“Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so; little ones to him belong, they are weak, but he is strong.” Maybe your parents sang this little chorus to you when you were little. Maybe you sing it to your little ones now. Did you know that the song has more than one verse? If you want to know what the other verses say, see hymn 344 in our hymnal!
Sometimes when I sing this song to our children, I think to myself, “Does the Bible actually say, specifically, that Jesus loves me?” My skeptical and cynical heart sometimes question whether Jesus ever said, “I love you” to his followers. Why would I wonder about such a thing? And, well, does “the Bible tell me” that Jesus loves me?
Let’s take these questions in reverse order, beginning with the question whether, in the Bible, Jesus ever literally says, “I love you.” The answer is yes, sort of. The closest thing we find to Jesus telling people, “I love you” is in John 15 when Jesus says, “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you” (v. 9). And, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (v. 12). So yes, Jesus tells his disciples, “I have loved you.”
But my squirely brain and suspicious heart wonder if that counts or not. After all, Jesus tells the disciples that he has loved them, not that he does love them. So it seems that Jesus nowhere explicitly says to someone, “I love you.” I am not questioning whether he loves us (more on how we know he does in a moment). I am simply making an observation about what Jesus does and does not say. Should there be an asterisk after the first verse of “Jesus Loves Me,” saying something like, “The Bible technically never tells us that Jesus explicitly says, ‘I love you’ to anyone”?
You may be thinking, “John, you are really overthinking a precious children’s song. Turn your analytical brain off and just enjoy the song for heaven’s sake!” But for some reason I want Jesus to say those three words, “I love you.” I want to hear it in the present tense and without qualification. I long for those words to reverberate in my ears and echo all the way down into my heart. But why?
Why do I (and maybe you) long to hear Jesus say, “I love you”? Two reasons. First, we were created to inhabit the love of God. In the Garden of Eden, God lived with man in perfect and unbroken love. Nothing hindered or diminished the love of God from flowing into Adam and Eve’s heart and life. Out of love God created them so that he could live in love with them. We were created to live in God’s love. This is why our hearts long for affirmation and acceptance and connection, that is, why they long for love. This is what we were made for.
But the second reason I long to hear Jesus say “I love you” is because, though I understand that Jesus loves me, I often do not believe it. I know it but do not feel deeply that it is true right at this very moment. Instead, I typically feel that he is mildly disappointed in me and wants me to get my act together. Dane Ortlund captures this well in Gentle and Lowly:
“Perhaps, as believers today, we know God loves us. We really believe that. But if we were to more closely examine how we
actually relate to the Father moment by moment – which reveals our actual theology, whatever we say we believe on paper –
many of us tend to believe it is a love infected with disappointment. He loves us; but it’s a flustered love. We see him
looking down on us with paternal affection but slightly raised eyebrows: ‘How are they still falling short so much after all I
have done for them?’ we picture him wondering.”
Ortlund is right. Even as believers, we struggle to trust the steadfast love of the Lord. We love him and so we desperately want to know that he loves us. But the nagging and insidious voice of shame tells us that we are too much of a failure for God to be head-over-heels in love with us. We long to hear those three words, “I love you,” because our lonely hearts wonder if we are worthy of his love, wonder if we have done enough to please him.
But what if God, in his infinite wisdom, decided to tell us his love in an even more profound way than by saying those three words? As the Scottish rock band Snow Patrol once said, “Those three words are said too much, they’re not enough.” What if Jesus decided to say, “I love you” in a more vivid, tangible, and believable way that by just uttering the words?
Indeed he did. In the incarnation and passion of Jesus Christ we see the most beautiful expression of love imaginable. In Jesus’ life and death, God is shouting “I love yous” to our heart every day.
The “shout” of his love comes to us when we read about him touching a leper and healing him, when he calls Levi out of his tax booth, when he raises a widow’s son, when he weeps at Lazarus’s tomb, when he frees a man with a legion of demons, when he quietly endures betrayal and abandonment by his best friends, when he courageously accepts his fate before Pilate, when he forgives the men torturing him, and, supremely, when he dies on the cross for our sins.
Jesus never explicitly says, “I love you” because his entire life and death are an anthem of love for those who have ears to hear. The incarnation is how the love song begins, as John says, “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world” (1 Jn. 4:9). And the love song crescendos with Jesus’ crucifixion, “In 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” (1 Jn. 4:10).
The apostle Paul did not see or experience the incarnation or crucifixion of Jesus. But he eventually heard the love song and understood it’s meaning, saying, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). And he understood that this love was for him, not just for people in some abstract and generic way. “The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20).
Friends, do you ever wonder whether Jesus loves you? Do you, like me, have a hard time believing something you know to be true? Rather than looking for exact words, look at Jesus’ life and death and believe that he did this for you. Jesus loves you, this I know, for the Bible shows (and tells) you so.
Needing the Love of Jesus, With You,
Pastor John