Does God Still Love Me After What I've Done?

Yes. And the reason is the most freeing thing you will ever hear: God’s love for you was never based on what you had done in the first place, so it cannot be undone by what you have done now.

The lie that whispers otherwise sounds like humility, but it is actually a subtle unbelief. It says your sin is a special case—bigger, uglier, more disqualifying than the sins Christ died for. But Scripture will not let your sin be that important. “The blood of Jesus… cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:7)—all, with no asterisk beside the one you cannot forgive yourself for. To insist your sin is beyond His reach is not thinking too little of yourself; it is thinking too little of the cross.

Consider where God’s love actually began. “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Not after you cleaned yourself up—while you were still in the wrong. His love came to you at your worst and did its costliest work there. If it did not depend on your goodness to start, it does not depend on your goodness to continue. You cannot fall below the reach of a love that already met you at the bottom.

This is precisely why Christ gives you His forgiveness in concrete, hearable form—in the Gospel preached, in the absolution spoken over you, in the Supper given for you. Feelings of guilt will lie to you; the promise will not. When the accusation comes—look what you did; surely He is finished with you—the answer is not to argue that your sin was small. It is to point to the cross, where it was answered in full, and to your Baptism, where His name was placed on you and has not been removed. He knew the very worst about you when He chose you. He loves you still.