I am glad to have received something from God in various ways including worshiping in the company of friends and in sharing in the Christian fellowship at the Baptist church Sunday evenings. Please read the following as a token of my appreciation for your contribution to my gladness, I believe that it represents what I find to be true by experience - I woke up at 6am Thursday 31st January with these thoughts on my mind and I felt a need to put pen to paper and share this with you.

God gives me all that is good in His eyes. We are dependant upon Him for everything that we need. I recognize the value of R’s memory shared one evening “Pray as if everything depends upon God, and do all you can as if it depends upon you”.

I understand that God is infinitely awesome, including in Splendour and Majesty,
Intelligence and creativity.

He humbled Himself in Jesus Christ to be born of woman in human form...

He came to serve and not to be served and to give His life as a ransom for many. Along with the birth of Jesus, His cross represents God’s holiest activity accessible to human eyes in His merciful forgiving of our sins, His being willing to die for this, and God’s power of life in raising His human body from death.

We need to imitate the narrow way of doing things to meet the needs of others and of giving ourselves to God to participate in the divine economy of God given in exchange for man and man given in exchange for God. Likewise, I have heard it said that He became like us that we might become like Him.

God creates perfectly. So we are each unique in who we are by design and yet all identical with one another in our need to communicate and grow into the likeness of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit re-presented in Jesus Christ.

This can only happen as we turn to face Jesus Christ, looking intently at Him and listening attentively to Him. And then we receive a purity of heart that forms in us the mysterious communion of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Then one with God we are one with one another, then in fact the kin-ship of God has come in us. In Him we do truly live and breathe and have our being.

Jesus Christ is seen and heard supremely in the reflection of His life given to us by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. These books are appropriately called ‘Gospel’ meaning ‘Good News’. He is also found paradoxically in every human being in their needs, dynamically felt and manifestly represented in reading the Gospels, and is manifest in us and dynamically felt in them when we do something to meet those needs. These things are true through God’s grace, His favour freely given to us of His Holy Spirit through Jesus despite the presence of sin in them and us formed by the error of not making God the centre of our lives. But don’t worry, Jesus Christ is our Saviour, through His infinite Love of us and merciful goodness towards us, our telling Him our mistakes and asking for His forgiveness, and as we submit to Him working through us as we chose the way He directs for us over the old path that we confessed as a mistake, He diminishes sin in us. Remember as God encourages through M and those who join in “God is good, all the time. All the time, God is good”.

Gospel reading, serving the needs of others and giving of self to God does something to turn us from sin and to Christ thus developing the communion of God in us. God knows when our hearts yearn deeply for His life in us. This is itself a gift from God as we choose to despise the sin of wanting other things more than Him to turn to seek the narrow path of communion in Gospel reading, serving and giving of self. God has given us all the gift of prayer which when used persistently ignites the fire of Love within necessary to do these things. Participating in the activity variously known as the ‘Eucharist’, ‘Holy Communion’, ‘Mass’, and the ‘Lord’s Supper’ is the deepest expression of prayer and is a sign signifying the want of God and His means in this life to bring us and all His creation to Himself.

The gift of participation here mentioned gives us a foretaste of the banquet that God has prepared for us in heaven. When His and our deepest true need will be fulfilled, Jesus’ mission accomplished, God with us, Christ in you the hope of basking in the wonderful, beautiful and infinitely desirable presence of God forever. Amen.