SteemChurch: Live the Gospel Today

Many of our contemporaries live without God or as if he did not exist. They have displaced him from their lives, causing unbelief, indifference, agnosticism or atheism to grow in the Western world in alarming ways.

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It is not only an individual phenomenon or that affects only the private sphere of people, but it is something much broader that conditions the general vision that is had about the world, values, the way of understanding life, behaviors , the social coexistence itself and even the culture of the whole society.

Of course this phenomenon also affects believers as we live in the midst of such a society, hence the need we have, especially pastors and Christian leaders, to once again consider the foundations of our faith in order to present our defense and give a reason of the same before the aggressions of this world hostile to Christ.

We will start by looking at four important characteristics of the current culture and how they affect the Christian faith, in order to determine what believers can do today and how we should present the Gospel in the midst of an unbelieving world.

I. Four characteristics of the current culture.

With the intention of being concise, we could summarize to four the most outstanding aspects of our society and contemporary culture that directly influence Christianity.
We live in a technical and scientific culture.

The scientific spirit permeates all our current reality as a result of the achievements of positive sciences during the last centuries. Undoubtedly, technological advances have changed our way of life and have also helped to create the conception that the human being has today of himself.

But science and its daughter technology have not only brought obvious benefits to humanity, but have also made certain risks appear. The danger that man gets drunk and fascinates of his conquests believing that "he is like God" and that, therefore, he no longer needs the true God.

Through this path you can fall into various errors. Namely, it is possible to deify science and come to the conclusion that faith is unnecessary. If the scientific method is capable of explaining everything, what is the use of faith? but also, it is possible to think that science and faith are antagonistic worlds condemned forever to mutual enmity; or, adopt a dualist position in which science is used for almost everything and faith only for what is incomprehensible or mysterious.
We belong to a consumer culture.

The longed for society of the well-being has brought of the hand, in the countries in which this is a reality, an inordinate spirit of consumption. The excess of material goods contributes to creating an accumulation of false needs. That which had always been considered superfluous, now becomes absolutely necessary.

The continuous desire to own makes the person feel frustrated if he believes that he has less than the others and this ends up causing lack of solidarity because there is a forgetting of the poorest. Such consumerist materialism dramatically leads to a lifestyle as if God did not exist.
A culture that yearns for freedom.

The Creator made us free and, therefore, it is normal for human beings to always want freedom. This is one of the fundamental rights of man. Being a person is equivalent to being free, but also knowing how to conquer one's freedom. Hence, this mixture of gift and effort is not always easy.

When freedom is added to material well-being, individualism can sometimes arise (egotistical isolation and carelessness for others); or, the "spontaneism" (the confusion of freedom with the realization of momentum).
Sometimes, freedom is understood as something absolute or without limits and everything that holds it back is condemned. Those who fall into this error, think that freedom is incompatible with the existence of God because it puts limits to the freedom of man.
We inhabit a pluralistic world.

In today's Western society different ways of understanding the world coexist. It is not that such a reality is bad in itself, but it can be a serious challenge for the Christian faith and the lives of believers.

As different religions and cultures coexist in a common space, faith tends to be privatized, reducing itself to the scope of the church or the family. Little by little it becomes irrelevant to society and is denied recognition or public projection.

With the excuse that the Christian faith is "another vision among so many", it is losing the acceptance it had in other times. And finally she gets accused of being a proselytist and of wanting to impose herself on others. Pluralism ends up relativizing everything distrusting any ideology that tries to offer a certain vision of the world.

Consequently, the human being suffers a void of meaning, a deep sense of helplessness, which seeks to counteract constructing its own explanation of reality, as well as its own ethical or moral code. This results in the denial of a universal ethic valid for all as proposed by the Gospel.

II. Challenges to Christianity

One of the main dramas of our time is the separation between the Gospel and contemporary culture. Such a rupture decisively affects the very center of the Christian message: the concept of God and the concept of being human.
The eclipse of God.

For the man and woman of today, God is no longer as easy to discover as in other times because science seems to have banished him to the ends of the universe. It is as if the mystery of God were less and less mysterious until it ended up becoming unnecessary.

However, such a darkening of God also produces the darkening of man. In effect, he loses his own convictions and stops knowing who he is. And if he does not know what it is, he also does not find reasons to respect others.

Unfortunately, organizing the world without God means organizing it against man. Humanism, by discarding God, becomes an inhuman humanism. And this is the great paradox of our time.

Return to the sacred.

In spite of everything, the same culture that sometimes denies God, in others it seems to experience a resurgence of the religious and Christian values. Thus, one should interpret, for example, the growing interest in human rights; sensitivity and respect for ethnic minorities; the solidarity of the rich countries towards their southern neighbors; the proliferation of initiatives based on social volunteering; etc.

However, it should be noted that certain contemporary forms of religiosity are ambiguous, such as those that propose a religion without God, or those based on esotericism, superstition and magic, as well as spiritualist fanaticism of all kinds. Such phenomena demand from Christians a careful discernment.
Ambivalence of the human heart.

In fact, modern culture reflects the eternal struggle between good and evil, that is, between the constructive and destructive forces that have always nested in the heart of man. We have arrived at the current situation as a consequence of this deep division that permeates the human soul.

On the contrary, when viewed with the eyes of faith, the world is not a chaos nor is it directed by a fatal destiny, but it was created and is being preserved by the love of the Creator. That is why Christians feel driven by that love, which is also that of Christ, to bring the divine light to those who do not know him or deny him.

III. How to live the evangelical faith in the midst of unbelief:

One of the questions that should most interest believers is this: What qualities should our faith have today?
Faith has to be the center of life.

Faith can not be reduced to the sphere of the private as some pretend. If God is the foundation of human life, the entire existence of man must be structured and developed around him. Jesus Christ must be for Christians the motivating principle that inspires all judgments, fundamental values, points of interest, lines of thought and models of life.

Faith in Christ is nourished above all by the loving, living and personal relationship with him, not only of the usual practices or of the external formulas with which it is usually adorned. In today's world, the Christian faith can only be based on sincere listening to God, in a personal relationship with him and in obedience to his word. There is no difficulty that can not be overcome if we let the Gospel resonate strongly in our lives.
Faith as a personal experience

To live the faith is to have personal experience of God and of Jesus Christ, his Son. That is, maintain an interpersonal relationship with them by nourishing their word and prayer. This translates into living as children of God, doing the will of the Father, communicating his word and loving human beings as brothers.

By acting like this, we become "salt of the earth" and "light of the world" (Mt 5: 13-16). To live faith as a personal experience is to undertake a spiritual journey that changes our lives and fills us with strength to understand ourselves, others, life and the world.
You have to celebrate faith in community.

It is not possible to live the Christian faith alone. Every Christian needs the church because it reaches personal faith thanks to the testimony of others. It is possible to say "I believe", thanks to the "we believe" of the community.
In the midst of our current individualist culture, the Christian faith today needs to express more than ever its community dimension. Our personal faith requires the faith of other Christians to express themselves in common and to create fraternal bonds that surpass the rest of human relationships.

And so, united, we have to announce the Gospel to all the world without complexes of superiority, since we are servants of Jesus Christ, but neither without any inferiority complex, as if we had to ask permission to announce it.
Faith has to be lived in the world.

Nor is it possible to believe in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ if we keep our backs to the world or try to flee from it. The Master confessed that "God so loved the world" that he was able to deliver his only Son. Therefore, the joys and sorrows of the human beings of our time, especially those who suffer the most, the weak and the poor, should also be our own.

There is nothing truly human that can not find an answer in the heart of Christ because he came to plant his tent among us to rescue us from evil. If we want to change the world we have to do it from within, not from the theory away from reality.

The current crisis of our civilization only has a solution in the force of love that Jesus Christ proclaims.

The extension of the kingdom of God is the definitive alternative to this crisis. And this is our fundamental mission: to announce to the man of today the civilization of agape love.