In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I apologize for this sadly weird voice. I am just now recovering after some sort of strange illness I came down with after coming back from North America. So if my voice sounds weaker than usual, which I know is weak anyway, I can only apologize. The question of this week has to do with believing that God does exist but not believing that God loves us. Simply put, the question I received is: I do believe in Christ, but I fear that he does not love me, and what do I do with that?

I want to say from the very beginning—and there will be more coming—but I want to say from the start that this is a temptation from the devil and that you should stay away from it. You should run away from it like you would run away from poison or a snake or the devil itself, whenever this thought, that God somehow does not love you, approaches you. Try to visualize in your mind that what is in fact approaching you is the devil itself. It is important that you understand this correctly, because that will give you the strength and the ability to fight this, and this is one of the most difficult temptations one can encounter.

We were talking, in one of our previous podcasts—I don’t really remember; I think just the one before this—about how most frequently we ourselves throw ourselves in temptation, in the sense that we generate the temptations with which we struggle. This can happen either out of ignorance, lack of experience, lack of guidance, lack of will. But things are usually quite obvious when one fights this sort of self-inflicted, self-generated temptation. If, for instance, you know that your weakness is lust, then you should simply stay away from the things that trigger that temptation in you. These are obvious. Things are easy to follow from their beginning till their end, but there are also grey-area temptations, the sort of temptations which can be generated either by us or by the action of the devil.

These are temptations you have never experienced before, for example, and which come out of the blue and stain your mind. In this case, your spiritual father will be able to discern if this is a temptation from the evil one or one which you have generated indirectly. That usually happens after we’ve judged someone, and most of the time someone struggles with that very temptation. Spiritually speaking, it is more dangerous to judge your brother for a sin than to fall into sin yourself. So Christ allows you to be tempted. He allows you to fall and be guilty of your brother’s sin in the hope that that will teach you how difficult it is to battle that particular sin, and then, God willing, in the future, you will no longer judge.

This can also happen at times with temptations you thought you had defeated a long time ago. All of a sudden, an old temptation is reactivated and for some reason, this time around, you struggle more than before, and you find that you are in danger of being defeated by an enemy you once could keep under control quite easily. This often happens because when you were fighting this temptation in the past, Christ was giving you the grace to defeat it so that it wasn’t really you who was carrying the demons away; it was Christ in you, acting very much like a parent who drives away an angry dog from his child, and then allows the child to take credit for the scared dog, just in order to give his child some confidence in the future.

But Christ knows us inside-out. He knows us better than we know ourselves. Thus he knows that some people will grow by not fighting a temptation, while others need that very temptation to mature spiritually or to keep another, perhaps more difficult temptation, at bay. So Christ will give grace to some, and he will not give grace to others, although really, even that lack of grace—what we perceive as lack of help—is in fact also grace, also a manifestation of his love, because the intention of that lack of help is the same: to help that brother grow and to help that brother find his salvation.

Now, if Christ gave you grace and you survived a temptation, but then years later, or decades later, you turn and you judge your brother for being defeated by the same temptation, not knowing that Christ is not giving him the grace he gave you, Christ will allow that temptation to return to you, and this time he will allow you to struggle with the temptation without his grace, just like your brother is fighting it. So you may understand the hell that your brother is fighting.

The easiest way to keep at bay these grey-area temptations is to never judge, never ever judge, because you are dust like your brother, and you would fall in all your brother’s sins, if not even worse, if Christ were to take away his grace from you. Put it in your heart that nothing you’ve succeeded, no battle you’ve won, has been won through your own strength, but through the strength Christ has given you. Never judge. Only Christ himself can judge, and he will judge with his judgment, which is entirely different from ours, when the time of judgment comes.

Now, getting back to our question, apart from these temptations, which are either generated by us or are in this grey-area where you need the discernment of your spiritual father to guide you—apart from these categories, there is one temptation which always—and I really mean always—comes from the devil. And this is the thought that Christ does not love you. This thought and its absolute counterpart—the thought that there is no judgment at all—these two always come from the devil, and you must be always aware of this, because this awareness, this knowledge, is the only foundation on which you can build a wall against these temptations so you may spiritually survive them.

I am not saying that this is easy. It is, in fact, horribly difficult, because Christ’s love is not something that can be proven here, in this created world, with our created logic and based on our created life experience. Christ’s love is God himself. God is love, and God is uncreated. So there is no way in which we, created beings, with our created tools of knowledge, can ever prove to ourselves that God is, which is the same as saying that God loves.

The only way we can receive this knowledge is through faith. We must open ourselves to a form of knowledge and to a content of knowledge which is not of this created world and which comes from the uncreated God himself. The knowledge that God is and that God is love can only come from God himself, and we can only incorporate it in our being through faith. I wish I were just in front of you now, so I could stress even more that this is vital. This is essential to understand, because everything in the world will tell us otherwise. Look around you today. People suffer. People die. Bad things happen to good people. Good things happen to people who act badly. There is no justice at times. There is no hope at times.

At times, all the world looks like the kingdom of a raging lunatic, and for a while this is actually true. The prince of this fallen world is the devil, and the devil knows that his ruling time is coming to an end. This fallen world is not going to provide you with the proof of God’s love. Only faith will. And to have faith you have to become like a madman in the eyes of this world. Just keep in mind that the world itself is mad, and so to be a madman, according to the judgment of a mad world, is in fact to be perfectly sane.

So if that’s what it takes, then be mad. Be mad and reject the demonic whispers of the devil that tells you that Christ does not love you. Reject the fallen logic of this world that tells you that Christ does not love you. Reject the wisdom of your fallen mind; reject the emotions of your fallen heart, for both will tell you at various moments in your life that Christ does not love you. Learn not to listen to them. Learn to be blind to them. Learn to be dead to them.

There is a very good reason why Christ says one can only open to real life when one has rejected and lost this fallen life. That one can only save one’s soul when one has learned to hate his own soul. “Hate your mother and your father” means to hate and reject the wisdom that shaped who you are, that generated who you are now, this fallen wisdom, this fallen life experience which tells you that Christ does not love you.

Do whatever it takes to hold on to this belief that Christ is love. Do not let go of Christ’s love, because if you lose your faith in his love, you have lost faith in Christ himself, even if you don’t really understand it yet. Do not let the evil one erase Christ’s love from your heart, for Christ, for God, is love himself. Fight for your faith in Christ’s love with the might and the desperation with which you protect your faith in Christ himself, because there is no separation, there is no difference between God and his love. There is no God who is not love. To say that God does not love you is to say that God is not.

When the devil sees that your faith is too strong for him to make you believe that God is not, that God does not exist, then the devil will use these tactics to bring you down and to push you into unbelief, even without your awareness. If he cannot make you believe that there is no God, he will try to make you believe in a fake god. He will do all in his power to replace the image of the living God, which is imprinted in your heart, with the image of a fake god and to push you into that world-old spiritual cancer of our humanity—idolatry.

God is who he is. He is the same today and tomorrow, and change does not affect his divinity. We—this fallen humanity—we are entirely subject to change, and the whole created world around us is subject to change. This is why our wisdom is not helpful in understanding anything regarding Christ and why we have to rely exclusively and entirely on receiving in faith the revelation, the truth of the Gospel. We are subject to change, and because that is the only worldview we have, we imagine that God who is love is also subject to change. We imagine that he can love us more or less, depending somehow on something we do or something we failed to do. But that is to create an idol, to build an idol according to our fallen image, this image which is always changing, that is not building ourselves according to the image of the living, unchanging God who is love.

Everything in the world and everything coming from the evil one will teach us that Christ’s love does not exist, because this is the same as a saying that Christ himself does not exist. God is one, and he is always the same. God is love. The god in which the devil wants us to believe, this god who is not love, is not the real, uncreated, living God. There is just a created idol, created by the devil in our minds, by the evil hands of the devil who knows we already believe in God’s existence, so his only hope to make us fall is to make us let go of the living, real God and apply our belief to a created idol of his making.

God who does not love is not the living God. If I could come wherever you are now and just tattoo this on your heart, I would gladly, lovingly do it. God is love. Any god who does not love is not the living God, but an idol of the devil, created by him into our minds.

There is another way in which the devil acts with the same purpose, namely, to replace the living God with an idol. If he cannot make us lose faith in God’s existence and if he fails to make us abandon God who is love for the created idol who does not love, he will then try to pervert the meaning of love so that he may make us believe in a God who is love, but a kind of love that is not saving, a kind of love that is not the love of Christ, but a love of either sin or of judgment. We can talk about this at some point in some other podcast if need be.

To conclude for the time being, remember to fight for your faith in God’s love, because only God who is love is the living God who brings us into being and saves us. And when I say “fight,” I do not use the word lightly. You will need to overcome the world, the unseen evil spirits and the greatest enemy of all, which is you, your own self. Even more difficult will be the battle against your senses, against your brain, against your logic. You need to believe that Christ loves you even as you yourself will learn to hate yourself beyond limit. You need to learn to love this pitiful, worthless nothing which is your very self.

You need to love yourself simply because Christ loves you. And as you learn to love the unlovable in you, you learn a drop of Christ’s love. And as you partake of that drop of his love, you will partake of God himself, because God is love. You—and I—will find your salvation in the process of hating yourself but not destroying yourself. Just as Christ has taught us a long time ago and is still teaching us every second of our lives, when we see no light, no joy, no life in us, there is light and there is joy and there is life in him. And because he created me, I must fight to believe that he loves me, and I must fight to make myself love this being which he created out of love—myself. And from myself, I need to learn how to love my brother, whoever, wherever, however he or she may be.

May God bless you wherever you are. May God keep you safe and keep you healthy. Do remember us in your prayers, and may God bless you again and again and again.