Service of Evening Prayer including recitation and song by the children. The theme for this year’s program comes from the well-loved children’s Christmas hymn “God Loves Me Dearly.” Originally written in 1852 by a pastor who was working with homeless and disadvantaged children, this hymn delights in the personal nature of our heavenly Father’s love—He loves even me. Because of our inherited sin and our own sinful choices, we were “in slavery, sin, death, and darkness,” but “God’s love was working to make me free.”

St. John wrote, “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent His only Son into the world, so that we might live through Him” (1 John 4:9). Jesus was born to “save His people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). Jesus “paid all I owed” through His birth, suffering, death, and resurrection and so “set me free.” Because of Jesus, God’s Son, coming to save us, everyone can joyfully say, and sing, “God loves me dearly, loves even me.”