Dear friend,
This year, something has been quietly but steadily reshaping my heart. I find myself returning again and again to one theme, not because I planned it, but because I can’t escape it. Love has become the language of my prayer, my preaching, and my obedience.
The New Testament has come alive to me in a new way. I no longer read it merely as history, doctrine, or instruction. I read it as a romance. From the Gospels to Acts, through every epistle and all the way to Revelation, the story is consistent and stunning: God pursuing a people, revealing a Groom, and preparing a Bride.
Love is not a side theme of Scripture; it is the storyline.
In the Gospels, we see love embodied, Jesus moving toward the broken, the overlooked, the resistant.
In Acts, we see love ignited, ordinary believers filled with the Holy Spirit, carrying good news to the known world at great personal cost. And in Revelation, we see love completed, not with destruction as the final word, but with a wedding, eternal worship, and unbroken communion with God.
The story of redemption ends at an altar, not in ashes.
This vision has recalibrated my life. Ministry no longer feels like something I manage; it feels like something I steward from a place of devotion. I am learning again that effectiveness without intimacy is hollow, and activity without affection eventually drains the soul. Jesus is not simply the center of the message.
I am choosing, daily, for Him to be my first love.
Everything flows from intimacy, or it eventually runs dry.
These truths are not shaping me in isolation. What God is doing in me, He is doing so it can flow through me. That is why I’m writing to you, not as part of a crowd, but as one heart speaking to another. We are being invited together into something deeper than momentum alone. We are being drawn into the heart of God Himself.
This year, my prayer is simple and consuming: that our lives would be rooted in love, empowered by the Spirit, and aimed toward eternal union with Christ. That we would live as people who know where the story is going and let that future shape how we live now.
Thank you for walking with me. Thank you for believing in what God is doing. And thank you for saying yes to the journey.
With love and gratitude,
Mikel French
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