Dear Friends
 
Throughout last year our focus was “Living Life on Purpose”, believing that our lives were made for a God-given, God-focussed, God-empowered purpose.  As we move into a new season I believe that God is calling us to live out that purpose amongst a people who so desperately need the message of hope, the Gospel of Jesus Christ.   This last week I read the words of Paul as he wrote to the Christians in Corinth:
 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.  We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.
2 Cor 5:17-20
 
These words so powerfully sum up our vision and direction in this new season, as we live our lives on purpose.  We are those who have been reconciled to God through Christ.  We have experienced the amazing grace of our God, the salvation by grace, through faith in Christ. We can confidently say we are “in Christ” and our sins will not be counted against us.  We live in a world, however, where so many have never known that grace, never understood that there is a God who loves them and who gave himself for them.  God has given to us the ‘ministry of reconciliation’ and ‘committed to us the message of reconciliation’.  We live as ‘Christ’s ambassadors’ amongst those we come into contact with and those we influence by our lives and words.

I want to encourage us all to be consciously considering and praying about who God has placed in our lives and asking for opportunities and boldness to bring the message of reconciliation to them.

Here’s to an abundantly fruitful year together.

Love and Blessings
Jon