Understanding the Struggle to Love God

There is a confession that quietly haunts many sincere believers, one that rarely makes it into Sunday morning conversation: I don't know if I actually love God. Not in any real, felt, consistent way.

And the shame that follows that admission is often worse than the admission itself.

But this struggle is neither new nor unusual. It is, in fact, one of the most honest things a Christian can feel — and understanding why it exists is the first step toward moving through it.

The First Problem: We Try to Love God the Way We Love Everything Else

The world's definition of love is essentially desire-based. We love what satisfies us, what we find attractive, what returns our affection. That wiring runs deep, and it is deeply corrupted by sin.

So when a Christian hears the command to "love God," the instinct is to try to generate a

warm emotional feeling toward Him. And when that feeling doesn't come — or doesn't stay — the conclusion is either I must not really be saved or this Christianity thing isn't working.

Both conclusions are wrong. The problem is not the relationship. The problem is the category.

We are trying to love God with equipment designed for lesser things.

The Second Problem: We Have Separated Love from Knowledge

Good theology has always insisted that the affections follow the understanding. You cannot genuinely love what you do not truly know. This is why Calvin opens the Institutes not with a call to emotional devotion but with the knowledge of God — because right knowledge is the ground from which true affection grows.

If your love for God feels thin, the first question is not "what am I feeling?" It is: what do I actually believe about who He is?

A God vaguely conceived will be vaguely loved.

This is not an argument for cold, academic theology. It is an argument that theology done rightly — with the whole person, in dependence on the Spirit — produces exactly the kind of durable, deepening love the Christian life requires. Doctrine is not the enemy of devotion. Doctrine is its fuel.

The Third Problem: We Have Made Love the Starting Point Instead of the Response

This may be the most important thing to understand.

1 John 4:19 does not say "love God so that He will love you back." It says, "We love because He first loved us." Our love for God is always responsive — it is a fruit, not a root. It does not earn favor. It flows from beholding favor already given.

This means the path toward loving God is not primarily effort directed at God. It is deeper immersion in the gospel.

The more clearly you see what God has done in Christ — the weight of the debt, the cost of the cross, the staggering reality that the Son of God bore the wrath you deserved — the more love becomes less of a discipline and more of an overflow.

You do not manufacture love for God. You behold Him until love becomes the natural response.

What This Actually Looks Like

Understanding the problem is one thing. Moving forward is another. Here are five practical contours worth sitting with.

1.   Let love be defined by the cross, not by your emotional register.

The cross is the supreme definition of love — not as feeling, but as costly, self-giving action on behalf of the undeserving (Romans 5:8). You are learning to love a God who loved that way. Your love back will look more like trust, loyalty, and obedience than it will like a warm sensation in your chest. That is not a lesser love. That is a more mature one.

2.   Distinguish between the love that is and the love you feel.

John Owen was careful to note that a believer's love for God can be real even when it is not felt intensely. The felt sense of love fluctuates. The covenantal reality does not. Part of spiritual maturity is learning not to judge the root by the weather. You may love God more truly on a dry, faithless-feeling Tuesday than you realize.

3.   Feed the knowledge, and watch the affections follow.

Read about God's character — not in a vaguely devotional way, but with theological depth. The Psalms are a masterclass here. The psalmists did not begin with emotion. They began with recounting — who God is, what He has done, what He has promised. The affections erupted from the recounting. Psalm 103. Psalm 145. Psalm 139. Let the content of Scripture shape what you believe about God, and trust that genuine belief will eventually move the heart.

4.   Ask for it as a gift, not a performance.

If love for God is a grace — and it is — then it can be asked for. "Lord, give me a heart that loves you more truly" is one of the most honest and appropriate prayers a Christian can pray. This is not manufacturing emotion. This is receiving a grace from the One who gives generously (James 1:5). The Puritans understood this well: desire itself can be brought to God as the seed of petition.

5.   Obedience is love's first language.

Jesus connects love to obedience repeatedly and without apology: "If you love me, you will keep my commandments" (John 14:15). This is not a works framework. It is a relational one. In any healthy relationship, you act for the other person's honor even when the feeling is low. That faithfulness, sustained over time, shapes the affections from the outside in. Do not wait to feel love before you act in love. Act, and trust that the feeling will follow the faithfulness.

The Deeper Comfort

There is a grace embedded in an understanding of the Christian life that is worth resting in here.

You are not primarily responsible for producing love for God. You are responsible for positioning yourself under the means by which God works — the Word, prayer, the Lord's Table, the fellowship of believers — and trusting that He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion (Philippians 1:6).

And there is this: the very fact that you want to love God more faithfully — that the distance bothers you, that the dryness grieves you — is itself evidence of grace. That desire does not come from your old nature. Your old nature is perfectly content without God. The longing for more is the Spirit in you pulling against the grain of your flesh.

That is not a small thing.

That is the evidence that the love is already there — buried under confusion, shaped imperfectly, not yet what it will be — but real.

And He who planted it will not abandon it.

"We love because he first loved us." — 1 John 4:19