God Loves All People as God’s Children
God loves YOU! In fact, God loves you just as you are! We are all created in the image of God, and we are loved for who we are and who we are becoming. Our flaws and failures, our gifts and compassion, and even our quirks make us especially crafted by God. God’s love for us is unconditional and infinite. God sent Jesus as a baby to live and die as one of us so that we could have eternal life in Christ. God loves each of us as God’s own child.
Loving ourselves and our neighbors connects us to God and to one another. Regardless of our differences, whether it be due to race, gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, socio-economic status, or any other origin… we are all loved by the one true God, and every one of us has love to share with one another.
Romans 8:35, 37-39 – Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Prayer: For Peace
Eternal God, in whose perfect kingdom no sword is drawn but the sword of righteousness, no strength known but the strength of love: So mightily spread abroad your Spirit, that all peoples may be gathered under the banner of the Prince of Peace, as children of one Father; to whom be dominion and glory, now and for ever. Amen.
(Book of Common Prayer, 1979; pg. 815.)
Ponderings…
How might you share love with someone unlike you? In doing so, can you find a commonality? How can you remind yourself that God loves you just as you are? What can you do to share that good news with someone else?
Illustrations used with permission. Copyright information for print above: Illustration by Elizabeth Wang, T-02550-OL, ‘God the Father loves us as His children with a tender and unfailing love’, copyright © Radiant Light 2006,<http://www.radiantlight.org.uk/>
