01. Chapter 1: Work and Faith
Chapter I
WORK AND FAITH.
Gal 2:20 — The life which I live in the flesh I live by the faith of (i.e. , by faith in) the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.
John 6:29. — This is the work of God, that ye believe in Him whom He hath sent.
We are about to engage in some thoughts on the principles and practice of the Spiritual Life. That Life, as to its source and secret, is “in the Son of God,” (1Jn 5:11) the Gift of the Father; in Him who is “the Life,” as well as “the Way and the Truth”(John 14:6). As to its reception, it is received in receiving Him; “he that hath the Son hath the life” (1Jn 5:12). As to its issue, exercise, and manifestation, it is the doing of the Will of God in all things, with a chastened, penitent, peaceful and loving confidence in Him as He is revealed and reconciled in Jesus Christ our Lord. As to its standard, it recognizes nothing lower than His revealed holiness; “even as He is pure” (1Jn 3:3). As to its purpose and hope, it looks, with a faith reposed upon His promise and power, to “walk pleasing Him” (1Th 4:1), here and now, under the shelter of the atoning Cross, and hereafter to be indeed “like Him, seeing Him as He is” (1Jn 3:2). As to its beginning and its maintenance, both of them are, from the divine side, by the Holy Spirit, “the Lord, the Giver of Life,” who brings Christ and the soul together. From the side of human experience, both of them are by faith, by submissive reliance on the promise and the Promiser. Faith is the hand that accepts the bread and the water of Life, the mouth that eats and that drinks them. From first to last the Life of God, like the Righteousness of God, “is revealed from faith to faith” (Rom 1:17).
First among our detailed thoughts upon this sacred Life I place now this — an enquiry into the place of Spiritual Effort in a life which is as yet in its essence everywhere and always a walk by faith, a life of faith. There is such a place. Work (I speak here of the spiritual and internal kind of work) not only has a function beside that of the happy quietism of a God-given reliance on the Lord and reception out of His fulness; it has a deep relation to it and connexion with it. This connexion is not always recognized in Christian thought and exposition. Things are sometimes said about the life of holy faith, the life of rest upon and in the Son of God, which leave, or seem to leave, no place for spiritual effort and resolve. Yet the Scriptures have very much to say about these latter things. They speak of “girding up the loins of the mind” (1Pe 1:13), of “working out salvation” (Php 2:12), of “being in earnest” (ourEnglish Bible renders it “labouring,” Heb 4:11) “to enter into the” heavenly “rest” (2Pe 1:10), of “giving diligence to make our calling and election sure,” of “watching and being sober” (1Th 5:6), of “keeping under the body and bringing it into subjection” (1Co 9:27), of “labouring fervently in prayer” (Col 4:12). We may be very sure, then, that this fact of spiritual effort is no accident of the Spiritual Life, but a large and vital truth in it. It would be strange if it were otherwise. All conscious personal life has much to do with exercise and effort in the course of its healthful development. A life, conscious and personal, which should be a life of mere and pure quiescence, would hardly be a life worth living. Could we wish for such a condition of the Spiritual Life? In the passages quoted at the head of this chapter we find some divine suggestions of the true connexion between the repose of faith and resolute spiritual exertion. i. In the words to the Galatians St. Paul puts before us, from his own experience, that delightful truth, dear to saints of all times and very specially called to remembrance in our own — the truth that the believer’s life “in the flesh,” amidst concrete conditions and surroundings in a fallen world, is to be continuously lived by faith. He is to “act, and grow, and thrive,” to deny self, and bear the cross, and bring forth fruit, by faith; by repose and reliance on his Lord and Head, by a perpetual turning to, and looking to, and receiving from, the Lord Jesus Christ, in all the fulness, and glory, and beauty, of His Person and Work. The divine method of spiritual victory and service lies in this, that our life is by faith, by submissive trust. By submissive trust we entered, at our spiritual new birth, at our true coming to Christ, beneath the blessed covert of Justification; and there we abide and remain, never to venture from beneath it for one moment to the end; never to step out on to the forbidden and fatal ground of acceptance for our works’ sake, for our state’s sake. And now meantime, by the same way, by submissive trust, we who dwell beneath that covert are to gather up therethisgreat treasure of power and peace. He who is our justifying and imputed Righteousness is also, by His Spirit, our sanctifying and inherent Life; and it is faith, mere and simple faith, submissive trust, that receives and feeds on Him as such. To His life and victory, to His holy fulness, we unite ourselves by faith, and by faith only. When temptation comes, our method is to fall back upon and to stand in our King who has conquered for us; to join ourselves, we may say, to His victory; to act upon the fact that we are joined to Him who has overcome, who is the Overcomer. So trusting, so living, His victory is for me, is mine, is as it were conveyed to His member, to me.
Here is our answer, for example, to the problem and torture of vain and evil thoughts, that stir as if uncontrollable in the mind. What are we to do?We entrust ourselves to the Son of God, who by His Spirit, by the Holy Comforter, dwells in us and we in Him. By implicit trust we unite our weary selves, in a special sense for the special need, to Him who in His impeccable and now glorified Manhood has won the victory over every form of evil, for us His members, His body. Again and again let us press home that truth upon our souls. Let nothing becloud it for us. Let no discussion over its details, nay, let no distortions, exaggerations, or parodies of it, make us doubt the thing itself, or forget to use it. The life of peace, of patience, of simplicity, of purity, of hope, of love — the holy lilfe — it is the gift, the ever present gift, of God; and it is given through faith in His blessed Son. Not long ago I met with a passage to this purpose in the life of that truly great Christian, Dr. Thomas Chalmers; a man who certainly was no visionary, no dreamer. It occurs in his diary, of the year 1813 (Memoir, vol. 1: p. 327): - “Was fatigued by exertion, and instead of following after God by hard straining of the mind, I gave myself to quietism, and feel that looking up for the Spirit through Jesus Christ is the only effectual attitude for obtaining love to God and filial confidence in Him. ”
Blessed is the reality of which Chalmers here speaks. Good and fruitful it is to look for life, love, and power altogether away from the processes and resources of self, to that fulness of the Spirit which dwells in Christ for us. Writer and reader, let us unite in making daily proof of this. ii. But where then is the place for effort?Such a place there is, as we have seen, amply recognized in the Word of God, and never to be discredited in our teaching or thinking. Perhaps the word “effort” is not the best; let us rather say “work. ”In the case of the body it is, I believe, a medical maxim that what wears and kills is not work, but effort; fitful, acute, abnormal exertion. And the word “work” is sanctioned by our blessed Lord Himself, in the passage quoted at the head of this chapter; John 6:29.
What sort of work is indicated there by the divine Teacher?It is the work, the labour, involved in getting to know, and to remember, what and why to believe. It is the mental and spiritual work of inquiry, judgment, recollection, applied to the subject of Jesus Christ, with a view to trust. This, I am persuaded, is the bearing of our Lord’s words atCapernaum. But even should the reader think otherwise about that passage, the truth which to my mind those words convey is a truth conveyed by many another Scripture. It is delightfully impled, for example, in the words ofSt. Paulquoted also above: “The Son of God, who loved me, and gave Himself for me. ”For that brief clause is enough to shew us the Apostle at work in the way of memory, and judgment, and estimate, and contemplation; gathering up the facts of his Lord’s Person and Work, and of his own relations to his Lord in consequence. And all this is working, working upon the grounds of faith. Every deliberate process of recollection is internal work; every habit of thought so developed is developed by work. The Christian believer works when he takes earnest pains and uses proper means to gather and to keep together within him the revealed facts about Jesus Christ and life in Him. He works when he dwells in soul on Who He is, on what He has done, and is doing now; on the mystery of His Natures, on the glory of His Person, on His Atonement, His Exaltation, His Headship, His royal High Priesthood, His Intercession; on the revealed privileges and resources ofUnionwith Him. He works, too, when he deliberately and diligently bears in mind his own perpetual needs, of sinfulness and weakness. All this is work, internal work, not to be done automatically, or as in a dream; not to be done by “trusting it to be done. ”And great is the need of such work, more than ever great, if possible, in an age like ours, at once so occupied and, alas, so superficial. The word “recollectedness” was a favourite word with our Christian fore-fathers, in the vocabulary of spiritual life. It conveyed well the thought of a deliberately formed, and steadily maintained, acquaintance with our deep need in ourselves and our spiritual riches in our Lord, and the temper of mind in which those riches could best be applied to the needs of life. But recollectedness, if it implies such things, cannot be found and kept without care, thought, resolve; without time saved or made; without persevering acts and habits. In order that we may live indeed by faith on the Son of God, we must, as to the rule and usage of our lives, set apart time, at whatever sacrifice, to ascertain and weigh what are those great treasures on which we are to draw. We must make prayer a real work; we must dig with real toil into our inexhaustible Bible, reverently, painstakingly, and with method; we must cultivate habits ofworship, public and private — by many Christians too much neglected; we must use the divinely appointed ordinances of the Church of God. Nor must we vainly think, as too many allow themselves to do, that we have “risen above” articulate doctrines, and may spare ourselves mental pains about them; a thought which leaves many a pious but indolent mind exposed in a very helpless way to the spell offalsedoctrines, well and sympathetically stated. “In understanding we must be men” (1Co 14:20); and that means a development not attainable without exercise. iii. Such work, and this is my main point in the present chapter, is right, and rightly directed, when it protects and guides the exercise of faith. On the other hand, and this must be reiterated with most earnest emphasis, such work is not identical with faith; it has not the function of faith; it cannot for one moment take the place of faith. Within the protective circle of such diligence faith is to live and act in its divine simplicity; submissive trust in the Son of God, personal reliance upon and reception from Him whose Person and Work we thus diligently hold in holy “recollection. ” Not work but trust is our organ, so to speak, for contact with Him, whether as to His righteousness for our acceptance, or as to His Spirit for our power. Yes, faith, in its simplest definition; that faith of which almost every miracle in the Gospels supplies a practical description. Faith, in the view of Jesus Christ, is personal trust. It is no mere condition which entitles us to touch Him. It is itself the touch. Not by toil of thought and will, but by that simplest touch, do I receive the Spirit of the Lord, and life and power of the Head. Toil of thought and will has a large work to do, as we have seen. But faith, and only faith, is the magnetic contact, if we may call it so, with Him. Such is His revealed order.
Let us rest, therefore. Let us labour, therefore. The life of faith in Jesus Christ is indeed a life of liberty, but not an easy-going life. Ease, indeed, there is in it, a sacred ease of certainty, of an acceptance we have not precariously won, but possess in Christ; a sense of wealth at our disposal, of power not our own, power far greater than the enemy’s, and exercised on a vantage-ground; but nothing casual and careless. There must be spiritual work that there may be a steady use of spiritual faith.
I would not be mistaken, as if I thought nothing of the most momentary and unprepared glance of the hard-pressed soul on Him who is our Peace and Victory. But I am speaking of the normal, habitual aspects of daily Christian life. If in that life, as to its wont and habit, we would know our Master’s power, we dare not leave faith to be exercised anyhow, so to speak. We must recollect, in order to believe, with a deliberate and watchful recollection. We must “grow in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour” (2Pe 3:18).
“I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed to Him, against that day. ” The Apostle “believed”; he had “committed” a great “deposit” to Him in whom his faith rested. And the exercise of that blessed personal confidence — how much it had to do, alike in its rise and its progress, with knowledge of the glorious Person in question, with thought upon His fulness of grace and truth, and with inference, strong and deep, as to the divine results of trust!
Lord, make us by Thy Spirit every day so to work as to believe with ever simpler faith; so to recollect as to rest indeed in Thee. Amen.