Chapter 6

DIFFICULTIES CONCERNING FAITH

The next step after consecration, in the soul's progress out of the wildernessof Christian experience, into the land that floweth with milk and honey, isthat of faith. And here, as in the first step, the enemy is very skilful inmaking difficulties and interposing obstacles.

     The child of God, having had his eyes openedto see the fulness there is in Jesus for him, and having been made to long toappropriate that fulness to himself, is met with the assertion on the part ofevery teacher to whom he applies, that this fulness is only to be received byfaith. But the subject of faith is involved in such a hopeless mystery in hismind, that this assertion, instead of throwing light upon the way of entrance,only seems to make it more difficult and involved than ever.

     "Of course it is to be by faith," he says, "for Iknow that everything in the Christian life is by faith. But then, that is justwhat makes it so hard, for I have no faith, and I do not even know what it is,nor how to get it." And, baffled at the very outset by this insuperabledifficulty, he is plunged into darkness, and almost despair.

     This trouble all arises from the fact that thesubject of faith is very generally misunderstood; for in reality faith is theplainest and most simple thing in the world, and the most easy ofattainment.

     Your idea of faith, I suppose, has been somethinglike this. You have looked upon it as in some way a sort of thing, either areligious exercise of soul, or an inward gracious disposition of heart;something tangible, in fact, which, when you have got, you can look at andrejoice over, and use as a passport to God's favor, or a coin with which topurchase His gifts. And you have been praying for faith, expecting all thewhile to get something like this, and never having received any such thing, youare insisting upon it that you have no faith. Now faith, in fact, is not in theleast this sort of thing. It is nothing at all tangible. It is simply believingGod, and, like sight, it is nothing apart from its object. You might as wellshut your eyes and look inside to see whether you have sight, as to look insideto discover whether you have faith. You see something, and thus know that youhave sight; you believe something, and thus know that you have faith. For, assight is only seeing, so faith is only believing. And as the only necessarything about seeing is, that you see the thing as it is, so the only necessarything about believing is, at you believe the thing as it is. The virtue doesnot lie in your believing, but in the thing you believe. If you believe thetruth you are saved; if you believe a lie you are lost. The believing in bothcases is the same; the things believed in are exactly opposite, and it is thiswhich makes the mighty difference. Your salvation comes, not because your faithsaves you, but because it links you on to the Saviour who saves; and yourbelieving is really nothing but the link.

     I do beg of you to recognize, then, the extremesimplicity of faith; that it is nothing more nor less than just believing Godwhen He says He either has done something for us, or will do it; and thentrusting Him to do it. It is so simple that it is hard to explain. If any oneasks me what it means to trust another to do a piece of work for me, I can onlyanswer that it means letting that other one do it, and feeling it perfectlyunnecessary for me to do it myself. Every one of us has trusted very importantpieces of work to others in this way, and has felt perfect rest in thustrusting, because of the confidence we have had in those who have undertaken todo it. How constantly do mothers trust their most precious infants to the careof nurses, and feel no shadow of anxiety? How continually we are all of ustrusting our health and our lives, without a thought of fear, to cooks andcoachmen, engine drivers, railway conductors, and all sorts of paid servants,who have us completely at their mercy, and could plunge us into misery or deathin a moment, if they chose to do so, or even if they failed in the necessarycarefulness? All this we do, and make no fuss about it. Upon the slightestacquaintance, often, we thus put our trust in people, requiring only thegeneral knowledge of human nature, and the common rules of human intercourse;and we never feel as if we were doing anything in the least remarkable.

     You have done all this yourself, dear reader, andare doing it continually. You would not be able to live in this world and gothrough the customary routine of life a single day, if you could not trust yourfellow-men. And it never enters into your head to say you cannot.

     But yet you do not hesitate to say, continually,that you cannot trust your God!

     I wish you would just now try to imagine yourselfacting in your human relations as you do in your spiritual relations. Supposeyou should begin tomorrow with the notion in your head that you could not trustanybody, because you had no faith. When you sat down to breakfast you wouldsay, "I cannot eat anything on this table, for I have no faith, and I cannotbelieve the cook has not put poison in the coffee, or that the butcher has notsent home diseased meat." So you would go starving away. Then when you went outto your daily avocations, you would say, "I cannot ride in the railway train,for I have no faith, and therefore I cannot trust the engineer, nor theconductor, nor the builders of the carriages, nor the managers of the road." Soyou would be compelled to walk everywhere, and grow unutterably weary in theeffort, besides being actually unable to reach many of the places you couldhave reached in the train. Then, when your friends met you with any statements,or your business agent with any accounts, you would say, "I am very sorry thatI cannot believe you, but I have no faith, and never can believe anybody." Ifyou opened a newspaper you would be forced to lay it down again, saying, "Ireally cannot believe a word this paper says, for I have no faith; I do notbelieve there is any such person as the queen, for I never saw her; nor anysuch country as Ireland, for I was never there. And I have no faith, so ofcourse I cannot believe anything that I have not actually felt and touchedmyself. It is a great trial, but I cannot help it, for I have no faith."

     Just picture such a day as this, and see howdisastrous it would be to yourself, and what utter folly it would appear to anyone who should watch you through the whole of it. Realize how your friendswould feel insulted, and how your servants would refuse to serve you anotherday. And then ask yourself the question, if this want of faith in yourfellow-men would be so dreadful, and such utter folly, what must it be when youtell God that you have no power to trust Him nor to believe His word; that "itis a great trial, but you cannot help it, for you have no faith"?

     Is it possible that you can trust your fellow-menand cannot trust your God? That you can receive the "witness of men," andcannot receive the "witness of God"? That you can believe man's records, andcannot believe God's record? That you can commit your dearest earthly intereststo your weak, failing fellow-creatures without a fear, and are afraid to commityour spiritual interests to the blessed Saviour who shed His blood for the verypurpose of saving you, and who is declared to be "able to save you to theuttermost"?

     Surely, surely, dear believer, you, whose veryname of believer implies that you can believe, will never again dare to excuseyourself on the plea of having no faith. For when you say this, you mean ofcourse that you have no faith in God, since you are not asked to have faith inyourself, and you would be in a very wrong condition of soul if you had. Let mebeg of you then, when you think or say these things, always to complete thesentence and say, "I have no faith in God, I cannot believe God"; and this I amsure will soon become so dreadful to you, that you will not dare to continueit.

     But you say, I cannot believe without the HolySpirit. Very well; will you conclude that your want of faith is because of thefailure of the blessed Spirit to do His work? For if it is, then surely you arenot to blame, and need feel no condemnation; and all exhortations to you tobelieve are useless.

     But, no! Do you not see that, in taking up thisposition, that you have no faith and cannot believe, you are not only "makingGod a liar," but you are also manifesting an utter want of confidence in theHoly Spirit? For He is always ready to help our infirmities. We never have towait for Him, He is always waiting for us. And I for my part have such absoluteconfidence in the blessed Holy Ghost, and in His being always ready to do hiswork, that I dare to say to every one of you, that you can believe now, at thisvery moment, and that if you do not, it is not the Spirit's fault, but yourown.

     Put your will then over on to the believing side.Say, "Lord I will believe, I do believe," and continue to say it. Insist uponbelieving, in the face of every suggestion of doubt with which you may betempted. Out of your very unbelief, throw yourself headlong on to the word andpromises of God, and dare to abandon yourself to the keeping and saving powerof the Lord Jesus. If you have ever trusted a precious interest in the hands ofany earthly friend, I conjure you, trust yourself now and all your spiritualinterests in the hands of your Heavenly Friend, and never, never, NEVER allowyourself to doubt again.

     And remember, there are two things which are moreutterly incompatible than even oil and water, and these two are trust andworry. Would you call it trust, if you should give something into the hands ofa friend to attend to for you, and then should spend your nights and days inanxious thought and worry as to whether it would be rightly and successfullydone? And can you call it trust, when you have given the saving and keeping ofyour soul into the hands of the Lord, if day after day and night after nightyou are spending hours of anxious thought and questionings about the matter?When a believer really trusts anything, he ceases to worry about that thingwhich he has trusted. And when he worries, it is a plain proof that he does nottrust. Tested by this rule how little real trust there is in the Church ofChrist! No wonder our Lord asked the pathetic question, "When the Son of Mancometh shall he find faith on the earth?" He will find plenty of activity, agreat deal of earnestness, and doubtless many consecrated hearts; but shall hefind faith, the one thing He values more than all the rest? It is a solemnquestion, and I would that every Christian heart would ponder it well. But maythe time past of our lives suffice us to have shared in the unbelief of theworld; and let us every one, who know our blessed Lord and His unspeakabletrustworthiness, set to our seal that He is true, by our generous abandonmentof trust in Him.

     I remember, very early in my Christian life,having every tender and loyal impulse within me stirred to its depths by anappeal I met with in a volume of old sermons to all who loved the Lord Jesus,that they should show to others how worthy He was of being trusted, by thesteadfastness of their own faith in Him. And I remember my soul cried out withan eager longing that I might be called to walk in paths so dark, that an utterabandonment of trust might be my blessed and glorious privilege.

     "Ye have not passed this way heretofore," it maybe; but today it is your happy privilege to prove, as never before, your loyalconfidence in the Lord by starting out with Him on a life and walk of faith,lived moment by moment in absolute and childlike trust in Him.

     You have trusted Him in a few things, and He hasnot failed you. Trust Him now for everything, and see if He does not do for youexceeding abundantly above all that you could ever have asked or thought; notaccording to your power or capacity, but according to His own mighty power,that will work in you all the good pleasure of His most blessed will.

     You find no difficulty in trusting the Lord withthe management of the universe and all the outward creation, and can your casebe any more complex or difficult than these, that you need to be anxious ortroubled about his management of it. Away with such unworthy doubtings! Takeyour stand on the power and trustworthiness of your God, and see how quicklyall difficulties will vanish before a steadfast determination to believe. Trustin the dark, trust in the light, trust at night, and trust in the morning, andyou will find that the faith, which may begin by a mighty effort, will endsooner or later by becoming the easy and natural habit of the soul.

     All things are possible to God, and "all thingsare possible to him that believeth." Faith has, in times past, "subduedkingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths oflions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, waxedvaliant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens"; and faith can doit again. For our Lord Himself says unto us, "If ye have faith as a grain ofmustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place,and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you."

     If you are a child of God at all, you must haveat least as much faith as a grain of mustard seed, and therefore you dare notsay again that you cannot trust because you have no faith. Say rather, "I cantrust my Lord, and I will trust Him, and not all the powers of earth or hellshall be able to make me doubt my wonderful, glorious, faithful Redeemer!"

     In that greatest event of this century, theemancipation of our slaves, there is a wonderful illustration of the way offaith. The slaves received their freedom by faith, just as we must receiveours. The good news was carried to them that the government had proclaimedtheir freedom. As a matter of fact they were free the moment the Proclamationwas issued, but as a matter of experience they did not come into actualpossession of their freedom until they had heard the good news and had believedit. The fact had to come first, but the believing was necessary before the factbecame available, and the feeling would follow last of all. This is the divineorder always, and the order of common-sense as well. I. The fact. II. Thefaith. III. The feeling. But man reverses this order and says, I. The feeling.II. The faith. III. The fact.

     Had the slaves followed man's order in regard totheir emancipation, and refused to believe in it until they had first felt it,they might have remained in slavery a long while. I have heard of one instancewhere this was the case. In a little out-of-the-way Southern town a Northernlady found, about two or three years after the war was over, some slaves whohad not yet taken possession of their freedom. An assertion of hers, that theNorth had set them free, aroused the attention of an old colored auntie, whointerrupted her with the eager question, --

     "O missus, is we free?"

     "Of course you are," replied the lady.

     "O missus, is you sure?" urged the woman, withintensest eagerness.

     "Certainly, I am sure," answered the lady. "Why,is it possible you did not know it?"

     "Well," said the woman, "we heered tell as how wewas free, and we asked master, and he `lowed we wasn't, and so we was afraid togo. And then we heered tell again, and we went to the cunnel, and he `lowedwe'd better stay with ole massa. And so we's just been off and on. Sometimeswe'd hope we was free, and then again we'd think we wasn't. But now, missus, ifyou is sure we is free, won't you tell me all about it?"

     Seeing that this was a case of real need, thelady took the pains to explain the whole thing to the poor woman; all about thewar, and the Northern army, and Abraham Lincoln, and his Proclamation ofEmancipation, and the present freedom.

     The poor slave listened with the most intenseeagerness. She heard the good news. She believed it. And when the story wasended, she walked out of the room with an air of the utmost independence,saying as she went, -- "I's free! I's ain't agoing to stay with ol massa anylonger!"

     She had at last received her freedom, and she hadreceived it by faith. The government had declared her to be free long before,but this had not availed her, because she had never yet believed in thisdeclaration. The good news had not profited her, not being "mixed with faith"in the one who heard it. But now she believed, and believing, she dared toreckon herself to be free. And this, not because of any change in herself orher surroundings, not because of any feelings of emotions of her own heart, butbecause she had confidence in the word of another, who had come to herproclaiming the good news of her freedom.

     Need I make the application? In a hundreddifferent messages God has declared to us our freedom, and over and over Heurges us to reckon ourselves free. Let your faith then lay hold of Hisproclamation, and assert it to be true. Declare to yourself, to your friends,and in the secret of your soul to God, that you are free. Refuse to listen fora moment to the lying assertions of your old master, that you are still hisslave. Let nothing discourage you, no inward feelings nor outward signs. Holdon to your reckoning in the face of all opposition, and I can promise you, onthe authority of our Lord, that according to your faith it shall be untoyou.

     Of all the worships we can bring our God, none isso sweet to Him as this utter self-abandoning trust, and none brings Him somuch glory. Therefore in every dark hour remember that "though now for aseason, if need be, ye are in heaviness through manifold temptations," it is inorder that "the trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold thatperisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise, and honor,and glory, at the appearing of Jesus Christ."

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