In that sublime purpose lies all the meaning of our human life. Indeed it applies to us to a far greater degree than it does to the rest of God’s creation, because God has made us in his own image, so that we can, of our own free and conscious choice share his life here and now, and, in St Paul’s words, “…come…to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ (NRSV, Ephesians 4:13). That is the ultimate reason why he has given us a mind with which to know him, a heart with which to love him, and a will with which to choose to become like him and to be wholly his.

If therefore we make anything else the focus of our desires, we misuse most monstrously these God-given faculties, and rob our Maker and Preserver of what is rightly his.

It is strange that human beings should set up anything else as the centre of their lives, when their Eternal Maker – who ought to be in that centre – is fair beyond all telling. But that is how it has always been, so that God even had to make a commandment against it, “You shall have no other gods before me” (RSV, Exodus 20:3) – and gods means anything that replaces him as the most important thing in life.

What, for example, exerts the greatest pull on you – money, possessions, pleasure, clothes, self – or God? Which of these comes first in your scale of values or has the greatest influence on your attitude to life? If one cannot humbly and truthfully say, “God”, then one is heading in the wrong direction altogether, and that direction is not towards God.