The Christian's Secret to a Happy Life

THE CHRISTIAN SECRET OF A HAPPY LIFE by HANNAH WHITEALL SMITH CHAPTER VI DIFFICULTIES CONCERNING FAITH The next step after consecration in the soul's progress out of the wilderness of a failing Christian experience into the land that floweth with milk and honey is that of faith. And here, as in the first step, the soul encounters at once certain forms of difficulty and hindrance. The child of God, whose eyes have been opened to see the fulness there is in Jesus for him, and whose heart has been made hungry to appropriate that fulness, is met with the assertion, on the part of every teacher to whom he applies, that this fulness is only to be received by faith. But the subject of faith is involved in such a hopeless mystery to his mind, that this assertion, instead of throwing light upon the way of entrance, only seems to make it more difficult and involved than ever. ìOf course it is to be by faith,î he says, ìfor I know that everything in the Christian life is by faith. But that is just what makes it so hard, for I have no faith, and I do not even know what it is or how to get it.î And thus, baffled at the very outset by this inseparable difficulty, he is plunged into darkness and almost despair. This trouble arises from the fact that the subject of faith is very generally misunderstood, for, in reality, faith is the simplest and plainest thing in the world, and the most easy of exercise. Your idea of faith, I suppose, has been something like this. You have looked upon it as, in some way, a sort of thing, either a religious exercise of soul, or an inward gracious disposition of heart, something tangible, in fact, which, when you have secured it, you can look at and rejoice over, and use as a passport to Godís favour, or a coin with which to purchase his gifts. And you have been praying for faith, expecting all the while to get something like this, and never having received any such thing, you are insisting upon it that you have no faith. Now, faith, in fact, is not in the least like this. It is nothing at all tangible. It is simply believing God, and, like sight, it is nothing apart from its object. You might as well shut your eyes and look inside, and see whether you have sight, as to look inside to discover whether you have faith. You see something, and thus know that you have sight. You believe something, and thus know that you have faith. For as sight is only seeing, so faith is only believing. And as the only necessary thing about sight is that you see the thing as it is, so the only necessary thing about belief is that you believe the thing as it is. The virtue does not lie in your believing, but in the thing you believe. If you believe the truth, you are saved. If you believe a lie, you are lost. The act of believing in both cases is the same. The things believed are exactly opposite, and this it is which makes the mighty difference. Your salvation comes, not because your faith saves you, but because it links you to the Saviour who saves, and your believing is really nothing but the link. I do beg of you to recognize, then, the extreme simplicity of faith, namely, that it is nothing more nor less than just believing God when He says He either has done something for us or will do it, and then trusting Him to keep His word. It is so simple that it is hard to explain. If anyone asks me what it means to trust another to do a piece of work for me, I can only answer that it means committing the work to that other and leaving it without anxiety in his hands. All of us have many times trusted very important affairs to others in this way, and have felt perfect rest in thus trusting, because of the confidence we have had in those who have undertaken them. How constantly do mothers trust their most precious infants to the care of nurses, and feel no shadow of anxiety! How continually we are all of us trusting our health and our lives, without a thought of fear, to cooks and coachmen, engine drivers, railway conductors, and all sorts of paid servants, who have us completely at their mercy, and who could, if they chose to do so, or even if they failed in the necessary carefulness, plunge us into misery or death in a moment! All this we do, and make no demur about it. Upon the slightest acquaintance, often, we thus put our trust in people, requiring only the general knowledge of human nature, and the common rules of human intercourse as the foundation of our trust, and we never feel as if we were doing anything in the least remarkable. You have done this yourself, dear reader, and are doing it continually. You could not live among your fellow men, and go through the customary routine of life a single day, if you were unable to trust your fellow men, and it never enters your head to say you cannot. But yet you do not hesitate to say, continually, that you cannot trust your God, and you excuse yourself by the plea that you are a poor, weak creature, and have no faith. I wish you would try to imagine yourself acting in your human relations as you do in your spiritual relations. Suppose you should begin to-morrow with the notion in your head that you could not trust anybody because you had no faith. When you sat down to breakfast, you would say, I cannot eat anything on this table, for I have no faith, and I cannot believe the cook has not put poison in the coffee, or that the butcher has not sent home diseased or unhealthy meat. So you would go starving away. When you went out to 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 the conductor, nor the builders of the carriages, nor the managers of the road. And you would be compelled to walk everywhere, and would grow unutterably weary in the effort, besides being actually unable to reach the places you could have reached in the train. When your friends met with you with any statements, or your business agent with any accounts, you would say, I am very sorry that I cannot believe you, but I have no faith, and never can believe anybody. If you opened a newspaper, you would be forced to lay it down again, saying, I really cannot believe a word this paper says, for I have no faith. I do not believe there is any such person as the Queen, for I never saw her, nor any such country as Ireland, for I was never there. I have no faith, so of course I cannot believe anything that I have not actually felt and touched myself. It is a great trial, but I cannot help it, for I have no faith. Just picture such a day as this, and see how disastrous 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 friends would feel insulted, and how your servants would refuse to serve you another day. And then ask yourself the question, if this want of faith in your fellow men would be so dreadful, and such utter folly, what must it be when you tell God that you have no power to trust him, nor to believe his word, that it is a great trial, but you cannot help it, for you have no faith? Is it possible that you can trust your fellow men, and cannot trust your God, that you can receive the witness of men, and cannot receive the witness of God, that you can believe man's records, and cannot believe God's record, that you can commit your dearest earthly interests to your weak, failing fellow-creatures, without a fear, and are afraid to commit your spiritual interests to the Saviour who laid down his life for you, and of whom it is declared that he is able to save to the uttermost all who come unto God by him? Surely, surely, dear believer, you whose very name of believer implies that you can believe, you will never again dare to excuse yourself on the plea of having no faith. For when you say this, you mean, of course, that you have no faith in God, since you are not asked to have faith in yourself, and would be in a very wrong condition of soul if you had. Let me beg of you, then, when you think or say these things, always to complete the sentence and say, I have no faith in God, I cannot believe God. And this, I am sure, will soon become so dreadful to you, that you will not dare to continue it. But, you say, I cannot believe without the Holy Spirit. Very well, will you conclude, then, that your want of faith is because of the failure of the Holy Spirit to do his work? For if it is, then surely you are not to blame, and need feel no condemnation, and all exhortations to you to believe are useless. But no, do you not see that in taking up the position that you have no faith and cannot believe, you are not only making God a liar, but you are also showing an utter want of confidence in the Holy Spirit, for he is always ready to help our infirmities. We never have to wait for him, he is always waiting for us. And I, for my part, have such absolute confidence in the Holy Ghost, and in his being always ready to do his work, that I dare to say to every one of you, that you can believe now, at this very moment, and that if you do not, it is not the Spirit's fault, but your own. Put your will, then, over on the believing side. Say, Lord, I will believe, I do believe, and continue to say it. Insist upon believing, in the face of every suggestion of doubt that intrudes itself. Out of your very unbelief, throw yourself unreservedly on the word and promises of God, and dare to abandon yourself to the keeping and saving power of the Lord Jesus. If you have ever trusted a precious interest in the hands of an earthly friend, I entreat you, trust yourself and all your spiritual interests now in the hands of your heavenly friend, and never, never, never, allow yourself to doubt again. Remember always that there are two things which are more utterly incompatible, even than oil and water, and these two are trust and worry. Would you call it trust if you should give something into the hands of a friend to attend to for you, and then should spend your nights and days in anxious thought and worry as to whether it would be rightly and successfully done? And can you call it trust when you have given the saving and keeping of your soul into the hands of the Lord, if day after day and night after night you are spending hours of anxious thought and questionings about the matter? When a believer really trusts anything, he ceases to worry about the thing he has trusted, and when he worries, it is a plain proof that he does not trust. Tested by this rule, how little real trust there is in the Church of Christ! No wonder our Lord asked the pathetic question, When the Son of Man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth? He will find plenty of work, a great deal of earnestness, and doubtless many consecrated hearts, but shall he find faith, the one thing he values more than all the rest? Every child of God, in his own case, will know how to answer this question. Should the answer for any of you be a sorrowful no, let me entreat you to let this be the last time for such an answer, and if you have ever known anything of the trustworthiness of our Lord, may you henceforth set to your seal that he is true, by the generous recklessness of your trust in him. I remember very early in my Christian life having every tender and loyal impulse within me stirred to the depths of an appeal I met with, in a volume of old sermons, to all who love the Lord Jesus, that they should show to others how worthy he was of being trusted by the steadfastness of their own faith in him. As I read the inspiring words, there came to me a sudden glimpse of the privilege and glory of being called to walk in paths so dark, that only an utter recklessness of trust would be possible. Ye have not passed this way heretofore, it may be, but to-day it is your happy privilege to prove, as never before, your loyal confidence in Jesus, 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 has not failed you. Trust him now for everything, and see if he does not do for you exceedingly abundantly, above all that you could ever have asked or even thought, not according to your power or capacity, but according to his own mighty power working in you all the good pleasure of his most blessed will. It is not hard, you find, to trust the management of the universe, and of all the outward creation to the Lord. Can your case, then, be so much more complex and difficult than these, that you need to be anxious or troubled about his management of you? Away with such unworthy doubtings! Take your stand on the power and trustworthiness of your God, and see how quickly all difficulties will vanish before a steadfast determination to believe. Trust in the dark, trust in the light, trust at night, and trust in the morning, and you will find that the faith that may begin, perhaps by a mighty effort, will end, sooner or later, by becoming the easy and natural habit of the soul. It is a law of the spiritual life that every act of trust makes the next act less difficult, until, at length, if these acts are persisted in, trusting becomes like breathing, the natural, unconscious action of the redeemed soul. You must, therefore, put your will into your believing. Your faith must not be a passive imbecility, but an active energy. You may have to believe against every seeming, but no matter. Set your face like a flint to say, I will believe, and I know I shall not be confounded. We are made partakers of Christ if we hold the beginning of our faith steadfast unto the end. Hundreds fail just here. They have a little beginning of faith, but discouragements come. The seemings are all against it. Their doubts clamor louder and louder, and at last they let them in. And when doubt comes in at the door, trust always flies out of the window. We are told that all things are possible to God, and that all things are possible also to him that believeth. Faith has, in times past, subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens, and faith can do it again. For our Lord himself says unto us, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard 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 have at least as much faith as a grain of mustard seed, and therefore you dare not say again that you cannot trust because you have no faith. Say, rather, I can trust my Lord, and I will trust him, and not all the powers of earth or hell shall be able to make me doubt my wonderful, glorious, faithful Redeemer. Faith is sweetest of worships to him who so loves, his unbearable splendors in darkness to hide, and to trust to thy word, dearest Lord, his true love, for those prayers are most granted which seem most denied. Our faith throws her arms around all thou hast told her, and able to hold as much more can but grieve. She could hold thy grand self, Lord, if thou wouldst reveal it, and love makes her long to have more to believe. Let your faith, then, throw its arms around all God has told you, and in every dark hour remember that, though now for a season, if need be, ye are in heaviness through manifold temptations, it is only like going through a tunnel. The sun has not ceased shining because the traveller through the tunnel has ceased to see it, and the sun of righteousness is still shining, although you in your dark tunnel do not see him. Be patient and trustful, and wait. This time of darkness is only permitted that the trial of your faith, being much more precious than of gold that perisheth, though it be tried with fire, might be found under praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ.