A lot of people are very 'down on themselves'. They clearly need words of affirmation and assurance that God really does love them. But that doesn't mean that we stop telling people they are sinners. Only through judgment will we experience God's love. And, as PT Forsyth put into words, only when a person has seen the magnitude of God's holy anger against us will that love be real and trustworthy to the person who can never see how he could be loved.
If God's love were not essentially holy love, in course of time mankind would cease to respect it, and consequently to trust it. We need not a fond love, but a love we can trust, and for ever [...]
the sinner could not trust a love that could not justify itself as holy. It is the holiness in God's love, I urge, that alone enables us to trust Him. Without that we should only love Him, and the love would fluctuate. For we could not be perfectly sure that His would not. It is the holiness in God's love that is the eternal, stable, unchangeable element in it - the holiness secured for history and its destiny in the Cross. It is only the unchangeable that we could trust; and there alone we find it. If we only loved the love of God, we should have no stable, eternal, universal religion. But we love the holy love He established in Christ, and therefore we are safe with an everlasting salvation.
(pp. 113-137, The Work of Christ)
Ultimately, the person who is down on himself can only be sure "because the father not only says but pays" (p.111, ibid)
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