Be Still And Know

1 John 4:10 'This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.' Most of the love that we experience in our lives is reciprocal. We love other people and they love us. Sometimes we have taken the initiative and, on other occasions, they do so. But with God it is very different. There is nothing that we could ever do to win his love. However hard we might try, we could never force God to love us. So the fact that he has chosen to love us is entirely down to his own initiative. This is an incredibly important truth because the whole of our Christian life needs to flow from it. In his letters, Paul often used the word ‘grace’ to describe God’s relationship with us. That is to say, forgiveness and salvation are a matter of sheer gift. There is nothing we could ever do to contribute towards them. When we take the step of faith and accept Jesus into our life, we are simply responding to his incredible generosity to us. In writing to the Ephesians,