1 John 4:7-8
(by Annie)This term I’ve been studying New Testament Greek, which means I’ve learnt words such as ’false prophet’, ’kingdom’ and ’arch-liar’ in Greek but still don’t know what ’hello’ is or how to tell someone my name (things like that isn’t on my list with the 200 most common words in the New Testament…). The past few weeks my homework has been to translate the whole first letter of John from Greek to Swedish. It’s been (surprisingly) fun, but also quite difficult.
One of the themes that keep popping up throughout the letter is love, just like in today’s verses. Love is also one of the themes for Christmas, with songs like ’All I want for Christmas is you’ as one of the recurring hits on the radio.
In today’s verses John wants to encourage us to love each other, something that isn’t always easy, especially if you are as stubborn as I am! But maybe this Christmas we could make an effort to forgive someone who has hurt us – or to ask someone who we have hurt to forgive us?