performance.
When Struggle Becomes Evidence Against Us
A friend of mine once drove for Uber. During one ride, a passionate Christian woman entered the car and began talking with him. When he mentioned that he had struggled periodically with depression, she responded forcefully, “Don’t think like that! Depression has no place in the life of a Christian.”
I am not sure how Charles Spurgeon or Mother Teresa would respond to that.
The remark reflected an idea common in performance-driven Christian environments: spiritual struggle signals spiritual failure. Depression, anxiety, doubt, anger, grief, exhaustion, and confusion become evidence that we are not doing Christianity correctly.
This message may never appear in a church’s statement of faith. It is communicated through reactions, silences, testimonies, leadership expectations, and the people held up as examples.
Over time, we learn the rules.
Not sharing the Gospel enough? Not good enough. Depressed? Not good enough. Miss church occasionally? Not good enough. Struggling with anger? Not good enough. Asking difficult questions? Potentially dangerous.
Eventually, the question Does God like me? becomes inseparable from another question: How well am I performing today?
Does God Like Me When I Am Not Doing Well?
Here is the problem with a performance-driven understanding of God: His fondness becomes something we earn.
We may still describe His love as unconditional, but our hearts operate according to an unwritten contract. God enjoys us when we are productive, obedient, emotionally stable, generous, disciplined, and useful. When we struggle, disappoint ourselves, or fail publicly, we assume His affection cools.
This idea creates a terrible environment for spiritual formation.
The journey into the heart already requires courage, honesty, compassion, gentleness, transparency, and care. If we expect God to meet us there with a stern glance and a wagging finger, why would we go?
We will hide instead. We will stay busy, explain ourselves, suppress difficult emotions, quote verses at our wounds, and keep religious activity moving quickly enough that no one has time to notice what is happening beneath the surface.
That is one reason hidden ideas about God shape our spiritual lives so powerfully. What we experience God to be like influences whether we move toward Him or retreat.
Love and Like Are Not Opposites
Some may object that Scripture speaks of God’s love, not His “like,” and that the language of divine fondness risks becoming sentimental.
But by like, I mean something rooted within love itself: enjoyment, delight, welcome, and the desire for another person’s good.
Human beings understand the difference intuitively. We can behave lovingly toward someone out of duty while communicating that their presence is inconvenient. We can provide for a child while rarely enjoying them. We can remain in a marriage while treating the other person as a problem to manage.
Provision alone does not create intimacy.
We long to experience someone lighting up when we enter the room. We need to know that our presence is not merely endured and that we are not valuable only because of what we produce.
This is particularly important in our relationship with God. If He is the deepest and most trustworthy Person in reality, then His posture toward us shapes our understanding of belonging, identity, safety, and love.
The Delight of Jesus
When we look at Jesus, we do not encounter someone begrudgingly tolerating human beings.
He enjoyed meals, friendships, weddings, children, conversation, and ordinary life. He welcomed people other religious leaders dismissed. He allowed others to interrupt Him, question Him, disappoint Him, misunderstand Him, and fail in His presence.
His love was not permissive or sentimental. He confronted, corrected, and invited surrender. Yet even His confrontation served the good of the person before Him rather than the protection of His own ego.
He looked at the rich young ruler and loved him before extending the invitation that exposed the man’s deepest attachment. He restored Peter after a public and painful failure. He allowed the woman at the well to be fully known without treating her story as grounds for contempt.
Jesus did not wait for people to become impressive before giving them His attention.
He enjoyed human beings enough to become one.
Why God’s Delight Is Hard to Receive
The difficulty is usually not that we have never heard about God’s love. It is that our hearts have learned something else.
Perhaps affection in our family depended on performance. Maybe approval arrived when we achieved, complied, stayed quiet, looked successful, or made life easier for everyone else.
Perhaps church culture reinforced the same lesson. The most admired people were productive, certain, energetic, useful, and visibly faithful. Those who struggled became projects, concerns, or cautionary tales.
Some of us learned that weakness created distance. Questions caused suspicion. Failure threatened belonging. Emotional pain made other people uncomfortable.
In those environments, unconditional love may sound beautiful while remaining experientially unbelievable.
The mind can affirm grace while the heart remains convinced that value must be earned.
God’s Delight and the Inward Journey
This is why experiencing God’s fondness is essential to beginning the inward journey with God safely.
We need some growing confidence that Jesus will not shame us when the hidden life becomes visible. We need to trust that our anger, fear, wounds, doubts, compulsions, and self-protective patterns are not revelations to Him.
He already knows.
The invitation is not to uncover something that will finally shock or disappoint Him. It is to become honest about what He already sees so that we can experience His presence there.
That is the beginning of intimacy.
We do not journey inward to prove how defective we are. We journey inward because Jesus intends to free us from what has remained hidden and because His love is sturdy enough to tell the truth.
God Not Only Loves You
We often say, “God loves you,” and we should. But perhaps some hearts need to hear something slightly different.
God enjoys you.
He does not merely value humanity in the abstract. He is not waiting patiently for a future version of you to become interesting. Your personality, humor, creativity, voice, questions, longings, and even the peculiarities that occasionally frustrate everyone around you are known to Him.
This does not mean He delights in everything we do. Love is not approval of every behavior, and delight does not erase the need for transformation.
But disapproval of an action is not rejection of a person.
Healthy parents understand this distinction. A parent can confront a child’s behavior while remaining deeply attached to and delighted in the child. Correction occurs within belonging rather than as a threat to it.
God’s delight is not a reward for spiritual maturity. It is part of the relational safety in which maturity becomes possible.
The First Step in Spiritual Formation
There are many upside-down realities in the Kingdom of God. One is that we become more like Jesus primarily through experiencing Jesus.
That raises an important question: How do we experience Him?
Theologians, philosophers, pastors, and ordinary people have wrestled with that question for centuries. There is no single technique that creates intimacy with God on demand.
But one thing seems clear. Allowing our inner selves to be seen, known, desired, and held by God is an important beginning.
That requires vulnerability.
It means bringing Him what is actually present rather than what we believe should be present. It means praying from disappointment, fear, anger, loneliness, affection, gratitude, confusion, or silence without cleaning up the experience first.
It means risking the possibility that God may be kinder than we have imagined.
A Question Worth Sitting With
David Benner offers a simple diagnostic question:
“Imagine God thinking about you. What do you assume God feels when you come to mind?”
Do not answer too quickly.
Theologically correct answers are easy to produce. Pay attention instead to what happens in your thoughts, emotions, and body.
Do you imagine warmth, delight, interest, and welcome? Or do you sense disappointment, impatience, concern, distance, or evaluation?
Perhaps the most honest answer is mixed. Part of you believes He loves you, while another part expects criticism.
That disconnect is not a reason for shame. It is an invitation to curiosity.
When the Heart Does Not Agree
Our beliefs and ideas do not always align.
A belief is often a conscious conclusion. An idea is an experienced assumption rooted more deeply within us. We may believe that God likes us while living from the idea that He merely tolerates us.
This divide may appear through perfectionism, compulsive service, harsh self-talk, anxiety, an inability to rest, fear of failure, or reluctance to approach God honestly after we sin.
The solution is not simply repeating the correct answer more forcefully.
Ideas formed through relationships and experience are often reformed through relationships and experience. We may need to experience patience through another person before God’s patience becomes believable. We may need a community that does not withdraw when we struggle. We may need repeated experiences of being heard without being fixed, corrected, or shamed.
This is one reason presence is essential to spiritual formation. God frequently makes His character believable through the attentive presence of other people.
Receiving Before Giving
The Christian life calls us toward self-giving love, but we cannot consistently give what we refuse to receive.
If we experience God as reluctant, disappointed, or emotionally distant, we may reproduce that same posture toward ourselves and others. We will become demanding, impatient, controlling, or conditional because those are the relational realities we know.
But when we begin experiencing His delight, something within us can relax.
We become less desperate to prove our value. We can acknowledge failure without collapsing into shame. We can listen to others without needing to control their response. We can serve without making usefulness the foundation of identity.
Receiving love does not make us self-absorbed. Properly received, it makes us increasingly free to love.
Does God Like Me?
Yes.
Not because you have performed well enough, remained emotionally stable, avoided every failure, served enough people, or become particularly impressive.
He likes you because His love is generous, personal, and relational. He knows you fully and desires your good. He invites you into His life, not grudgingly, but joyfully.
The challenge is not merely agreeing with that statement. It is allowing yourself to be loved in the places where you still expect rejection.
Perhaps deep discipleship begins there: not when we finally get our act together, but when we allow Jesus to meet us in the hidden place where we still wonder whether He enjoys us.
God not only loves you.
He likes you.
Duc in altum.
Brian Fisher is the founder of Soil & Roots and the author of Soil & Roots: Cultivating Deep Discipleship. He writes and speaks about spiritual formation, the inner life, and how people become more like Jesus from the inside out.
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