LIVING IN FAITH, HOPE AND LOVE

Faith, hope and love are a summary of the way a Christian is to live. Letters from the apostles to churches usually mention these three things in their greetings.

Faith, hope and love are not generated by persons but by the gospel. We are commanded to believe and to hope and to love, but they are also given to us by God. This is not surprising or confusing if we understand that we are creatures of God and that the proper context for our willing and doing is that God is being God to us. A human being only functions truly in God.

BELIEVE IN GOD!

God calls us to believe in him and in his Son and in the promises he has made. This means believing that he exists and that he will reward those who seek him. If we will not believe, we will not be established, but will rather perish in our sins.

We should believe in Christ to be justified or forgiven. We should trust God our Father for all things and not be anxious.

But faith is a gift of God. 'The grace of our Lord filled me with faith and with the love that is in Christ Jesus'. Jesus Christ is the author and perfecter of our faith.

'In your faith you are more conscious and sure of Him than you are of your faith. For your faith, you well know, may fail Him, but you know still better that He will not fail your faith. And you are more conscious and sure of Him, as the source and cause of your experience, than you are of the experience itself, which you forget to think of' (Forsyth, Positive Preaching, p. 46).

The future is unseen, but what we expect to happen has great power over what we do now. The 'god' of science and technology has begun to falter because it is now apparent that it cannot produce a better world. This is not because science is deficient but because God has shown the limits of something in which we had hoped. The same is true for all false hopes.

God calls us to hope in him-for the renewal and unity of all things and our own participation in that through his Son. In particular, Christ has promised that he will return to raise the dead, gather his own and establish all God's purpose.

This hope is not dependent on our capacity to imagine things. It is confidence in Christ who has loved us, and in the God who raised him from the dead. If this has demonstrated the quality of God's love and power, shall he not freely gives us all things necessary to life and godliness?

From the beginning, the command of God has been to love. God is love, and we are creatures made in his image; so, to love is to be human-to be alive.

But love is not of us; it is of God. If we live in God, we do love. That is, we live in the actions whereby the living God has brought us to life-the death and Resurrection of his Son and the pouring out of the Spirit.

Christ described this to us before his death and Resurrection. He knew what love was because he was loved by his Father. He has made this Father known to us so that we, with him, may know the love of the Father. It is this love, revealed in Christ, and the unity of being together in the Father and Son, that proclaims to the world that the Father has truly sent his Son.