The Grace of Faith

“Now abideth faith.” — i COR. xiii. 13.

TJAST thou faith? To this, an apostle’s question, all men could, in a sense, return an answer in the affirmative; for it is not more true that no man liveth and sinneth not, than that no man liveth and believeth not; or devil either, for “the devils also believe and tremble.” Suppose a man without faith in any one, without faith in the honesty of his servants, faith in the integrity of his friends, faith in the affections of his children, faith in the fidelity of his wife, death would be to be preferred to a life like his. Better that our eyes were closed in death than that they should see every one with a mask on their face and a dagger beneath their cloak; with such a jaundiced vision, we should be “of all men the most miserable.” On looking into the matter, you will find that faith, instead of belonging only to the elect of God, holy and chosen, is common to all, even the worst of men. The backbone, indeed, of the social, and the foundation of the commercial fabric, remove faith between man and man, and society and commerce fall to pieces. There is not a happy home on earth but stands on faith; our heads are pillowed on it; we sleep at night in its arms with greater security for the safety of our lives, peace, and property, than bolts and bars can give.

I. In illustration of the universality of faith, ob serve —

i. Faith, which is the source of so much human happiness, is the mainspring of human activity. It moves more than half the machinery of life. What leads the husbandman, for example, to yoke his horses when, no bud bursting to clothe the naked trees, no bird singing in hedgerows or frosty skies, nature seems dead? With faith in the regularity of her laws, in the ordinance of her God, he believes that she is not dead but sleepeth; and so he ploughs and sows in the certain expectation that he shall reap, and that these bare fields shall be green in summer with waving corn, and be merry in autumn with sun-browned reapers. The farmer is a man of faith. So is the seaman. No braver man than he who goes down to see God’s wonders in the deep. Venturing his frail bark on a sea ploughed by many keels, but wearing on its bosom the furrows of none, with neither path to follow nor star to guide, the master knows no fear. When the last blue hill has dipped beneath the wave, and he is alone on a shoreless sea, he is calm and confident — his faith in the compass-needle, which, however his ship may turn, or roll, or plunge, ever points true to the north. An example his to be followed by the Christian with his Bible, on that faith venturing his all, life, crew, and cargo, he steers his way boldly through darkest nights and stormiest oceans, with nothing but a thin plank between him and the grave. And though metaphysicians and divines have involved this matter of faith in mystery, be assured that there is nothing more needed for your salvation or mine than that God would inspire us with a belief in the declarations of his word as real, heartfelt, and practical, as that which we put in the laws of providence — in the due return of day and night, summer and winter, seed-time and harvest.

2. The followers of the world have faith. For their salvation it only needs to be rightly and divinely directed. Where will you find it stronger than in those who, in spite not only of others’ sad experience, but also of their own, seek true, lasting happiness in earthly pleasures. One gourd has perished after another; the ground beneath their feet is strewed ankle deep with their withered leaves; yet see how they train up another gourd in hope of better fortune. These men might have learned, one would think, that the happiness which they expect from the possession of any earthly object is a delusion. The phantom has ever eluded their grasp; yet, as it dances on before them, they persevere; nor cease the vain pursuit, till they stumble into the grave. There is a faith in the world which no succession of disappointments seems able to destroy, or even to disturb. It is very sad to see it! We have not to go to a heathen hell to see the Tantalus, who, though he has always found that so soon as the cup touches his thirsty lips, the water vanishes, yet ever raises it anew; or the Sisyphus, who, though the stone with sore labour has no sooner been rolled to the brow of the mountain than it has always slipped from his hands and bounded back to the bottom, yet begins again, and again, and again, the wretched task. This world is the hell where such tasks are done, such disappointments are borne; and borne often with a patience and an endurance of faith in the worldling which almost tempts us to adopt the language of our Lord, and say, We have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel! If surpassed at all, their faith in the world is only exceeded by that which Job expressed in God, when, from the ashes where he sat over the graves of his children, the patriarch lifted his eyes to heaven, to cry, Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him!

3. Unbelievers have faith, notwithstanding that that appears a contradiction in terms.

They present a still more remarkable and melancholy illustration than the last, of the fact that faith, though in one and the most important sense a special gift of God, is natural to the human heart. Many people, for instance, who do not believe in the divinity of the Bible, will be found giving credit to the ravings and wretched nonsense of spiritualism, as it is called. The credulity of sceptics is quite remarkable j but this is still more remarkable, that thousands who are not sceptics, though they withhold their faith from the truths of God’s word, put it in these old threadbare lies of the devil — “Thou shalt not surely die;” you can sin to-day and repent to-morrow; you may turn religious at a more convenient season; it will be time enough to seek another world when this has lost its enjoyments, and “the years draw nigh when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them;” the evening of life, like the last quiet hours of day, is best adapted for prayer and meditation; farewell to all enjoyments so soon as you allow your attention to be occupied with such gloomy subjects as death, the grave, judgment, and eternity; banish your idle fears; God, unlike man dressed in a little brief authority, is much too generous to be an exacting judge, and too merciful to be a severe one; at any rate, should the worst come to the worst, you can reasonably calculate on a season for repentance; and you will find it much easier to attend to these things when your head is gray, and your passions are cooled, and the night’s falling shadows dispose you to solemn thoughts, than it is now. By such lies as these, the cunning fiend leads thousands on, step by step, to everlasting ruin. And thus, strange as it may sound, it is true that it is as much by faith — of a kind — that some go to hell, as it is by faith that God’s people go to heaven.

Therefore, as a man approaching a precipice does not need to get feet, but to get the feet he has turned round, so that every step becomes one from danger to safety, it is not so much faith we need, as that the faith we have be set on new and right objects, and turned in a new and right direction. What we need in order to be saved is the faith that, looking to Jesus, becomes saving faith — and saving because it embraces the Saviour which has God for its author, Christ for its object, these other graces for its fruits, and for its reward a kingdom and a crown in heaven. This is the faith of which Paul says, Now abideth faith, hope, charity.

II. Let us attend to the importance of sound scriptural views of this matter.

This was never more necessary than now. Liberty of thought, of private judgment, on which our Protestantism stands, is in danger; and in danger from the conduct of rash and unwise men. Such a calamity threatens it as befell the cause of civil liberty, when the revolutionists of France, confounding licence with liberty, destroyed everything and built up nothing; and, leaving their country without a government, and by their worship of the goddess of Reason, I may add, without a God, made the very name of liberty to stink in the nostrils of the world. We are invited now-adays, to lift those anchors of the faith by which our fathers rode out many a storm; yet it were well and wise, before doing so, to see into what position we are likely to drive. So far as concerns either the religious or civil condition of those communities from which these novelties in faith and practice have been imported, I see no reason to envy them; to copy them; or to turn a deaf ear to the prophet’s warning, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls.

Men seek to soothe our very natural alarm by drawing a distinction between doctrines and duties, saying that if our life and practice are good, it is a small matter what we believe. True, and so if the stream is pure, it is a small matter that the fountain is polluted; if the fruit is good, that the tree is bad; if the vessel is rightly steered, that both compass and chart are wrong. But who ever heard of such things 1 Who has gathered grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles’? How can a man’s conduct be right if his creed be wrong — wrong, not in its accidents, but in its essence and substance ] The Spartans thought theft no crime if secretly committed; and so, that being their belief, they stole. David Hume thought the same of adultery; and so, that being his belief, what hindered him, or now hinders his followers, from such a crime? The Hindu widow thinks it meritorious to give herself to the flames which consume the body of her husband; and so, that being her belief, she mounts the pile and commits suicide. Simon Magus thought that the Holy Ghost might be bought and sold; and so, that being his belief, by the proffer of money he offered such an insult to God, that Peter indignantly exclaimed, Thy money perish with thee! Saul of Tarsus thought it was for God’s glory that he should persecute the Christians; and so, that being his belief, he steeled a naturally tender heart to the claims of pity, and imbrued his hands in the blood of martyrs. It is no answer to this to tell us of men, of whom, alas! there are too many, who set much value on an orthodox creed, and little on a holy, or even moral life; who talk much of faith, but are not careful to maintain good works. What does their case prove against the importance of sound views on such high subjects as faith, salvation by grace, and redemption through the blood of Christ] It only shews that men may sin against light and conscience — no new thing, nor peculiar to Christian ages; since an old heathen has said, “I see the better, and approve; yet follow the worse.” Such importance did Martin Luther, no mean authority, attach to the doctrine of justification by faith in the blood of Christ, that he called it the article of a stand ing or falling Church. I subscribe to the sentiment: ceremonies, forms, and even some doctrines, are but the ornaments of the building or parts of its superstructure; but this, lying at the foundation, touches the security of all. Embodied in her creed and faithfully preached from her pulpits, this doctrine should protect any Church when assailed by the rude hand of violence. It consecrates, if I may say so, not its errors, but its life. Were we armed with power to remove such a Church, and bent on supplying its place with what might appear to be a better system, it says, as David said to Abishai, on turning aside his spear from Saul, “Destroy him not: for who can stretch forth his hand against the Lord’s anointed, and be guiltless?” Whether the candidate for baptism should be immersed or sprinkled; whether that ordinance should be administered to infants or only to adults; whether, in commemorating the death of Jesus, we should sit or kneel; whether the Church should be ruled by deacons, presbyters, or bishops; whether it should be maintained at the expense of the State, or depend only on voluntary liberality; are questions on which no man will spend dying thoughts or waste dying hours. No. The nearer we approach to another world the less these questions will appear, but the greater this — Am I, being justified by faith, at peace with God through my Lord Jesus Christ? Other foundation than this can no man lay. Destroy it not! Destroy it; remove it, or rather me from my confidence in it, in Jesus Christ and him crucified as the only

refuge of a sinner, and gone is my peace, my hopes in death, and my heaven in eternity, — I have suffered greater loss, I am a poorer man than he who pursued the plunderers of his shrine, crying, Ye have taken away my gods, and what have I more?

III. Salvation through faith, and not through works, is a feature peculiar to the gospel.

An atheist is a moral monster. Man has fallen, but not so low as to be satisfied with the atheist’s cold, and dark, and dreary creed. Recoiling from that, he has erred on the side of a multiplicity of gods. The soul craves for a god as the body craves for food. It clings to the thought as a creeper to the pole it climbs; and, rather than his spirit should want such a support, man will catch at the wildest and most childish notion of beings above himself — just as ivy, when it has not a rock, will embrace a rotten tree, or as a drowning wretch, for lack of something better, clutches at a straw. So in the darkness amid which men were left to grope, may be found I know not how many false systems of religion. Some worship the serpent, others the crocodile; here the ox is adored, there the elephant. These Parsees, prostrating themselves before the rising sun, worship fire; while those Hindoos, believing its waters to possess a virtue capable of washing away sin, account the Ganges sacred, and regard it as divine. In yonder desert which he treads with naked foot the savage starts back, with a look and a cry of horror; he has trodden, not on a deadly serpent, but on a poor insect, which, wounded, dying, and all unconscious of the honours paid to it, he kneels to worship. Nor do the modes of heathen worship differ less than its objects. The blood of calves reeks on this altar; the blood of man on that. At the shrine of one divinity they present the golden fruits of earth, and at another the gory spoils of battle. Here, her abode beneath sunny skies, a benevolent deity is worshipped by boys and girls crowned with garlands of beautiful flowers, and dancing to the sounds of music. Another dwells in the recesses of the gloomy forest; his temple a circle of rude and roofless stones, and the offering for his worship a young and lovely maiden, who fills the woods with unavailing shrieks as cruel priests drag her to the altar which she is to dye with blood.

Yet, different as these religions are, they have one feature in common. In every case the worshipper expected, by his works, offerings, or sufferings, to be his own Saviour. Ask yon Hindoo, for instance, who has lain for long years on a bed of iron spikes, or held up his arm till it has become rigid and withered like the blasted branch of a living tree, or travels painfully on his knees to the distant shrine of a favourite god, why this pain, these horrid, self-inflicted tortures? They have one answer. Through these, reproaching our indolence, and apathy, and self-indulgence, and ready with the men of Tyre and Sidon to rise up to condemn many of us in the day of judgment, they expect to purchase pardon and to open the gates of Paradise. Since men never yet corrupted, as you see in Popery, the true religion, nor, as you see in Pagan - ism, invented a false one, but the great, prominent doctrine of their creed was salvation through works, the gospel in proclaiming salvation, not through merit, or by works, but by faith, stands out in a character all its own. It is thus as much distinguished from common creeds as was its author, a virgin’s child, from common men; and we may apply to his gospel the very words spoken of himself — whether he spoke peace to a troubled bosom or to a stormy sea, bade the water turn into wine, or the dead corpse into life, it could be said of Jesus, Never man spake like this man. What other religion ever spake such words, offered salvation to the lost on such terms as these — sent forth a cry like that which is echoing from pole to pole and ringing round the world, Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price: Be lieve on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved: Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest: Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Ghost. Blessed sayings! faithful as blessed, they are worthy of all acceptation!

IV. Salvation through faith dislodges and sweeps away all confidence in our own works. The gospel, as I could most clearly shew, while resting all on faith, recognises the importance of good works; insists on the performance of them; and regards them, indeed, as the only trustworthy evidence of conversion — “the tree is known by his fruit.” Still it does not recognise, but sweeps them away as grounds of a sinner’s justification in the sight of God and acquittal at the bar of judgment I know no more remarkable illustration of this than is found in the history of that eminent Reformer to whom I have already referred. One day, while he was reading the Bible, Luther’s eye caught these words — The just shall live by faith; and out of that sentence, as from a little seed, the Reformation sprang. It fell into his mind as an acorn drops into the soil beneath which it bursts its shell, and rising a tender shoot, grows up into an oak that flourishes in the sunshine of a thousand summers, and defies the storms of a thousand winters. By God’s blessing on these few words, Luther broke loose from the trammels of Popery, a freeman whom the truth makes free. With these, as with a wedge, Heaven lending him strength and courage to drive it home, he split up and shivered into fragments the strong and hoary system of Romish superstition. “The just shall live by faith!” Shall he? Then if eternal life is by faith and not by works, man is not saved by penance — and he swept that away; nor by the merits of saints — and he swept those away; nor by indulgences, nor by fasts and vigils, the voluntary poverty and the sackcloth, the pilgrimages and the prayers of the Church of Rome — and he swept all away. Thus working, as they say, with a will, with stout heart and strong arm, Martin Luther cleared away the rubbish which had been gathering for long ages above the true foundation of a sinner’s acceptance with a righteous God; and on, and deeper on, he wrought, till he reached and laid bare the rock. That Rock was Christ; and there a jubilant world read these words, written by the finger of God, in letters large and legible — Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ.

V. The practical conclusion is, that while we are to abound in the work of the Lord, and be careful to maintain good works, we are to be no less careful not to trust in them. The two are quite compatible — incompatible as they seemed to one who, speaking of a distinguished saint, said, I do not understand him; he speaks of his good works as filthy rags, yet no man takes such care to cover himself with such rags. How compatible they are, appeared also in that chamber where, while the last hours of faith and piety were .offering the grandest spectacle beneath the sun, a bystander reminded the dying Christian of the good that he had done, of his holy, useful, and illustrious life. He bade him cease — saying, I take my good works and my bad works, and, casting them into one heap, turn from both to Christ. Faith in an unseen Saviour is, I admit, not easy. It is our nature to walk by sight rather than by faith; and the gift of God, faith, is acquired “not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.”

A boy once threw himself down from the upper window of a house on fire into his father’s arms. He did not see him; from the ledge where, hesitating to leap, he stood till it burned beneath his feet, he saw only the smoke rolling between them, pierced with tongues of flame. But up through that suffocating, sulphurous cloud, high above the roar of the rising flames, he heard and recognised his father’s voice — crying, in urgent, imploring tone, Leap for your life! I am below to receive you into my arms. And when, confident in his father’s word, and love, and power, he sprang from the height, right into the lurid darkness, it was a brave leap — a grand act of faith. Still, he had the evidence of sound, he heard his father’s voice. And yon old man had the evidence of sight, when, taking the babe from Mary’s arms into his own, he bowed his head, and raising it to heaven, exclaimed, Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: for mine eyes have seen thy salvation. Simeon saw the tree in the tender shoot; the day in the opening dawn; in the little cloud no bigger than a man’s hand the whole heavens overspread by thickest vapours, and pouring down such rain on the thirsty ground that streams burst foaming from the hills, and deserts were pools of water. Not so our eyes and ears! We never saw our Saviour’s face: we never heard our Father’s voice.

Faith here achieves what in other things would be impossibilities, and what in earthly affairs wrould be regarded as the height of rashness. In Jesus Christ, whom having not seen we love, we believe in one we never saw; and in our souls we commit the keeping of our most precious treasure to one who dwells in a remote and unknown land — a country from which no traveller has ever returned to assure us that his trust was not, and that ours will not, be misplaced.

Yet blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed. The seen are shadows; the substance is found in the unseen. These are the most real objects — God, whom no man ever saw and lived; the soul, which does not grow infirm with time and defies the sharpest darts of death; not this world of matter, which shall vanish in the smoke of its own funereal fires, but that world of spirits, where saints enjoy a glory that never fades and crowns that never fall, and sinners suffer the worm that never dies and the fire that is never quenched. No doubt, in Christ the foundation of our faith is unseen; but so is that of yonder tower that lifts its tall erect form among the waves over which it throws a saving light. It appears to rest on the rolling billows; but beneath these, in visible and immovable, lies the solid rock on which it stands secure; and when the hurricane roars above, and breakers roar below, and ships are wrecking, and men are drowning, and women are weeping, I could go calmly to sleep in that lone sea-tower. Founded on a rock, and safer than the proudest palace that stands on the sandy, surf-beaten shore, it cannot be moved. Still less the Rock of Ages! Who trusts in that is fit for death, prepared for judgment, ready for the last day’s sounding trumpet, since the Lord redeemeth the soul of his servants; and none of them that trust in him shall be desolate. Happy is that people that is in such a case: yea, happy is that people whose God is the Lord.