Merry Christmas!

Just a short note to say Merry Christmas !

What Christmas means is that simple lovingkindness is at the heart of universe: God is a God who loves, God is love¹.

Of course this doesn’t mean God is like some naive Father Christmas figure in the sky, or that anything goes for us: life has a purpose, that we might learn how to love like Christ more deeply every day, and the punishment for those who do not learn how to love selflessly is ultimately becoming the person they make themselves into, in other words, their punishment is that they never become the person they were meant to be: eternal regret.

God is totally loving, and what a hell it must be for those who lived their lives ultimately selfishly to realise that they have made themselves unable to give and receive love, unfit for eternity and unfit for the very purpose for which humans were created, and this is potentially what happens to those who never learn to really love others or live selflessly or receive the wonderful grace and mercy of God.

For the truth is, we can’t do anything worthwhile on our own, despite all of our best intentions.

Good intentions always go astray; I’m sure you know what I mean: just look at our family Christmasses. And how easy it is to blame others when things go wrong!

And this of course is why we humans often make the same mistakes again and again. We can’t do it on our own, we can’t be good enough. But this is what Christmas is all about: God didn’t leave us to do it on our own. Yes, we make many mistakes, we go into situations full of good intentions to be loving and kind, but instead of demanding we reach some kind of perfect goal so that we could attain the level of worthiness to be able to reach God’s level, instead, He sent His Son down to live as a human being and to redeem us from slavery to sin: this is like the person a debt is owed to (God) voluntarily paying the debt of the person who owes the money.

What Jesus did by becoming human is that he took away the gap between humans and God, he cancelled the debt we owed God of all our trespasses; he took away the sin that separates us from God, by dying on the cross Jesus tore the curtain of the heavenly temple that kept God separated from us, thus making it possible for the most poor, wretched, sinful, rotten, awful people (i.e. all of us) to know God and to be friends with Him and enjoy His mercy and His grace.

And if you want to know, how do we be friends with God? How can we know him and enjoy His mercy and grace? It might be easy to make this all more complicated than it is, by talking about prayer techniques or systems of meditation or good works or going to church: but the truth is very simple — all we have to do to be friends with God is ask God. It’s as simple as asking. Ask Jesus to show himself, to change your heart and be the king of your life so that you can know God and follow His way. All we have to do is ask for God to change our lives and change our hearts, to seek Him — and yes, we must lay everything on the line — but the eternal reward of knowing God and being able to love Him and love others is worth it.

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Addendum: Honestly, you might think you’re not worth saving: well come to Jesus and ask Him to save you. Just cry out to him, he will hear you!

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Great interview with the creator of the Hallow app:

(Revised this article a few times, not always for the better)

1. love in this case doesn’t mean romantic love, but rather, lovingkindness, forgiveness, goodness that seeks the good of another, mercy towards others, which of course ought to be central to romantic love in marriage, but often isn’t.