GOD is the reason and purpose as to why I can share these few words. GOD is love. Love is the reason I stand today. The love that looked beyond the mess, anger and hurt and saw me; reached down, not worried about the filth and pulled me out. A scared boy hiding in a man’s body, who was never good enough. ‘Worthless’, ‘good for nothing’, the words that I found myself fulfilling. I was wallowing in sin, in its pleasures, in its hurt and in its destruction. My loving wife respected by my peers, a good social life and yet I was unsatisfied. I was running from GOD and I did not even know it, running from the very thing I was looking for. But then I ran smack ban into GOD.

Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee. (Jeremiah 31:3).

Face to face with this loving GOD there was nowhere to go but to fall to my knees, unable to run any longer, submission was all I had left. Accepting His acceptance was the most challenging, how could he love me? I do not deserve it and I never earned it.

For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly (Romans 5:6).

GOD loving me despite of who I was and still does, is amazing to me even now. Nothing I can do past, present or future can separate me from GOD’s Love, radiating from Jesus Christ my Lord. GOD has got me on his mind. The bible says in Jeremiah 29:11, ‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future’.

It is amazing He calls me son and I am adopted into the family of GOD. My desire is for others to know this amazing love; it is freely received and freely I will give. This hurting hate filled world is yearning for this beautiful gift of Love.

Jesus does not have the love the world is looking for; He is the love the world is looking for. Jesus declares we ought to love our neighbour as ourselves.

We wonder why these youths who have been abandoned by there fathers are reminded how they are just like their absent dads; whose needs are now secondary to mum’s new love interest. They are rejected with low esteem and in their minds they worthless. They do not love themselves and they seem themselves as of no value and that is how they see their neighbour. That is why life to them is so cheap. They need to hear that they were made in the image of GOD, wonderfully and fearfully so. If they are rejected, GOD will take them up. When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up, Psalms 27:10.

The apostle Paul wrote, without love we are nothing. ‘And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing’ (1 Cor 13:3).

Let us pray GOD through Jesus Christ will continue to make us something. Love is action and love costs. Love cost Jesus his life that we could live so let us love not in word but in deed. Men will know we are Christ disciples by the love we show. ‘By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another’, John 13:35, not words but actions. We can and must, as Christ was in the world so we also should be. ‘Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment: because as he is, so are we in this world, 1 John 4:17. GOD is love.

Your servant in Christ

Elder Blanford Lorenzo Wright (Wolverhampton, UK)