Revitalize Your Church

Morning glory, starlit sky, soaring music, scholar’s truth, flight of swallows, autumn leaves, memory’s treasure, grace of youth: Open are the gifts of God, gifts of love to mind and sense; hidden is love’s agony, love’s endeavor, love’s expense. Love that gives, gives ever more, gives with zeal, with eager hands, spares not, keeps not, all out-pours, ventures all its all expends. Drained is love in making full, bound in setting others free, poor in making many rich, weak in giving power to be. Therefore he who shows us God helpless hangs upon the tree; and the nails and crown of thorns tell of what God’s love must be. Here is God: no monarch he, throned in easy state to reign; here is God, whose arms of love aching, spent, the world sustain. (W. H. Vanstone)

Father in heaven! You have loved us first, help us never to forget that You are love so that this sure conviction might triumph in our hearts over the seduction of the world, over the inquietude of the soul, over the anxiety for the future, over the fright of the past, over the distress of the moment. But grant also that this conviction might discipline our soul so that our heart might remain faithful and sincere in the love which we bear to all those whom You have commanded us to love as we love ourselves. You have loved us first, O God, alas! We speak of it in terms of history as if You have only loved us first but a single time, rather than that without ceasing You have loved us first many times and every day and our whole life through. When we wake up in the morning and turn our soul toward You – You are the first – You have loved us first; if I rise at dawn and at the same second turn my soul toward You in prayer, You are there ahead of me, You have loved me first. When...