I am writing to you, dear children, because your sins have been forgiven on account of his name. [1 John 2:12]

I begin with a confession: I’m a sucker for New Year’s Resolutions.

Now before you all belittle me with your well constructed arguments, I am well aware of their supposed uselessness. I recognise that our human weakness means that, despite our best intention, we will invariably fall down, normally by about day 6. I also recognise that it’s a great excuse to be marketed everything from yogurt to yoga DVD’s, just because maybe these tools will help fulfill your dream you.

However, every year without fail, I sit and form my list; the things I want to change, the things I need to accomplish, the dreams I don’t dare to act upon, and every year I end up so close, yet so far from fully realising them in any meaningful way. And so I wait, till the next arbitrary date to have the chance to fashion a better, more handsome, more witty, and less prone to flatulence Gary James Borrows.

The question I asked myself this year was ‘Where does the desire to change come from?’ The answer, I realised, was not actually a pleasant one. I found it as I scanned through my Twitter feed, reading comments of people’s needs for crash diets, for more exercise, for better financial frugality. What I saw was that rather than desiring change to become something better, people where in fact trying to change away from being something worse. Rather than longing for improvement, we long to lose the guilt. Smoker? Here’s a nicotine patch. Overweight? Here’s an exercise routine. Yes, for some of us this may seem irrelevant or cliche, but lets put it another way. Bad at reading the Bible? Here’s a daily devotional. Lacking prayer and intimacy? Here’s a great worship CD to soak to. Suddenly, that celebrity fitness DVD doesn’t seem so far away from our own spiritual reality.

This is how God showed his love for us: God sent his only Son into the world so we might live through him. This is the kind of love we are talking about—not that we once upon a time loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to clear away our sins and the damage they’ve done to our relationship with God. [1 John 4:9-10]

John puts it bluntly; God is love. This amazes us because within this definition John changes our image of God. God, like love, is this massive, indefinable and limitless life around us. We can’t see it, can’t really diagnose it, but when gripped by it, it is… unmistakable. I would ask you all to raise your hands if you thought you’d ever been in love, and once we all have, we realise that God suddenly becomes much more graspable. He is there, in the everyday, totally unexplainable yet totally encounter-able.

And the great thing about this love is that for all its grandeur, it is a simple love, a love which requires us to prove nothing and provide nothing, simply allow it to mark us for all eternity. It is a love which asked for nothing before giving us everything. And it is in this love we are asked to build ourselves, a love which makes us children rather than orphans, accepted rather than rejected, perfected rather than abandoned.

So here is my request, regardless of whether you’ve got your new jogging route, your daily food planner, or your finance spreadsheet all set up. All I ask is that you remember that the only reason you need to act is that you are loved with a perfect love, with a simple love, and all He desires is to be loved in return.

Happy New Year

Gary