Dear Family

One of those many weird, unanswerable ponder-ings in life for me, at any rate, is to attempt to fathom how we are able to be “in Christ” whilst at the same time, He is “in” us. The Bible says, for ex-ample, “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation” and also “Christ in you, the hope of glory”. The clos-est explanation I can get to satisfy my pragmatic mind, is to think about a thoroughly soaked sponge in water. The sponge is in the wa-ter and the water is in the sponge. Not that the God who created this water should ever be compared to anything remotely like a mere facet of His creation, but at least it helps me to understand a little more how something can be in something else and at the same time be the thing that something else is in. Confused properly now?

The important thing is that we are in Him, and he is in us! He is our life. He is our past, our present and our future. He is everything we need, and we are the fulfilment of His plan for our lives. Nothing more, nothing less. In Acts 17:28 the Apostle Paul quotes the Greek poet, Aratus, from the first line of his poem on astronomy, “Phaenomena”, which is dedicated to the god Zeus as follows “For in him we live and move and have our being”. Obviously Paul was referring to the God who made the world and not Zeus, but he uses this line to emphasize the incredi-ble relationship we have with Al-mighty God. We live, we move, we have our being – all in Him!

I encourage you never to lose sight of the inexplicable closeness of God. He in us, we in Him. Through good times, through bad times, in celebration, in temptation. He is there! Our promised “Emmanuel”, “God with us” is a truth that, as believers, we should hold dear and high. God is not far removed from our human exist-ence, only popping in occasionally to see how bad things have got be-fore He shuts up shop. Rather, He in us, and we in Him, all the time, forever. Thank you, Jesus!

Paul