A really good question today from a listener named Derek in Chicago, Pastor John, I have

been a Christian for about a decade and it has been a wonderful decade of growth and

learning in Scripture.

I feel close to God.

I know God loves me and the shed blood of his son proves it according to Romans 8.32.

But the question I more often struggle with is this.

Because God actually like me.

Pastor John, what would you say to Derek?

This is not just Derek's question.

Many ask the same thing.

It often goes hand in hand with a family background in which there is no experience

of being enjoyed, a father or mother or others who basically coexisted with us or tolerated

us but rarely seem to delight in us or want to be with us or take genuine spontaneous

pleasure in anything we did or said.

In other words, there are a lot of people who from their own experience have no actual

existential categories for grasping the fact of someone, anyone, God included liking

them or enjoying them or delighting in them.

So it seems to me that what's needed for a person like that and it may be most of us.

What's needed is to discover an actual experience of being enjoyed by God and pleasing God

and God smiling upon us and having pleasure in us.

What's needed for that to happen is three things.

A framework for understanding the love of God in its different dimensions to a big

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