- It’s Not a One-Way Street

A GREAT DEAL IS HEARD THESE DAYS about the number of young men, particularly seminary students, who give up their faith in the Scriptures and go over theologically to the so-called liberal position. That hundreds of young men begin as lukewarm evangelicals and after a year or so under the tutelage of unbelieving professors turn their backs upon the faith of their fathers cannot be denied. And we have no wish to deny it here. It is always better to look facts in the face, however unpleasant the sight may be. The traffic between faith and unbelief is tragically heavy, as the Scripture declared it would be. But we may encourage our hearts with the knowledge that the traffic does not always move in the direction of unbelief--sometimes it moves the other way.
Every now and then the cheering news comes to us of some “liberal” who gets sick to his stomach with the plum pudding philosophy and the mixture of cheap poetry and applied psychology they have been fed by the modernists and comes home like the prodigal to the Father’s house. I have heard of a number of such persons over the last few years, and undoubtedly there are hundreds of others of whom I have not heard. Proof that the traffic is not all one way is afforded by the following testimony. This is part of a letter written to a friend by the recently converted pastor of a denominational church. It speaks for itself.
“Up until last summer I was just one of the proud, unsaved, `liberal’ false prophets, preaching a gospel that is no gospel, but only the cheap sentimentalism that the world calls religion.
“Three months ago the Lord saved me and has made me, even me, a new creation in Christ Jesus. Last summer I began to sicken of the unitarian pantheism that I was preaching in the name of Christ. I rebelled against it and began preaching—still blindly--about sin and salvation by faith, all the while confused and upset. I found a new friend who began to help me in an intellectual way to throw off the trappings of liberalism.
“Then, one day God took a veil off my understanding, and I suddenly knew that Jesus Christ died my death—that He has died the death I am due to die because of my sin—but that if I accepted Him as Lord and Savior I would not have to die! I surrendered myself and gave up all, that I might be His bondslave. And Jesus Christ accepted me and came into my empty self and took my life for Himself. How gracious and wonderful He is!
“I just wanted you to know that this has happened to me by the grace of God in Christ. Every man must be born of the Spirit, and when by faith God gives him this unspeakable gift, he knows it, for the Spirit Himself bears witness to our spirit, and we know in whom we have believed.
“My people here need to be saved. Some of them truly know the Lord Jesus Christ, but so many need to hear the message of another witness. I pray that the Holy Spirit will come with fire and power to baptize those who will believe.”
An encouraging thought for the true Christian is that the movement from orthodoxy to liberalism is usually slow, almost too slow to be perceived, where as the movement back to faith is sudden. Unbelief enters the soul by a slow seepage; the toxin gets through the walls of the soul by a kind of spiritual osmosis so that the victim is well poisoned before he or she notices it, and the pathological condition that results usually makes it impossible for that person to know what is wrong. I have never known of a single instance where a man or woman accepted modernism as a result of a spiritual experience. Rather it is the lack of such experience that exposes the soul to the in-seeping of the poison of unbelief.
The movement from doubt to faith, conversely, is usually sudden, often explosive. A man or woman is converted to Christ by a sudden, violent encounter with God and spiritual things. This person’s conversation becomes an enlightening, a sudden inward illumination that shows the certainties of the spiritual life as sharply as a midnight landscape when illumined by a flash of lightning. After long and painful searching of the heart, after what may be an agony of wrestling with the angel, the morning breaks suddenly as it broke on Jacob. There is no doubt about it now. The heart can say, “What have I to do anymore with idols? I have heard him, and observed him” (Hosea 14:8, KJV).
The simple fact that the believer “always experiences” something and the unbeliever “never does” should tell us a great deal. The liberal can never be quite sure of anything—it is contrary to his or her whole philosophy to be certain. Only the true Christian is sure. He or she has seen the sun rise, and it takes more than the contentions of the pseudo-learned to destroy the brightness of this person’s faith.