ABSTRACT

This project comes to you with a fresh angle on the subject of importance of faith in the body of Christ. It offers profound insights into its trials and triumphs, and puts the spotlight on God’s character and His word. Here is just one brief example of how scriptures illustrate the relationship between faith and feelings.

When danger looms large, fear is inevitable. When our body chemistry sets up a sense of in pending disaster, when we suffer heavy blows and our circumstances are oppressive, and dark. What then, does faith do? It breaks down every fear that comes our way. With God, fear will not stop us. We overcome it. “Why are you cast down, O my soul?…….(Psalm 45:5).

Blessings unfold with each chapter, the focus being firmly set on Jesus Christ, “The author and finisher of our faith” (Hebrews 12:2).

My desire is, to teach the never changing importance of faith in the body of Christ and also faith principles revealed in the Word of God. They have been proven in my own yours of following Jesus against the backdrop of decades of front-line evangelism grateful to our Lord Jesus.

Believers need to know that faith is important in the house of God. Without faith we can receive nothing from God. We must not wave in out of faith, that is the only way that we can see the miraculous wok of God in our lives. Faith can change any impossible situation to possibility.

CHAPTER ONE

FAITH FROM NEGATIVE TO POSITIVE

The Bible was written for people with no real faith. We all begin with a minus. If we have no faith, reading the Bible produces it, and if we have some faith we get more the same way. We don’t acquire faith first and bring it to scripture. Scripture encourages faith “faith comes by hearing the Word of God” (Romans 10:17).

Many who don’t believe don’t read the Bible. They are sick and leave the medicine with the bottle tightly corked. People without faith should be warned that if they open the Bible they are likely to finish up as believers.

The Bible brings us to the cross people do not start moving mountains until they have been to mount Calvary. They could not move even a molehill or a mole. Real faith doesn’t start in university. We’ll have less if we go there without any! If we have not been to where Christ save not even a Doctorate in Theology will do.

The starting point is fired at the “green hill for away outside the city wall”. From there, we tread on and on towards the mark of the high calling of God in Christ (Philippians 3:14). Walking in doubt is like going back to a Victorian age. We need a radar and faith provides it in this world of uncertainly.

“the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith as it is written, ‘the just shall live by faith’ (Romans 1:17). Believe God! It is life’s knowledge and experience across the area of faith as widely as I can, whether people are well along the road or just and share treasures with them I have collected over a life time.

The plus life, one morning Jesus walked along the shingled edge of Lake Galilee and beckoned too few local fishermen. He said, “follow me!” (Matthew 4:19). At the moment everything began for them. Until then “Everything” had only been fish and then it became people, action, and changing world history, with ever-increasing faith, ever-increasing effects.

Jesus did not call them, smiles and wear sackcloth. Jesus didn’t want to turn folk into stick in the – mud’ people. He wasn’t so conventional himself! The disciplines caught His bubbling spirit, which challenged the stuffy establishment. He showed them new things, especially faith and love, and them they conquered the world.

The primary truth about God is that He is the Deliverer, the emancipator, and the saviour. He is God only to the free. Faith is a venture that turns life into an adventure. Doubts get us nowhere. They are mooring ropes. Believing God means we cast off, like ships designed for riding the high seas and going somewhere. Faith inspires. Doubt paralyzes. Faith says “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” unbelief does nothing, faith is God is exciting.

We becomes what we were born to be only when we are “born again” by faith in Christ Jesus. Christ said, “If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36). The world’s greatest book on freedom is the Bible. The very idea of freedom came from the Bible not from Greece or Rome. Read it! Remember God made the first free nation ever seen on earth, Israel, and He wants to put a sense of liberty in our very soul. God opposes tyranny. The Gospel makes us the freeborn sons of God.

People have talked about those who “bury themselves in religion”. Well, in religion may be, but Christianity is Christ, and you can’t call Christ a religion! He is the resurrection and the life. Christ said, “If you hold to my teaching…. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:31-32). He is no deceiver millions have found themselves gloriously free through the Gospel. His words do not strike us with rules and commandments. His yoke is easy and His burden is light. The Sermon on the Mount describes what Christians are naturally, what they want to do, not what people should be like.

When Paul the Apostle was preaching in an upstairs room in Trocas “there was many lights” there (Acts 20:8). The Bible writers have a way of saying that kind of thing when conveying a spiritual truth. There were two kinds of lights there, the oil lamps and the room full of Christians who were the true “many light”. That is what believers are. “You were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord” (Ephesians 5:8). Believers are stars; unbelievers are black holes from which light never escapes. Faith makes us “children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation in which (we) shine like stars in the universe” (Philippians 2:15).