TEACHING AND TOUCHING THE WORLD WITH THE LOVE OF GOD
 Hayley and I didn’t have the slightest inkling when we drove from our home to Heathrow Airport to collect Steve and Melanie McVey that a week later, we would be sitting in the Eagle and Child public house in Oxford where C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien (members of the writers’ group called “The Inklings”) had gathered many moons ago and finding ourselves gripped by far reaching musings of our own.
The four of us had been eagerly anticipating our time together and harboured great hopes for the “Intimacy of Grace” conference. Steve and Melanie arrived in London after hotfooting it from Norway via South Africa and it was apparent from our first conversation that God was going to do an “and suddenly” thing in our midst. Steve and Melanie had been deeply touched by the needs of the people of Swaziland (you can read about their Swaziland experiences in Steve’s blog at http://www.gracewalkministries.blogspot.com/). What was remarkable (and this was not the first time this had happened by any stretch of the imagination) was that Steve and I were both thinking deeply about the same thing. We were both deeply preoccupied with the question of socialising the gospel. We both yearned to move into the business-end of our message where we move from simply “Christ-in-me” to “Christ-as-me”; in other words, to “Jesus loving His world through us”. The Sunday before they arrived, I had spoken at our West London ecclesia on what I called “The River-Level Life” (click here to visit). We both knew that this year’s conference would take us all deeper into the truths of who we are in Christ but how deep, we could not have imagined.
This year’s conference theme was based on a verse from the Song of Solomon – “I am my beloved’s”. The conference was an outstanding success but what happened, to quote a coined conference phrase, was that we “broke through into the already”. We are indebted to Dave Bilbrough not only for that Thomas Merton quotation but for his wonderful contribution as well. If you have been unable to attend the conference, I strongly recommend that you order the CD boxset as I know you are not going to want to miss out on the talks. Steve’s talk on the “Intimacy of Prayer” was stunning and my talk on the “Intimacy of Intercession” was a radical call to spiritual Fatherhood.
We rounded off the conference weekend on Sunday, 8 July 2007, with a joint Grace West and Grace East meeting where Steve brought a powerful message called “Guardians of Grace”. The talk really drew together all that we had been pressing into throughout the conference and culminated in a challenge which both Steve and I were compelled to rise to, viz. to practically outwork the love of God by loving others with the love of God. This new practical outworking we have decided to call “Grace Loves”. Grace Walk and The Grace Project are this new ministry’s founding partners and it will be a joint-venture between the two organisations; not a merging but an extension of our respective ministries, providing us with a platform for partnership which allows us to do exponentially more than we can do individually in teaching and touching the world with God’s Love.
We are overwhelmed by the generosity of The Grace Project in response to an invitation to give financially to The Grace Loves initiative. Our intention is to express the love of God through practical acts of grace worldwide. Our first two initiatives are “Grace Loves Swaziland” and “Grace Loves Brazil”. Our aim in both of these territories will be to meet some practical needs. In Swaziland, the needs are there for all to see – poverty, drought, HIV/AIDS; whilst in Brazil, our vision is for the creation of the first Grace Loves Academy for the street children of Brazil.
If you would like to know more about our heartbeat for the initiatives, why not listen to the “Special Announcement” talk at www.thegraceproject.com? You’ll be interested to know that everyone will have a chance to partner with us in this work; some will want to give, some will go and others will want to stay and pray but everyone who has been loved can love. In the coming days, we will be giving details of an internship which we are going to offer. There will be a limited number of places available for people wanting to enrol on a two-year programme which will be based in the UK and the USA and it will also include a period of service in Brazil and Africa. For the moment, we would ask that you prayerfully consider what level of involvement and commitment you should have in the work but this much we can say, “We love because He loved us first”. Let me finish this note by asking you to meditate on what promises to be one of the foundational texts for this work [Is. 58:1-12] –
“Cry aloud; do not hold back; lift up your voice like a trumpet;
declare to My people their transgression, to the house of Jacob their sins.
Yet they seek Me daily and delight to know My ways,
as if they were a nation that did righteousness
and did not forsake the judgment of their God;
they ask of Me righteous judgments; they delight to draw near to God.
‘Why have we fasted, and You see it not?
Why have we humbled ourselves, and You take no knowledge of it?’
Behold, in the day of your fast you seek your own pleasure,
and oppress all your workers.
Behold, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to hit with a wicked fist.
Fasting like yours this day will not make your voice to be heard on high.
Is such the fast that I choose, a day for a person to humble himself?
Is it to bow down his head like a reed,
and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him?
Will you call this a fast, and a day acceptable to the Lord?
Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of wickedness,
to undo the straps of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover him,
and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?
Then shall your light break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up speedily;
your righteousness shall go before you;
the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.
Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer;
you shall cry, and He will say, ‘Here I am.’
If you take away the yoke from your midst,
the pointing of the finger,
and speaking wickedness,
if you pour yourself out for the hungry
and satisfy the desire of the afflicted,
then shall your light rise in the darkness and your gloom be as the noonday.
And the Lord will guide you continually and satisfy your desire in scorched places and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail. And your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to dwell in.”
Grace Loves gives us the opportunity to turn the desert of parched religion into the flood plains of grace. Join us, won’t you? And help somebody say, “Grace loves me”.
Agapē,
Paul & Hayley
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