The Safety and Helpfulness of Faith
“They shall take up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing it shall not harm them. They shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover.” — MASK xvi. 18.
THESE are the last words that Jesus spoke on earth. The next verse says, “So then after the Lord had spoken unto them, he was received up into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God.” The cloud which hid their Master from the disciples’ sight left these words of promise still ringing in their ears. “These signs shall follow them that believe,” he said. And those who knew that they believed in him must have turned and gone back from the scene of the ascension, with eyes full of the expectation of miracle. By-and-by they began to see the fulfilment of the promises. When Peter and John went through the Beautiful Gate into the Temple, and looking upon the lame man bade him, “In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk,” and “he leaping up stood and walked,” the disciples who stood by must have looked into one another’s faces and said, “Yes, this is what the
334 The Safety and Help/illness of Faith.
M i pter promised.” When Paul at Melitu shook off the viper into the fire and felt no hurt, the words of the Lord must have come back to them, and they must have said, “Behold still the signs that He foretold should follow them that believe.” And no doubt they were right. Christ’s farewell words did find such fulfilment for a time. But by-and-by there came a change. Those miracles became more and more rare. Men still believed, but their belief gave them less and less power over material nature. Perhaps then the disciples grew bewildered and perplexed. Can it be that the power of Christ’s promise is exhausted? Had his gift a limit so that it has lost its virtue? But as they asked that question, gradually they must have become aware of a more profound fulfilment of the promise. No longer over outer and material things, but now over the inner and spirit ual life, the power of faith began to show itself. No longer over the danger of the serpents which the hands could handle, or of the sicknesses which flushed the cheek with fever or crippled the tortured limbs, did their belief prove itself mighty. The serpents of the soul, the sicknesses of the heart and mind, they learned to see that these were more dangerous enemies, and that their faith came to its supreme test when it grappled with and tried to conquer these. This conviction grew with the deepening spiritual life of Christianity, until at last the words (.•hiinged their tone, and now it is a promise of spirit ual victory over spiritual difficulties, when the disciple hears his Lord declare, “You shall take up serpents, and if you touch any deadly thing it shall not harm you. You shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover.”
It is in this fullest sense of course that I want to study the great eternal promise of Christ with you this morning. It is as bright to-day as it was on that fresh morning when our Lord passed into the cloud which still hides him from our sight. Nay, it is brighter. The sun that goes behind a cloud al ways diffuses its light over the heavens not instantly at its first disappearance, but not till some few moments after the cloud has hidden it, and when the cloud itself helps to diffuse the light of the sun which it has hidden. So when Christ became unseen, the world only gradually learned the richness and completeness of his unseen presence. And so we are studying not something whose glory is outworn, but something whose light is growing brighter in the world continually, when we study the promise of the ascending Christ.
The promise then is this: that the believer shall drink poison and it shall not harm him, and that life shall go out of him to cure the sick. And first of all we must notice what is the cause of privileges such as these. Then we shall better understand the full nature of the privileges. These signs are to follow “them that believe.” It is to men who believe, through their belief, that privileges such as these are to be given. The essence and ground of the promised power is faith. That old word, Faith!. That old thing, Faith! How men have stumbled over its definition and bewildered and ensnarK-d themselves and those who heard them! G<><1 iorhid that I should bewilder you to-day. I want to be as clear and simple as I can; and though 1 would be far from disji.i ing any of the subtler and more elaborate descript i< pn s of what faith is, I am sure that we may give curselves a definition which is true beyond all doubt, and which is full enough to answer all the need of definition which we shall meet to-day. Faith then, personal faith, is this, the power by which one being’s vitality, through love and obedience, becomes the vitality of another being. Simple enough that is, I am sure, for any man who will think. I believe in you, my friend; and your vitality, your character, your energy, the more I love and obey you, passes over into me. The saint believes in his pattern saint, the soldier believes in his brave captain, the scholar believes in his learned teacher. In every case the vitalit of the object of faith comes through love and obedience to the believer. Faith is not love nor obedience, but it works by both. A man may love me and yet not have faith in me. A man may obey me, and yet not have faith in me. Faith is a distinct relation between soul and soul; but it is recognizable by this result, that the life of one soul becomes the life of the other soul through obedience and love. Now faith in Christ, what is it? Just in the same simple way, it is that power by which the vitality of Christ, through our love and obedience to Him, becomes our vitality. The triumph of the believing soul is this, that he does not live by himself; that into him is ever flowing, by a law which is both natural and supernatural, a law that is supernatural only because it is the consummation and transfiguration of the most natural of all laws — there is always flowing into him the vitality of the Christ whom he loves and obeys. His whole nature beats with the inflow of that divine life. He lives, but Christ lives in him.
And then add one thing more. That this vitality of Christ which comes into a man by faith, is not a strange and foreign thing. Christ is the Son of Man, the perfect man, the divine man. Add this, and then we know that his vitality filling us is the perfection of human life filling humanity. “They that believe” are not men turned into something else than men, by the mixture of a new and strange divine ingredient. They are men in whom human life is perfect in proportion to the completeness of their faith through the Son of Man. They are men raised to the highest power. The man in whom Christ dwells by faith is the man in whom the divine ideal of human life is perfect, or is steadily becoming perfect, by the entrance into him of the perfect life of the man Christ Jesus, through obedience and love.
And now turn back to our promise. These signs shall follow them that believe, them that have the complete human life by me — Christ says. “If they drink any deadly thing it shall not harm them — and they shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover.” Is that a prize? Is it wages which is offered, for a certain meritorious act which is called faith?
Not so, surely! It is a consequence. It is a necessity. Safety and helpfulness. These come out of the full life of Christ in the soul of man as the inevitably fruits. Safety, so that what hurts other men shall not hurt him. Helpfulness, so that his brethren about him shall live by his life. These are the utterances of the vitality of him who is thoroughly alive, what we have reached already. It is by life. by full, vigorous, emphatic existence that men are safe in this world, and that they save other men from death. I glory in such a statement as that. It makes my Bible shine. Men everywhere are trying to be safe by stifling life; by living just as low as pos sible. Men everywhere are trying not to do one another harm, trying to spare each other’s souls by tender petting, by guarding them against any vigorous contact with life and thought. Th«- Bible comes glowing with protest. “Not so,” it says. “Only by the fulness of life does safety come. Only by the power of contact with life are sick and help less souls made whole. None but the live man saves himself or quickens the dead to life; saves himself or saves his neighbor.” It is a noble assertion. The whole Bible, from its first page to its last, is full of the assertion of the fundamental necessity of vitality; that the first thing whirh a man needs in order to live well, is to live.
Let us take now these two parts of the promise of Christ in turn. He tells his disciples that if tln-y believe in him, they shall drink deadly things and not be harmed, and they shall be able to heal the sick. Safety and helpfulness, these are the two privileges of full life; these two together make a successful and complete career. And first let us consider the safety which Christ oilers. Notice it is a safety not by the avoidance of deadly things, but by the neutralizing of them through a higher and stronger power. There is no such idle promise as that if a man believes in Christ a wall shall be built around his soul, so that the things out of which souls make sin cannot come to him. The Master knew the world too well for that. His own experience on the hill of his temptation was still fresh in his memoiy. He knew that life meant exposure, that sin must surely beat at every one of these hearts. Nay, that the things out of which sin is made, temptation, moral trial, must enter into every heart; and so he said not, “I will lead you through secluded ways where none but sweet and healthy waters flow:” but, “Where I lead you there will be the streams of poison. Only if you have the vitality which comes by faith in me, your life shall be stronger than the poison’s death; if you drink any deadly thing it shall not harm you.”
One thing we see immediately in such a promise, one condition which belongs to its fulfilment. It is that only in the higher action and mission lay the safety from the lower influence; and therefore that the lower influence was to be powerless over the disciples only as they met it incidentally in the direct pursuance of their higher task. Jesus had made this same promise once before. When he sent the seventy disciples out to preach, he said to them almost exactly these same words, which now he said as he looked into his disciples’ eyes for the last time on Olivet. They too were to find the deadly things they touched robbed of their venom. The poison was to be harmless as they drank it. But thru Christ spoke it of their special mission. It was while they went on this particular preaching journey that the pestilential powers of nature were to lose their mischief. But now, on Olivet, he is giving his disciples a life-long career. He is sending them forth consecrated to a service which is to last until they die. So now the special promise becomes general, and covers all their life; now they are constantly to be armed against the poison; but still the essence of safety is to be in their perpetual mission, their unbroken consecration. It was not that they might sit down at ease and drink what pleasant poison they would, and yet be unharmed. It was only while they were living, believing, working, only as they lived and believed and worked, that they were safe. And the meaning of that, when we translate it into the terms of our life, is clear enough. Only those temptations which we encounter on the way of duty, in the path of consecration, only those has our Lord promised us that we shall conquer. He sends us out to live and work for him. The chances of sin which we meet while that divine design of life, the life and work for Him, is clear before us, shall not hurt us. When we forget that desi-n, our arm withers, our immunity is gone. This is what we really mean, what we often put blindly enough, wln-n we ask whether such a man is a religious man or not. We mean, or we ought to mean, whether religion or the service of God is present with him as a continual purpose; not whether he is ever tempted; not whether he ever sins; we know the answers to those questions well enough; but whether behind all the temptation, under all the sin, his soul is still set toward God with genuine and strong devotion. If it is, we know that he must come out safe. This is the real question after which men are often fumbling when they seem to make some mere out side thing like an amulet worn about the neck, or a church-membership written in a book, a pledge and token that what would be sin to other men is not sin to some privileged, protected soul.
It is only when we are about some higher task, only when they meet us as accidents in the service of Christ, that we have a right deliberately to encounter temptation and the chance to sin, and may claim the Lord’s promise of immunity. Think in how many places that law applies. Have I a right to read this skeptical book, this book in which some able, witty man has gathered all his skill against my Christian faith? It is a book of poison. Have I a right to drink it? Who can say absolutely yes or no? Who does not feel that it depends upon what sort of life the reader brings to meet the poison? If in your soul there is a passionate desire for truth, if you do really love and serve Christ, and want to know him better that you may love and serve him more, if this book comes as a help to that, part of a study by which you shall get nearer to the heart of the truth and him, then if you drink that deadly thing it shall not harm you. Nay, you may rise ujp from the reading with a faith more deep. Whatever change your faith may undergo, it shall win a profounder life. But if there is no such earnestness, no such life as this, if it is mere curiosity, mere desin to be fine and liberal, mere defiance, a mere wantonness, then the poison has it all its own way; there is no vigorous life to meet it; and its death spreads through the nature till it finds the heart.
This is the only true discrimination. The old policy which makes indexes of forbidden books can never do anything for faith. Whatever a man can read in honesty and humility and consecration, and the pure desire of truth, let him read it; and if there be any deadly thing in what he reads it shall not harm him. I say this solemnly, deliberately, thoughtfully, knowing that many young people are hearing, and I hope are noting what I say. I say it without hesitation; only I beg you to remember how profound are the conditions which alone give one the right to read the skeptics and yet hope to keep his faith. It is a solemn thing for a man first to lie sure that he has indeed honesty, humility, const (i,:- tion, and the pure desire of truth. The very solemnity and responsibility with which he searches him self that he may be sure of that, will be his safest safeguard.
There are dabblers in unbelief on every wid* of UK, who are being poisoned through and through by the scepticism which they drink in. There are other men who know vastly more than they about what unbelief has said, who are more full of real faith for all their study. Everything depends upon the state in which their spiritual constitutions met the struggle and upon what it was that took them into the midst of doubt. And so it is evey where with all exposures of the spiritual life. “What took you there?” u What right had you to be there?” These are the critical questions on which everything depends. If you are passing through temptation with your eye fixed on a pure, true life beyond it, temptation being only a necessary stage upon your way, so long as you keep that purpose, that resolution, that ideal, you shall be safe. If you are in temptation for temptation’s sake, with no purpose beyond it, you are lost.
Two men walk through the vilest streets here in our city. One of them has nothing in him but selfishness and low love of self-indulgence. The other is glowing with human charity, seeking perhaps some child of his who has wandered into that dreadful hell, or longing, it may be, to pluck out of the burning some man’s or woman’s life, whose fiery iniquity makes those streets the streets of hell. Why is it that one man fills himself full of the iniquity through which he walks, steeps himself in its vileness, and the other comes out with garments all the whiter for the fire? Is it not what Jesus said, “This sign shall follow them that believe. If they drink any deadly thing it shall not harm them “?
Two men go into politics. One of them wants office; the other wants honesty in government, fuithfr, to national obligation, tin- pivs’-rvation of the public purity and credit. What shall be their personal the fate of their personal characters there, in the political turmoil? One of them has no faith. It is faith that sends the other where perhaps his feet half refuse to go. According to their faith so is it unto them. And when, while one man sinks from depth to depth of unscrupulous selfishness and shameless corruption, the other seems to breathe the foulest air without a weakness or a taint, I seem to see as clear a fulfilment as the world can show, of that which Jesus said, “This sign shall follow them that believe. If they drink any deadly thing it shall not harm them.”
The religious man who lives and works in one church, one denomination, is saved from the poison of narrowness and sectarianism by the larger faith with which he believes and rejoices in the work of Christ his Master, and the salvation of men his brethren, wherever he can see it going on. The woman in social life bears a charmed life through all its deadening frivolity, because the life of Christ is in her, and she ever counts herself and all of those whom her life touches in the lightest contact, the children of God, sacred, and capable of pure and beautiful life. Everywhere the amulet is faith, Home great idea, some large, long hope. Everywhere, where death rages most wantonly, “the just Khali live by faith.”
What would you say to the young man who you knew was asked to go into some dangerous trade? Not a trade where boilers sometimes exploded or where poisonous gases crept into the lungs, but a trade where honesty was constantly beseiged, or where temperance was hourly solicited, or where a man was always dragged down towards hard and cynical thoughts of his fellow-men. What would you say to him? If the danger was a certainty, if no man could possibly live in that trade and not be cursed with its curse, then there would be only one thing to say. He must not go at all. No man has any right to be doing that hateful business anywhere upon the earth, no matter how it may seem as if the world would suffer if all men gave it up. That case is plain. What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul? But if that is not so. If men do live in this dangerous trade and keep their souls pure, what then shall you say to your young friend who thinks of entering into it? “Be sure, be sure that you have faith. Be sure that you are one of them that believe. Be sure that you are going there for something more than. money. Be sure that you reverence the life you carry there. Be sure that you go there as the child of God. If you go so, then go, and Christ’s word shall be fulfilled to you. In fear of him, in reverence for yourself, in charity for your brethren shall be your safety. And protected by that faith, “if you drink any deadly thing it shall not harm you.”
There is a deep solemnity about the sight when a group of young men, a generation of young men,
34 6 The Safety and HclpJ culness of Fait h.
come up to life together. To whom aimm them will it be life indeed? to whom will it In- death? It is as if we saw a line of men march into a region where a fever raged. How we should search their faces to see which among them carried the vitality which could keep them safe. The pestilence is not whimsical or indiscriminate. It knows its victims when it sees them coming. And so the world of wickedness, the world of corruption, impurity and spiritual death — it too must know its victims. It too must laugh with anticipated triumph as it sees coming up to it a frivolous and faithless soul, must cringe and know its powerlessness when some man filled with faith, comes humbly, strong with the strength of Him in whom he trusts. For him the world in vain may mix its poisons. This is the criticalness that one feels as he sees any group of men beginning life; any class of young men leaving college; any generation meeting the novel needs and dangers of a new age of the world
So much I say distinctively of the first part of Christ’s promise to the faithful man. He promises him safety. But that is not all. Hear once again the other part. “If he drink any deadly thing it shall not harm him,” and “He shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover.” Safety and helpfulness. .He shall be safe and he shall save others too. These two things go together, not merely in this speei.il promise of the Saviour, but in all life. Safety and helpfulness. So is the whole world bound into a whole, so does the good that oomee to any man tend to diffuse itself and touch the lives of all, that these two things are true. First, that no man can be really safe, really secure that the world shall not harm and poison him, unless there is going out from him a living and life-giving influence to other men. And second, that 110 man is really helping other men unless there is true life in his own soul. Both of these seem to me to be great and ever-present truths. Men try to act as if they were not true, and thence comes much bad, useless living. Men think that they can be safe without being helpful, and thence come all the selfish notions of salvation. Merely to crawl through life with face and mouth so bandaged up with caution that the foul air of life cannot affect us; merely to strike out from the wreck of a fallen world and swim ashore, shaking off all the drowning men who clutch at us in the wild water, and leaving the screaming wretches to their fate, the man who seeks salvation so, finds at last to his disappointment and dismay that he is not saved. It is not the hands that catch us and hold on to us, it is the hands of helpless men which we shake off in our selfishness that drag us down.
And then the other truth. No man can really save another unless he saves himself. It is the good man by his good deeds that gives life to the world. The vitality which bad men by their bad deeds seem to give, is not vitality, but death. .You remember how they taunted Jesus on the cross. “He saved others, Himself he cannot save,” they said. But they were wrong. It could not be as they said. We know
348 The Safety and Helpfulness of P^aith.
that he was saving himself while he saved tin* -world. He was fulfilling his work. lit- was glorifying his Father. He was entering into Hi’,- as d«-ath crept over him. And always it is the living, not the dead, who give life. It is the man not who has sinned deeply but who has known by intense sympathy what sin is, how strong, how terrible, and yet escaped it for himself. He is the man who helps the sinners most. He is the anointed one who carries on and carries round the Christ’s salvation. In their deepest need the wickedest men look to the purest men they know; the deadest to the livest; first to those who they think have most escaped sin, then to those who they think have been most cleansed of sin by repentance and forgiveness.
These two things belong essentially together — Safety and Helpfulness — and both of these Jesus promises to the men who believe in Him. Turn then for a few hurried moments to the second helpfulness or the life-giving, the life-strengthening power. “They shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover.” If I read those words spiritually, if I make them the promise and prophecy of that wonderful power which in all times, in all religions, spiritual life has had to extend itself, like fire, from any one point which it has already occupied, to everything within its reach which is inflammable, which is capable of the same burning life, it seems to me that the way in which the promise is fulfilled is by the clothing of the believing life with two qualities which are expressed by these two words — testimony and transmission. Here is a
7* he Safety and Helpfulness of Faith. 349
man in whom I know that the promise of Christ is certainly fulfilled. He is a believer, and through his open faith the life of Christ flows into him constantly, and is his life. Full of that life, he gives it every where he goes. The sick in soul touch his soul and are well again. The discouraged find new bravery, the yielding souls are clad anew with firmness. The frivolous grow serious, the mean are stung or tempted into generosity, and sinners hate their sin and crave a better life, wherever this man goes. Oh! there are such men in the world. There always have been. The world finds them out, and souls half-conscious of disease creep to their doors. Friends bring their friends into the presence of these healing lives as of old the men of Jerusalem “brought forth the sick into the streets, and laid them on beds and couches, that at least the shadow of Peter passing by might overshadow some of them.”
The power of these life-giving lives seem to me, I say, to be described in these two words — testimony and transmission. It is first in the testimony which they bear by the very fact of their own abundant life. They show the presence, they assert the possibility of vitality. And very often this is what souls whose spiritual life is weak and low need to have done for them. Men half alive grow to doubt of the fuller life in anybody. Men try to realize the descriptions of religion which they hear, and, falling short of them, they grow ready to believe that religion is a thing of excited imaginations, and to give up all thought of making it real in themselves. It is
350 The Safely and Helpfulness of Faith.
not only the badness in the world, it is the dreadful im redulity of good, it is the despair and lack of struggle, which tells how low. ebbs out the tide of spiritual life. Then comes the man in whom spirit ual life is a real, deep, strong, positive thin <;-. The first work which that man does is to bear the simple testimony of his life that life is possible. Already, just in acknowledgment of that, the sick faces begin to revive and the sick eyes look up to him. The brave and godly boy among a group of boys just learning to be proud of godlessness and contemptuous of piety — the man of golden principles among the skeptics of the street — the one true penitent rejoicing in a new and certain hope out of the ranks of flagrant sin — these instantly, the moment that they begin to live, begin to bear their testimony of life, and so make life about them. The hand just trem bling with the mute and awed but certain consciousness of its own new life,though it be but a child’s hand, feeling for support, there is a wondrous power in it, if it falls upon some poor decrepit faithless soul, to work there the fulfilment of the Saviour’s promise that they which believe shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover.
And besides testimony I also said transmission. The highest stateme/it of the culture of a human nature and of the best attainment that is set before it, is that, as it grows better, it grows more transparent and more simple, more capable therefore of sim ply and truly transmitting the life and will of God which is behind it. The thought of a man, as heimproves and strengthens, getting the control of his own powers and becoming more and more a source of power over other men, this thought, which has no doubt its own degree of truth, is limited and vulgar beside the breadth and fineness of the other idea, that as a man is trained and cultured as the various events of life create their changes in him, as tempests beat him and sunshine bathe him, as he wrestles with temptation and yields to grace, as he goes on through the spring-time, the summer and the autumn of his life, the one highest purpose and result of it all is to beat and fuse his life into transparency, so that it can transmit the life of God. For all good is from God, and he uses our lives, all of them, to reach other men’s lives with. Only the difference is this: upon a life of sin, all hard and black, God shines as the sun shines on the black, hard* marble, and by reflection thence strikes on the things around, leaving the centre of the marble itself always dark. But on a life of obedience and faith, God shines as the sun shines on a block of chrystal, sending its radiance through the willing and transparent mass and warming and lighting it all into its inmost depths.
I wish that there were time to develope and describe the privilege and power of belief to become the transmitter of that which it believes in. The figure which I have just used tells the story, and I must leave it with you as I abruptly close. Only remember that no words can tell, no figure can begin to represent the fulness of the privilege of life which belongs to those who genuinely believe in Jesus
Christ. Nothing but his own life can toll us fully what the life is that he means to give to UK. Safety and helpfulness. As safe as lie was. as able to touch the blackest sin and yet be white, to taste of death and thereby be more thoroughly alive. S shall His complete disciples be. As helpful as he was; as full of the testimony of life and its possibility to half-dead souls. As purely transparent in obedience, in self-forgetfulness, in essential sonship kept clear and unclouded by filial love. So helpful shall they 1 pe who believe in Him. As live as he was, nay, as live as he is forever, shall we be when our human life becomes the utterance of his, as his divine Life is the utterance of God’s.