An Age for Faith

By Harold Gielow

"An Age For Faith" is a concise, yet penetrating look at the meaning of faith in the Christian's life, the challenges our current world presents to Christian faith, and how God enables us to overcome those challenges. It is a walk through God's word and our world, looking not only at scriptural precepts and prophecies but also contemporary events in the light of God's word.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9781365871450

Book preview

An Age for Faith

Faith Working Through Love

The Christian community desperately needs contemporary giants of faith.  Our society has progressively moved away from the established church according to a recent study, America’s Changing Religious Landscape.

The Christian share of the U.S. population is declining, while the number of U.S. adults who do not identify with any organized religion is growing, according to an extensive new survey by the PEW Research Center.  Moreover, these changes are taking place across the religious landscape, affecting all regions of the country and many demographic groups.  While the drop in Christian affiliation is particularly pronounced among young adults, it is occurring among Americans of all ages.[1]

What is it about today’s church which is so lacking that not only is it not attracting more members but it is driving them away?  As God’s true message is relevant to people across time, I believe it is because, in far too many cases, God’s people have left their first love and, with that, lost sight of the importance, and meaning, of …faith working through love.  (Galatians 5:6, The King James Version). Whatever your specific eschatological beliefs, Christians know that every day is one step closer to the closing of the church age.  Regardless of the proximity of Christ’s return, we also are aware of the frailty of life and that no one, in or outside of grace, is promised tomorrow.  If we are truly living by faith working through love, then this should be enough to compel us to reach out to those living without a relationship with their creator.  For all of these reasons, as well as the evidence of church decline, it is imperative that the church reexamine their spiritual life and determine that key, critical ingredient which is evidently lacking to sufficiently meet our contemporary challenges and our world’s eternal need.  Re-discovering true faith working through love is that key to these challenges as well as meeting this time’s need for giants of the faith to reap for God a great harvest.

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[1] PewResearchCenter (2015, May, 12).  America’s Changing Religious Landscape.  Retrieved from http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/

And Now These Three Remain

1 Corinthians 13 highlights faith, hope, and love above all of God’s spiritual gifts, with love being preeminent.  Paul, in Galatians, tells us that faith works through love.  Galatians further tells us, For we wait for the hope of righteousness by faith,  (Galatians 5:5, The King James Version).  We have, then, an intimate connection and order in these mighty three gifts; love, faith, hope.  Love is preeminent, without which ground it is impossible for faith to spring and hope to flower.  All of the other fruits of the spirit come about from this basic union, nourished in the soul of God’s love from which rises the substance and evidence of our life in Christ, and into which blooms the first fruit of hope as well as all of the other gifts of the spirit.

It is from the substance and evidence of these gifts that we, as the body of Christ, are conformed to his image and draw others into a relationship with him.  It is from our first revelation of this great hope where we found our first love; that God loves us just like we are, that he sent his son to die for our sins, that Christ arose, defeating sin and death, and that we likewise will be with him for all eternity.  Praise God!  Unfortunately, many have failed to abide in that first discovery of love, faith, and hope.  Affixing to that tender vine strings of this and that from the world thinking to aid the vine, they simply rather choke it off, as if the vine needed more from us than our simply abiding in it.  Although the root still lives, the branches have withered and dried, with no hope of fruit and, therefore, no power to draw others to it.

The symbolism of the soil of the word, the vine of Christ, and the fruits of the spirit are both a beautiful word picture of the unity of God and his body, the church, as well as an enlightening depiction of the intimate relationship between the three great gifts of love, faith, and hope which, if we fail to abide in, results in a fruitless church.  Before we move to our main topic of faith, let us first look at this relationship.

The Essential Nature of Love

Not to trivialize, but the childhood taunt to fellow kids who, perhaps before their peers, had found a sweetheart was the quip first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Johnny with a baby carriage.  Although a puerile jibe, perhaps it can serve to illustrate a finer point.  What is marriage but an outward manifestation of an inner commitment?  What are children but the fruit of that love and commitment (and grandchildren the hope of our older age)?  It is no accident, of course, that God centrally depicts our relationship to him as a marriage, or a covenant.  It all starts with love.

God’s word beautifully and simply gives us an example of the essential nature of love in John 3:16:  For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever should believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.  God, the creator of the universe, out of his great love for us, was obedient, even unto death, in demonstrating that love.  In John we are told, "For this is the