Old Testament
Deuteronomy 10:17-19
17 For the LORD your God, he is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, the mighty, and the awesome, who doesn’t respect persons or take bribes.
18 He executes justice for the fatherless and widow and loves the foreigner in giving him food and clothing.
19 Therefore love the foreigner, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt.
New Testament
Hebrews 10:24-25
24 Let’s consider how to provoke one another to love and good works,
25 not forsaking our own assembling together, as the custom of some is, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching.
Deuteronomy describes the Lord without flattery: he is great and awesome, and he shows no partiality. Then, without pause, the text says what that greatness looks like: he executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and he loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. God’s majesty is not aloof. It bends towards the vulnerable.
Hebrews then urges a different kind of courage: not the spectacular moment, but the steady habit. Consider one another. Stir up love and good works. Do not neglect meeting together. Encourage one another. In other words: become the kind of people who can hold others up over time.
Child social care needs that kind of steadiness. It needs households with room. It needs congregations that can support carers without judgement. It needs people who will show up at court hearings, cook meals, offer lifts, keep confidences, pray, and stay. It also needs churches spacious enough for family stories that are not neat: kinship care, estrangement, disrupted placements, reunification, guarded contact, and long seasons of uncertainty.
Lord, make your Church a dependable, prayerful neighbour. Keep us from treating care as somebody else’s vocation, or a specialist’s task. Teach us to love the stranger and defend the fatherless, because you do. And by your Spirit, help us to encourage one another into costly faithfulness, until love becomes more than a beautiful idea.