It’s a harsh world we live in. People are busy in the pursuit of power and wealth. The weak get trampled. Might is right. There are extremes of wealth and poverty which leave children to die in dust.
Love sounds like a weak word in the midst of that. Love is a feeling, sending a valentine, doing what you like to do. Love is conditional, on being loved, on feeling the desire to love. Love is often more about ourselves than about others.
Yet love is truly so much more. As Jesus said, “as I have loved you, so you must love one another”. It is difficult for us to grasp such love, for it is so totally different to what we experience and encounter every day. “As I have loved you” points to the cross. It points to self-sacrifice. It points to a kind of love so contrary to what comes naturally.
Yet what matters most is love. It is the defining mark of Christianity. Without love it is empty words. Over the next six weeks at St Lukes we are exploring, and hopefully experiencing and expressing, the theme of love in community. We pray that we might grow in love for one another and for the wider community, not in words but in actions.
We invite you to join us in this journey. There are 25 host home groups, daily readings and weekly memory verses. All those are tools to help us. The real question is how we live it out. In a world where the love lived out by Jesus is such a rare commodity, may we be granted the grace to grow in that love!