for the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God.
"The Father himself loves you." Not loves you through an intermediary, not loves you in some generic, distributed way that gets spread thin across billions of people — the word Jesus uses points at something direct and personal. Not by proxy.
It's easy to imagine God's attention as something like a customer service line — technically available to everyone, but so overloaded that yours is just one voice in an ocean of others. This verse doesn't describe that kind of love. It describes something closer to how a parent looks at their one particular child in a crowded room — not confused about which one is theirs.
You don't have to have earned this kind of attention or proven yourself first. The verse simply states it as already true for the ones it's describing. Whether that's true for you is worth investigating rather than assuming either way — but it's worth knowing this is the actual claim, not a watered-down version of it.
If you've assumed God's love is a vague, general thing rather than something aimed at you specifically, that assumption is worth questioning.
A short video on this is coming soon — for now, read on.