In God’s Hands

As Archbishop Justin Welby says in his foreword to Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s book, it is written by one of the most extraordinary Christian leaders alive today, or to have lived in the last century or more.

Archbishop Tutu distils the wisdom forged through a childhood of poverty and apartheid, an adulthood lived in the glare of the world's media, and the long and agonising struggle for truth and reconciliation in South Africa, into the childlike simplicity which Jesus tells us characterises the Kingdom of God.

Archbishop Tutu has produced a meditation on the infinite love of God and the infinite value of the human individual. Not only are we in God's hands, he says, our names are engraved on his palms.

Throughout an often turbulent life, Archbishop Tutu has fought for justice and against oppression and prejudice. As we learn in this book, what has driven him forward is an unshakeable belief that human beings are created in the image of God and are infinitely valuable. Each one of us is a God-carrier, a tabernacle, a sanctuary of the Divine Trinity. God loves us not because we are loveable but because he first loved us. And this turns our values upside down. In this sense the Gospel is the most radical thing imaginable.

Again as Archbishop Welby says, this is a book of transparency about its author. We live the life alongside the author; and the voice we hear, even if we might disagree with some of what he says, challenges us to hear the voice of Christ.

These Lent resources were assembled by Canon Stephen Shipley.