Tag: Heather

Hope, Life and Death

To have faith in Jesus is to have hope. This hope sets us free to know love and purpose, to live and to die, and to look to eternity.
Deep and profound reflections from Heather Fellows.

To have faith in Jesus is to have hope. This hope sets us free to know love and purpose, to live and to die, and to look to eternity.

Here’s a brilliant guest post from Heather Fellows.

Life is hard.  Some days and for some people it may be so hard that they question if it can be endured much longer.  And yet, by and large, our desire to live wins through.  What is it that makes us want to live, even when life is hard?  What keeps us going?  Hope.

Christianity is all about hope.    Our faith is tied to hope.  We are a people of hope.

The letter to the Hebrews explains faith in this way:

‘Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.’1

To have faith – to trust in God and in Jesus – is to be a man or woman of hope.

As St Paul wrote, ‘in hope we were saved.’2

And it is by trusting in that hope – in Jesus, in his life and the life he has won for us – that we can face our present. 

Even though that present may be hard, it leads towards a goal that we can be sure of and which is great enough to justify the effort of the journey. 

But that leaves us with the questions: what kind of hope is this that saves us?

What kind of hope transforms lives, families, and societies?

What kind of hope can make our present pain and struggle worthwhile?

What kind of hope leads beyond the valleys of this life into the light of eternity?

These are the questions we are thinking about this morning.

Before I go any further I want to acknowledge my debt to Pope Benedict XVI’s letter to the church, Spe Salvi, Saved in Hope. It is a brilliant and rich document that I can barely scratch the surface of but has something very important to say to us.

Living Without Hope

To begin to understand the hope we have in Jesus, we need to start with where we were before he came.

When St Paul wrote to one of the earliest Christian churches in Ephesus, he reminded them that before they came to know Jesus, they were ‘without hope and without God in the world’ (Eph 2:12).  They had had other ‘gods’ that emerged from the different and conflicting myths they talked about. But those ‘gods’ provided little or no hope for their future or light for their present.  They found themselves in a dark world, facing a dark future. 

A dark present, facing a dark future. Does this sound familiar? 

Why don’t we pause for a moment and consider who the ‘gods’ of our age are.  Let’s start with money.  How often are we tempted to say: ‘If I could just have more money, then I would be happy.  I need to earn more money to buy more stuff.  I need stuff to give meaning to my life.’

Jim Carey, the famous actor & comedian once said,

‘I wish that everyone could get rich and famous and have everything they ever dreamed of so that they would know that’s not the answer.’3

Or what about the gods of power and success?  “If I could reach that position or get that promotion, then my life would be good.” 

Freddie Mercury, the lead singer of the rock band Queen put it this way,

‘You can have everything in the world and still be the loneliest man.  And that’s the most bitter type of loneliness.  Success has brought me world idolization and millions of pounds, but it’s prevented me from having the one thing we all need.  A loving, ongoing relationship.’4

Hope, Love and Purpose

There are lots of ‘gods’ in the world, but only one God. 

The thing that sets Christianity apart from the ‘gods’ of Ephesus, or of our time, is that Jesus promises a future. Wealth is lost or dies with us. Power and success are fleeting. But we have the hope of a life which will not end in emptiness.  Paul said in his letter to the Thessalonians, ‘do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope.’ 5

As Christians we don’t know all the details of what our future holds whether in this life or beyond. But do know for sure that we have a future and this makes it possible to live in the present well. 

This is because the Christian message doesn’t only tell us something about the world; it does  something in us.  When we receive Jesus’ hope, we live differently.  We are given new life and it begins as soon as we accept Jesus. 

Benedict tells the story of an African slave girl, Josephine Bakhita, who was born around 1869 in Sudan. 

She was kidnapped by slave traders at the age of 9, beaten till she bled and sold in slave markets.  She worked as a slave for the wife of a general who flogged her daily.  She bore 144 scars on her body.  Finally in 1882, she was bought by an Italian merchant for the Italian consul who took her back to Italy. 

After her master had taken her back to Italy, he made the mistake of leaving Josephine at a convent while he went back to Sudan to conduct more business. As she listened to the Nuns, she came to know a new kind of master, Jesus Christ.   She heard there was a master above all masters, the Lord of Lords and that he is goodness in person.  She came to know that she was known, created and loved by this supreme master.  What’s more this master had himself been flogged and now he was waiting for her at the Father’s right hand.  Now she had hope.  No longer simply the modest hope of finding masters who would be less cruel, but the great hope that she was definitively loved and whatever happens to her, she is awaited by this Love.  She said, ‘my life is so good.’ 

Through the knowledge of this hope she was redeemed, no longer a slave, but a free child of God.  She was baptised, and confirmed in Venice, fought for and won her freedom in an Italian court and spent the rest of her life telling others about this great master in whom she has found hope.

Christianity brought for Josephine Bakhita an encounter with the living God and therefore an encounter with a hope stronger that the sufferings of slavery, a hope which transformed her life from within and thus world around her.  Through baptism she was joined to the Church as a sister, not a slave.  She was filled with the same Spirit and received from the same body of Christ together with those who were her ‘masters’ in her working life.  Even though the circumstances around us may remain unchanged when we come to know Jesus, we are changed from within and, through us, others are changed too.

Many early Christians were from the lower social classes and so were very open to the experience of a new hope.  But so too were those from higher social classes.  They were all living without hope and without God.  The shallow state religion of Rome offered them lots of ceremonies, but Christianity offered them God to whom they could pray and enjoy a relationship with. 

A friend who grew up in a Muslim culture once said to me that it was the most precious thing to discover that she could pray to God for herself; that she could tell Him what was on her heart; that she could ask Him for what she needed and that to do so was not selfish or unholy, but rather that God desired this intimate relationship with her.  Sometimes if we have been Christians for a long time, we can forget the preciousness of this gift.  Jesus invites us into a personal relationship with God the Father.  That’s awesome. 

Knowing the God who made all things and whose Son loves us and is redeeming all things sets us free. We are not at the mercy of life, of its trials, of chance or the world around us. The future is not written in our stars but in the loving will of our Father.

Benedict puts it this way in Spe Salvi,

‘It is not the laws of matter which ultimately govern the world and mankind, but a personal God governs the universe.  It is not the laws of matter or evolution which have the final say, but a person.  And if we know this Person and he knows us, then truly we are no longer slaves of the universe and its laws, we are free.  Heaven is not empty.  Life is not a simple product of laws and the randomness of matter, but within everything and at the same time above everything, there is a personal will, there is a Spirit who in Jesus revealed himself as Love.’

So our hope in Jesus sets us free. But it also changes how we face life and death.

Hope, Life and Death

When archaeologists dig up ancient Christian graves they find Jesus portrayed in two different ways on them.

The first shows Jesus as a philosopher; the second as a shepherd.

In the ancient world, the philosopher was someone who knew how to live and how to die.  They would teach this art to anyone who could pay them for it. Many so-called philosophers were found to just be charlatans making money through their words who had nothing to say about real life. 

I don’t know about you, but this rings true for a lot of ‘philosophies’ about life that are circling around today. 

How often are we told to ‘Be true to yourself’ and anything less is a fake life?  Or that we need to break free of the traditions that enslave us, follow our own path and think your own thoughts.  This philosophy is everywhere from social media to Disney movies.  But does it help us to live authentically as a human?  Can I really have my ‘own’ truth rather than there being something external which is objectively true?   I don’t know about you, but I find it terrifying to think I am supposed to find ‘the truth’ within myself.  I am fairly sure there is a lot of rubbish deep inside of me and it is a huge comfort to know that I am not the source of truth, but that that is to be found in another, far greater than me.

But when we come to Jesus we find the true philosopher. He is one who can tell us who we are and what we must do to be truly human.  He shows us, in his own words, the way, the truth and the life.  He also shows us the path beyond death.  And only someone who is able to do this can be a true teacher of life. 

The second image was that of a shepherd.

This is most beautifully described in Psalm 23.  The true shepherd is the one who knows even the path that passes through the valley of death, the one who walks with me even on the path of final solitude where no one else can follow.  He has already walked this path, descended to death, conquered it and has returned to accompany us on that same journey and give us the certainty that, together with him, we can find a way through.

The realisation that there is one who even in death accompanies me was the new hope which arose over the life of the early church. It is what the world still desperately needs to hear today. 

Life is hard, suffering happens, death is real and we all need hope to sustain us. 

Hope and Eternity

Hebrews 10:34 the writer notes the counter-intuitive freedom of a group of persecuted early Christians,

‘You suffered along with those in prison and joyfully accepted the confiscation of your property, because you knew that you yourselves had better and lasting possessions.’

As Christians, we can give up material possessions, gladly, because we have found a better basis for our existence, one that does not depend on money or power or status.  We have a real hope.

This enables Christians to live for eternity, not for the here and now.

Because we hope for eternal life, we can give generously, even recklessly, for the sake of the gospel and in order to bring others to faith. 

If I told my non-Christians friends how much money I have given away, they would thing I was absolutely bonkers.  At the time we gave up our flourishing careers as barristers to come and work for the church they thought we were mad enough.  I don’t have a lot of money, but I feel compelled to give it away whenever I can anyway.  And do you know what?  That is incredibly freeing.  When you stop believing that earning money and getting a promotion is the goal of life and that serving Jesus is instead, it turns out he takes care of you anyway. 

Lots of you know our story.  God has provided houses, school places, ballet classes, music lessons, holidays, pushchairs and much for us when we could not afford them.  Some through miraculous gifts in the post and some through the generosity of others as God has moved their hearts.  The future has broken into the present.

But what does that future look like?  Do we really want to live for eternity?  If eternity looked like this life carrying on forever, many of us would say, no thanks, 70 odd years is enough for me!

So if on the one hand we don’t want to die, and those who love us don’t want us to die, and on the other hand neither do we want to live like this indefinitely, what do we really want? 

St Paul says that ‘We do not know what we ought to pray for’ we just know that it is not this life.6 

This eternity is not an unending number of days on a calendar, but rather it is like plunging into the ocean of love, a moment in which time no longer exists.  Jesus says it like this, ‘I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy.’ 7

Or again,

‘Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.’ 8

And again, ‘Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.’9 

On and on and on and on it goes: Eternal life, our only ultimate hope, is centred on a relationship with One who does not die, who is life and love itself.  We are in him. 

Whenever we are moved by his love, we experience true life.

Every day we experience many greater or lesser hopes.  Sometimes they can appear totally satisfying – the hope of a great love, a new job or other success.  But when they are fulfilled it becomes clear that they were not the whole.  We need a hope which goes further. 

Only God can give us this hope.  And the very fact that it comes as a gift is part of the hope.  God is the foundation of hope.  Not any god, but the God who has a human face and who has loved us to the end, each one of us and humanity in its entirety.  His kingdom is not some imaginary hereafter that will never arrive, but it is present wherever he is loved and whenever his love reaches us.  His love alone gives us the possibility of persevering day by day, spurred on by hope in a world which by its very nature is imperfect.

This is hope and we all need it.

What Does It Mean?

So are these just pious thoughts or do they have a practical consequence for the way we live now? How can we know this hope in a way that is personally and socially transformative? 

Firstly, if you are currently living without hope, come and know Jesus.  Put your trust in him and get baptised.

He is our hope.  He shows us the path through life and beyond it to eternity with God in heaven.  He enables us to bear the present and to taste life now.

For those who are already walking this path, thought, I think we can grow in hope in three ways.

  1. Prayer – when no-one listens to me anymore, God still listens to me.  When I can no longer talk to anyone or call upon anyone, I can always talk to God.  When there is no longer anyone to help me deal with a need or expectation that goes beyond the human capacity for hope, he can help me.  Benedict puts it beautifully: when I have been plunged into complete solitude, if I pray I am never totally alone.

In his sermon on First John, Saint Augustine describes beautifully the intimate relationship between prayer and hope.  He defines prayer as an exercise of desire.  Human beings were created for greatness – for God himself; we were created to be filled by God.  But his heart is too small for the greatness to which it is destined.  It must be stretched.  By delaying his gift, God strengthens our desire; through desire he enlarges our soul and by expanding it he increases our capacity for receiving him.10 

If you are barely hanging on to hope, pray.  Pray anyway, but especially in the darkness of life, pray.  Through prayer we draw near to God and he to us and he strengthens our grasp on his great hope.

  • Action – We cannot earn heaven through by what we do, it is a gift. But at the same time, our behaviour is not indifferent before God and the infolding of history.  What we do does matter.  We can open ourselves to truth, to love and to what is good. We are called to be ‘God’s co-workers,’ contributing to the world’s salvation.11 

We must do all we can to reduce human suffering when we see it in our everyday lives. 
It is not within our power to banish pain and suffering from the world altogether. But through Jesus, hope for the world’s healing has entered the world.  We are healed by accepting suffering, maturing through it and finding meaning through union with Christ who suffered with infinite love. 
Each of us can live out this when we see those in pain in our families, in our schools, or our work places. 

Where is God calling you to partner with him in reaching out to a suffering world?  Who needs to know the hope which you have found in Jesus?  How can you demonstrate his love to others today?

  • Words – As Christians we should never limit ourselves to asking, how can I be saved? We are given hope in order to share it with others. When we see those in pain or suffering, we should pray for them, we should comfort them. But then we need to share our hope with them. When all else has passed, that is what they ultimately need. That can be as simple as offering to pray with them, sharing our stories of hope with them or inviting them to Church with us.

To have faith in Jesus is to have hope. This hope sets us free to know love and purpose, to live and to die, and to look to eternity.

  1. Hebrews 11:1 ↩︎
  2. Rom 8:24 ↩︎
  3. 2005 December 16, The Ottawa Citizen, Carrey’s been busted, Continuation title: Carrey—Being rich not the answer by Jay Stone, Start Page F1, Quote Page F2, Column 2, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. (Newspapers_com) ↩︎
  4. https://queenarchives.com/qa/ ↩︎
  5. 1 Thes 4:13 ↩︎
  6. Rom 8:26 ↩︎
  7. John 16:22 ↩︎
  8. John 17:3 ↩︎
  9. John 13:1 ↩︎
  10. In 1 Ioannis 4, 6: PL 35, 2008f ↩︎
  11. 1 Cor 3:9 ↩︎

God is Love

God is love. He gives love to us. We give it away to others. 
A guest post from the inestimable Heather Fellows.

Here’s a guest post from the inestimable Heather Fellows.

God is love.  He gives love to us.  We give it away to others.   

I want to share some of the ideas I was meditating on when I went away on my retreat a few weeks ago. I have drawn particularly on Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, God is Love. You can find a copy for free online if you want to read it.

Introduction

Christianity has been transforming societies across the world for the past 2,000 years. The positive impact of the Church cannot be overstated: guided by the teachings of Jesus, Christianity has touched virtually every part of life. Over the centuries, the Church has founded schools, hospitals and orphanages. Christians have campaigned for prison reform, better housing and an end to the slave trade; they have helped to establish a huge number of charities to support the poor, the underprivileged, prisoners and their families, the homeless and those seeking justice. Churches run marriage courses, thousands of parent-and-toddler groups and provide support for the bereaved. The people of this church make sacrifices day in and day out for the good of others. 

Research in the UK in 2015 for the Cinnamon Network calculated that the time given by churches and faith groups to their communities through social action was worth more than £3bn a year.[1]  I imagine that figure is much higher now, if only through inflation.

And that is staggering, isn’t it?  So, what has, and what continues to motivate the Church to reach out in these kinds of ways day after day, century after century? 

Love. 

Love is at the heart of it all.  Jesus says that God is, Himself, love.  He defines what love is.  And Jesus ultimately demonstrated what this love looks like by laying down his life for us on the cross. 

Today I want to spend a little time dwelling on the love of God.  What does it mean to us and for us? And what is its impact upon us?

I’m not going to quote long bits of the Bible here. But if you want to dig into where this comes from, you can look at 1 John 4: 7-16 and Mark 12: 28-31.

God is Love

When looking at the subject of love, we must begin with God himself.  Only after that can we begin to think about what love means for us. 

What does it mean to say that God loves us?

We love, John tells us, because God first loved us.  God is the source of love.

We all need to be loved.  We know that if a child is deprived of love when they are an infant, it has huge implications for their life.  It leads to attachment problems, anxiety, insecurity and many other things. 

So perhaps it should come as no surprise to us that the Bible and especially the New Testament, is laced with references to love.  We need it like we need air to breath and water to drink and food to eat.  And so God, in his great mercy, came down to earth, to meet our greatest need. 

This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 

Our sin separated us from God and this was a big problem.  From that point on mankind has been restless.

I think we can sense that in the world around us, can’t we?  People are always seeking and searching for something and yet there is a sense that it is always slightly out of reach.  And God’s answer to the problem is love. 

Love looks like God himself taking the form of a man and coming to the earth to live and die in our place, bearing the weight of our sin upon his shoulders and paying the price we can never pay, so that we might be united in love with him.

God loves man with a personal, elective love.  He chooses Israel and loves her, but precisely with a view to healing the whole human race.  God gives her the Torah, the Law, opening Israel’s eyes to man’s true nature, his sin, and showing her the path leading to true life.  And man, through a life of fidelity to the one God, comes to experience himself loved by God, and discovers joy and truth and righteousness – a joy in God that becomes his essential happiness:

“Who do I have in heaven but you?  And there is nothing upon earth that I desire besides you…for me it is good to be near God” (Psalm 73).  

How beautifully the Psalmist captures the heart of one who has come to know something of the depths of God’s love.  There is nothing that matters more.

Our society is obsessed with love, but there is something distinct, something unique about God’s love.  If you know your Greek, you might know that the most commonly used word for love in the New Testament is agape.  This is the kind of love demonstrated by Jesus.  It is a kind of love whose concern is not primarily for oneself, but for the other.  The kind of love we often seek is more of an eros love.  This kind of love is a desperate, and hungry longing that desires to be filled for its own sake.  It says, I need something and you can give it to me.  But what God does is to intervene in man’s search for love in order to purify and perfect it.  He unites our eros desire with his agape selfless love and creates something beautiful and powerful. 

Jesus sums this up so well in Luke 17:33 when he said, “Whoever tries to keep their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life will preserve it.”  The essence of love and life itself is found in giving it away, just as Jesus himself so perfectly modelled.

But as well as there being a hunger in each of us to be loved, so too God loves.  God’s own eros desire for man, his passionate love for us, is also totally agape, totally self-giving.  God’s love is unmerited, we have done nothing to deserve it, in fact we rather deserve death for turning our backs on our Creator.  But God loves us with a passionate and forgiving love.  So great is God’s love for man that by becoming man he follows man even into death, and so reconciles justice and love.  The Song of Songs describes God’s relationship with man and man’s relationship to God.  It is a love poem and pretty erotic in places:

I belong to my beloved, and his desire is for me: (Song 7:10)

The essence of biblical faith is that man can indeed come into union with God.  Our search for peace has a true destination. 

In Jesus we see that it is God himself who goes in search of the lost sheep – the lover in search of his beloved, culminating in his death on the cross – giving himself in order to save man – love in its most radical form. 

When we take Communion we remember that Jesus has given his body and blood as the new food from heaven. 

Before Jesus, the Jews understood that God’s Word was man’s real food – the Old Testament says that man cannot live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.  But this same ‘Word’, the word become flesh as John puts it, now truly becomes food for us as love in the person of Jesus. 

When we take Communion, we enter into the very dynamic of Jesus’s self-giving.    And in taking this meal in communion with each otherwe remember that union with Christ is also union with all those to whom he gives himself.  I cannot possess Jesus just for myself.  We become one body with Christ, together.  And so we see how the love of God and the love of our neighbour are now truly united.  Communion includes the reality of both being loved and loving others in return. 

But this love doesn’t stop there.  As we accept and receive it, as we receive Jesus into our lives, God’s love is poured into us, saturating our hearts and minds and transforming us from the inside out into the very likeness of Christ.  God’s love fuels and enables our Christian life.

In Romans 5:5 it says: “… God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.”

It’s the fulfilment of Jesus’ promise in John 7: 37: “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.”   If we want our lives to be characterised by love, then we need Gods love first. 

There is one God who is the source of all that exists, and we need to come and drink from him if we are to know love and life as he intended. 

Jesus himself tells us that the focus of our lives should be love.  When Jesus is asked which is the most important commandment, he answers by uniting into a single precept the commandments to love God and love your neighbour.  The two are intertwined.  And this echoes the passage we read in 1 John; we cannot truly love others, without first experiencing the love of the Father.   It is a response to the gift of love with which God has drawn near to us. 

That same love which prompted Jesus to lay down his life for us, God’s love, has been given to us if we have received Jesus into our lives. 

And so as we have considered something of the nature of God’s love for us, we must now look at what it means for us.  Because the very nature of God’s love is that it was designed to be given away, to impact the ones to whom it was given, to impact us. 

And how does his love impact our lives? 

We know from the well-known parable of the Good Samaritan told by Jesus that our neighbour is everyone and anyone.   Love for others should absolutely characterise the church family and it is the place where no-one should go without.  But loving our neighbour is a much wider calling.  It is a call to love everyone we meet. 

And Jesus had a particular heart for the poor and the least in society. This is what he said in Matthew 25:31-36:

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

Jesus identifies himself with the least. 

The love of God and love of others are inextricably bound together. He is the stranger, the prisoner, the who is hungry and naked. 

Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me. (Matt. 25:40)

In the least in society, Jesus tells us, we will find him.  And we know that in Jesus we find God. 

God is, of course, everywhere and we all bear his image, but Jesus says when we show love to the least, we are especially loving him.   God’s love is taking a hold in our hearts, we are beginning to love with a God-like love in response to his love for us.  And in doing so our own appreciation of God’s love for us grows.

When Gods radical, self-giving love is poured into our hearts, something happens.  If you are a Christian here today, perhaps you can identify with this.  As we receive God’s love, we find ourselves feeling a love for others that we cannot explain and didn’t previously experience.  Sure, was a nice enough person before I was a Christian and I was, mostly, hopefully, kind to my friends and polite to people I met.   But God’s love goes far beyond niceties.  God’s love extends to the poor and the stranger and the outcast. 

Putting Love Into Action

First, let’s ask God to help each of us to know more deeply and fully his love for us. 

Why not spend some time this week chewing over some of the verses we have looked at today? 

God loves you so much.  His desire is for you.  Do you know that?  If you aren’t a Christian, perhaps you are hearing this for this first time.  Perhaps this speaks to you and there is a deep desire in your heart to be loved.  Then God’s word to you today is this ‘I love you so much that I gave my only son for you, so that by believing in me you might not perish but have eternal life.’  Come to me, he says. 

And second, if you have received Jesus into your life, then do you know that his transforming love has been poured into your heart by the Holy Spirit?  Perhaps you have experienced hurt and your heart has grown a little cold.  Ask God to reveal his love afresh to you today, invite him to pour his love afresh on you, to warm your heart. 

Finally, Jesus’ s love for us was never meant to be kept to ourselves, but to be given away.  In fact it only truly finds completeness as it is given away.  Why not ask God to open our eyes to the people around us to know how we can love them today?

Who are your neighbours?  Who is at the school gates or in the office?  Where are the poor near you?  I once prayed a prayer asking God to show me the poor in Hersham and he did just that, which is another story.  It was a ‘take me deeper than my feet could ever wander moment’.  It’s a powerful prayer to pray.  But in seeking to love others, God has moved powerfully in my own heart too.

Who needs to know God’s love this week?  We could do worse than just ask that question each day. 

With all those we encounter in everyday life, we are called to reflect God’s love by seeking to see them as Jesus does, attending to their practical needs, but also keeping in need their deepest need of all, for Jesus himself.

God is love.  He gives love to us.  We give it away to others.  

[1] Cinnamon Faith Action Audit, May 2015, p.4; Louise Ridley, ‘Could The Staggering £3bn Social Contribution Of Religious Groups Be The Antidote To Austerity Cuts?’, HuffPost, 20 May 2015 <https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/05/20/church-groups-community-social-contribution-tories_n_7321288.html> [Accessed 17 May 2024]