Author: Grant Thorpe.

For some time, I have been aware that Christians tend to live in two worlds. One of these is a religious world where the creed sounds right and faith seems viable. It may be a retreat but it does provide some security. The other world is the one that is seen, where an income must be earned, bills payed, people helped and problems solved. It is the world which we hope will be favourable to us, but in which, we know, we must finally die.

Against this tendency, it must be asserted that this world is the one in which our religion is based. It is the world God loved and to which he sent his Son. It is in this world that Jesus came to most clearly reveal the Father -so much so that even angels long to see what is happening here. It is in this world that God is working out his purposes and preparing his People. Everything about it is under his control.

The thing that many Christians have been unable to understand is how one can see God’s love in all the earth when the earth is so full of wrong. Where this question has not been answered. Christians have tended to resent the way things are and have reacted to life’s pressures in a range of ways, very similar to the ways unbelievers have reacted to them.

Yet it was in the midst of life’s adversity, unfairness. and seeming rampant disorder that the gospel was first given. Those who discover God’s good news are. able to see beyond life’s harshness to God’s love. They find they have a new dignity, and because they know God, they want to live by love in his world.

These studies try to show that the gospel of God is not a retreat from reality, but the only way in which our world can be understood, and certainly, the only power whereby it can be changed.

At the end of each study are suggestions for group, family, or personal study. Use all or part of these as desired, but be prepared also to deal with the natural questions which may arise spontaneously.

Download PDF