A Call to Faith Lesson I, Part I, Words Empty of Faith?
Lesson l Part I, Words Empty of Faith?
Introduction: “A Call to Faith” is one of the books recommended by General Assembly.
The world is tired of words. We only have to look about us to see that the underpriveledged of the world are taking action. Words have finally played out. The people of our world are tired of words too. The rest of the people look askance at Christians when they see a group of people set aside only by their creeds, and not by their lives.
Zwingli, who was the Martin Luther of Switzerland, said that “A Christian man’s task is not to talk grandly of doctrines, but always to be doing great and hard things for God”.
The church, too is tired of words. Christian people are tired of their own words when they are not expressions of their real life. When church becomes a succession of meetings with grand ideas to have bigger meetings, when men and women address one another with pious phrases and half truths about God, Christian people begin to ask “ls there nothing more to the Christian faith than this multiplicity of words?”
Many people feel a wistfulness and a yearning when they remember the martyrs of the church who found religion a thing to die for. They wonder about the enthusiasm of the early Christians, because their religion is too small a part of their lives to make a serious sacrifice for it.
A tragedy of the church and the individual is that they are guilty of using significant words emptily. The result is that people do not understand the meaning of great words, and the continued loose usage makes the Christian immune to the real meaning.
One of the main reasons for the confusion and apathy of our day is the indifference and ignorance of most of the members of the church to the theology of the church.
We feel a glow of warmth when we realize that our church is made up of members from almost every denomination, because we feel that at last, all of us are brothers under the skin.
But it is tragic to realize that most of these people joined our Church because they knew or cared so little for the theology of the church that it made little difference which one they belonged to.
(Lesson I continued next week)
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