Vision Church is built upon 12 core values, which are central to who we are, all we do, and how we want to reflect Christ to others. In this series, we will be exploring and unpacking each core value together.
Core Value: We Love
‘God is love’, 1 John 4:8
God loves each and every one of us with a deep and passionate love, and He created us in His image and likeness to love and be loved.
Love is what all of our hearts deeply long for.
In the search to satisfy our need for love, we often look in all the wrong places – in relationships, sex, drugs, alcohol and in other people. It’s only as we come to know our creator that we discover and encounter the love that we seek.
Growing up as a teenager my perception of God was far from that of a loving God. I perceived him to be mean, distant and boring, and a God who was irrelevant to my life.
When I encountered God’s love everything changed. It felt as though my eyes had been opened and my heart was filled with a deep river of unconditional love.
This is the encounter all of humanity longs for – an encounter with the love of God.
When we experience this unconditional love of God, we are never the same. We are able to love ourselves and love other people – not with human love but with a supernatural love that comes from heaven.
On one of our Encounter weekends many years ago, at the end of the first session, a lady came forward to receive prayer. I had been talking about God’s father heart of unconditional love, and as she received prayer, she was overwhelmed with the love of God.
In that moment she began a life changing journey in which God began to heal deep wounds in her heart. Since that time she has gone on to extend that same love towards many other people, bringing them into a true relationship with Jesus.
The Bible tells us that when Jesus saw the crowd ‘He had compassion on them’ (Matthew 9:36)
Jesus was moved with compassion because everything he did was motivated by love.
Out of his great love for humanity Jesus preached the good news of the kingdom of God, healed the sick, set people free, raised the dead and even sacrificed his own life for our complete redemption and salvation.
Nothing is beyond the realm of God’s great love.
This is our heart’s desire and prayer ….. that like Jesus, we would know the love of Father God overflowing from our hearts, compelling us to lay down our life in love for others.
For the rich and poor, the black and white, the educated and uneducated, the married and the single, the young and the old. Without discrimination, without condition, without limits and without compromise.
Our mission is to represent and reproduce God’s heart of love to the multitudes who don’t yet know him in the city of Leeds, the surrounding regions and into the nation of the United Kingdom and whole world.
We love!