URC Daily Devotion 11th September 2019

‘For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.’

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.

It is beyond us. What can we say, Paul asks, that will truly convey the nature of God as we know God in Jesus? God who is for us, who embraces us with a father’s love; Jesus, God’s Son, our brother who knows what it is to be human, sharing our path from the manger to the cross – living still to represent humanity to God and God’s love to humankind. Nothing in all creation we are assured, can separate us from this love that we know in Christ. All that life or death can throw at us is powerless against it.

Do we really believe it, though, and act on it? Most of us rarely experience hardship, distress, famine, persecution, and the rest, and we are grateful for that. But in many places at home and abroad people of faith (or no faith) suffer in many of these ways. So many that it seems impossible that anything we can do will make a difference, so, often, we feel powerless and do nothing. Yet it is only in sharing the unconquerable love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord that we will know in our hearts and in our lives the reality of that love. Love must be embodied, to be real. My four-year-old had it right: where there is love is where God is found.