093. Especially This Word Faith Put Me To It.
XCIII ‘Especially This Word Faith Put Me To It.’
ESPECIALLY this word Faith put me to it. For I could not help it, but I sometimes must question, whether I had any Faith or no. But I was loth to conclude that I had no Faith; for, if I do so, thought I, then I shall count myself a castaway indeed. Now, who can tell but there may be some people here this evening who are just at John Bunyan’s stage in their salvation? They, like him, are never out of their Bibles. But, as they read Paul’s Epistles, they are greatly put to it by this word Faith, which rises up and meets them at every turn. Now if there are any such here I shall do my best to speak to them and to their case for a little to-night.
Well then what exactly is this thing faith, of which the whole New Testament speaks so often and says so much? What is this thing faith, which nonplussed John Bunyan so often and which non-plusses ourselves so often? Take it, to begin with, as the Shorter Catechism so scripturally and so succinctly has it:
‘Faith in Jesus Christ is a saving grace, whereby we receive and rest upon Him alone for salvation, as He is offered to us in the Gospel.’
Keep that fine Catechism answer well in mind, and take occasion from time to time to turn that answer over word by word in your mind and in your heart, and every time you so turn it over act upon it immediately, perform it immediately, practise it immediately, make it your own immediately; that is to say, every hour of every day receive and rest upon Jesus Christ as He is every hour of every day offered to you in the Gospel.
Ever since my student days Bishop O’Brien’s answer to the question as to what faith is has remained with me and has often been very helpful to me:
‘They who know what is meant by faith in a promise, know what is meant by faith in the Gospel; they who know what is meant by faith in a remedy, know what is meant by faith in the blood of the Redeemer; they who know what is meant by faith in a physician, faith in an advocate, faith in a friend, know, too, what the Scriptures mean to express when they speak of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.’ The Bishop of Ossory’s Nature and Effects of Faith was a classic with us in our day both for its rich evangelical substance and for its fine English style. And then just to keep in mind some of the Scripture synonyms and equivalents for faith, that is a great help both to the young inquirer and to the advanced believer. As thus: Faith is just believing; it is just assenting and consenting; it is just confiding and relying, and staying oneself upon. Again, it is rising up; it is coming; it is walking; it is running; it is fleeing; it is laying hold on; it is receiving, and it is resting on. Again, it is seeing; it is hearing; it is understanding, and it is meditating on. Again, it is tasting; it is eating; it is drinking, and drinking abundantly. Again, it is washing in a fountain; it is putting on fine linen; it is putting on Christ to justification of life; and so on, all through the Scriptures. The Old Testament saints were eminent believers and they were always saying and singing their wonderful faith in language like this:
‘The Lord, He is my God, and He is become my salvation. The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my high tower, and my deliverer: in Him will I trust. Behold, God is my salvation: I will trust, and I will not be afraid what man can do to me. O my soul, hope thou in God; who is the health of my countenance, and my God.’ And then when like Bunyan we open Paul’s Epistles, faith is the gift of God. Faith is the fruit of the Spirit. It is a shield. It is a breastplate. It is a battle, which always ends in a victory. Without faith it is impossible to please God. The just shall live by faith. The sinner is justified by faith, and the saint is sanctified by faith. We have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, we stand fast by faith, and having done all, we stand. And, to crown all, Christ dwells in our hearts by faith. But the only adequate specimen of Paul upon faith is all the Epistles we have from the Apostle’s pen. Indeed you must never be out of Paul’s Epistles if you would know all the things that faith performs in the salvation of sinners, and in the sanctification of saints, and in the glory of God And then a Latin father and a preacher of the school of Paul has this:
‘Give me a passionate man, a hot-headed man, and one that is headstrong and unmanageable; and with faith as a grain of mustard seed, I will, by degrees, make that man as quiet as a lamb. Then give me a covetous man, an avaricious man, a miserly man; and with a little faith working like leaven in his heart, I will yet make him a perfect spendthrift for the Church of Christ and for the poor. Then give me one who is mortally afraid of pain; and one who all his days is in bondage through fear of death; and let the spirit of faith once enter and take its seat in his heart and in his imagination, and he shall, in a short time, despise all your crosses and flames and even the bull of Phalaris itself. Then show me a man with an unclean heart and I will undertake, by his faith in Christ, to make him whiter than the snow, till he will not know himself to be the same man.’ The grand difficulty, said Bunyan, in the way of my faith is just myself. Myself to me, he said, as a fallen and an unsanctified man, is more than all things else. Myself is more to me than God Himself, and Christ Himself, and the Holy Ghost Himself. Put myself in one scale, and all the Godhead in another scale, and it is all as nothing, over against myself. And it is because the nature and the operations of faith reverse all that for me for ever, that, to the day of my death, I so resist the approaches of faith to me and its full dominion in me. It is because faith so humbles me and so slays me and so utterly annihilates me that I find it so impossible for me to live the life of faith. It is because faith every day of my life and in every part of my life makes me nothing and far less than nothing, while it makes Another everything and far more than everything. That was the rub with Halyburton also, who when he was in any spiritual strait, ‘betook himself to any shift but Christ. Anything,’ he said, ‘rather than faith and Christ.’ And that was the same rub with Bunyan. That was the reason why he was so put to it both with the word Faith and with the thing. It was because he had to go wholly and for ever out of himself for his salvation. It was because he had to depend wholly and for ever on Another; and, to add to his difficulty, that Other was one he had never seen, but by that faith which all through so put him to it. And he had to depend on that unseen Another for hourly pardon, for hourly peace, and for everything else worth having, on earth and in heaven, in time and in eternity. He had to count all his best things to be but dung compared with Christ, and all his best deeds to be but filthy rags, beside the robe of Christ’s righteousness. And worst of all he had to take all his sins and all his sinfulness; all the vilest and all the wickedest things he had ever done, or had ever desired to do, and he had to lay them all on the substituted head of the Son of God. He had to go to Calvary every day and every hour and immediately after every sinful thought and word and deed, and he had to lay them all on the Son of God, nailed to the Cross, and there made a curse for him and for his sin. No wonder that that word Faith so terribly put Bunyan to it! And no wonder that we so revolt from that same word ourselves! No wonder it is so hard for us who are so proud and so unbroken men, simply and like little children to receive the atonement! But when Bunyan humbled himself to receive that substitution of Another in his room: or, rather, when he was humbled of God to receive it: no wonder that being the passionate and eloquent man he was he broke forth in this rapturous strain:
‘Oh, methinks it makes my heart to bleed to think that the very Son of God bled to death for me, and for my wicked doings! O, Thou Loving One! O, Thou Blessed One! How much I owe Thee! Now was my heart filled with comfort and with hope. Yea, I was so taken that day with the love and the mercy of God to me, that I could not contain it all till I went home. I could have spoken of God’s mercy to me to the very crows that sat upon the ploughed lands before me, had they been capable to have understood me. To speak as then I thought, had I had a thousand gallons of blood within my veins, I could freely have spilt it all at the feet of my Lord and Saviour.’
After all that I am prepared to receive this so apposite paragraph in Walter Marshall’s Bunyan-like life: Upon consulting several eminent divines, and giving one of them an account of the state of his soul, and particularising his sins which lay upon his conscience, the divine told him that he had forgotten to mention the greatest of all his sins, namely, the master sin of unbelief, in not believing on the Lord Jesus Christ, for the remission of all his sins, and for the sanctification of his heart and his life. Hereupon Marshall set himself to studying and preaching Christ, till he attained to eminent holiness, and to great peace of conscience. His last words on his death-bed were these words out of his favourite Apostle: ‘The gift of God is eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord.’ And now that we have seen something of what true faith is, let us ask before we close who and what a true believer is. Well, a true believer, says a master in these high matters, is one ‘who has given over all other lives but that of faith.’ Ever since I first came on that stroke of experimental and spiritual insight it has dwelt in my mind in a most illuminating and suggestive way. But true and good and most suggestive as that definition of a true believer is, at the same time, standing on my own experience and observation, I will take the liberty of turning that definition round the other way, and will state it to you in this way: A true believer is one who has been given over by all other lives but the life of faith. For all the true believers I know or have ever heard of clung to all their other lives as long as they could. And it was only after all their other lives had shaken them off that they betook themselves to the life of faith. Take some of the greatest believers in the Bible. Take that saint and psalmist of such wonderful spiritual genius, Asaph. In his priceless seventy-third psalm Asaph tells us his own painful experience in this matter of all his lives giving him over. He frankly tells us, for one thing, how consumed he was with envy at the men who were in greater prosperity than he was himself. Their great prosperity was his continual torment. He felt as if he had nothing left to live for, so torn with envy was he and so miserable. And all that went on till he took all that up to the sanctuary where faith in God was preached and sung and celebrated continually. And it was when he was standing one day in the heavenly light of the sanctuary, that the spirit of faith came down upon him till, like Bunyan, he could not contain himself till he went home, but sang this psalm on the spot till all the other worshippers heard him:
Nevertheless, continually, O Lord, I am with Thee:
Thou dost me hold by my right hand, And still upholdest me. My flesh and heart doth faint and fail, But God doth fail me never: For of my heart God is the strength And portion for ever. And so it was with the prophet Habakkuk. You all have his noble song by heart:
‘Although the fig-tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines: the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: yet will I rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation.’ And in this also as in everything else of an experimental kind Paul comes in to crown them all. And then ourselves. Many of us now here are true believers, just in the measure that this life and that other life of ours have given us over. God would never get us at all unless He made first this life of ours and then that to give us over. I would tell out all your spiritual life as well as all my own were I to enter into those particular lives of ours that He has made to cast us off and to give us over to the life of faith. God makes all manner of losses and crosses and disappointments and bereavements to come to us in order to shut us up to the life of faith and to Himself. Till He makes this song to be sung over us as well as over all the desolate and downcast in Israel: On eagles’ wings they mount, they soar, Their wings are faith and love, Till past the cloudy regions here, They rise to heav’n above. The true believer then, the truest and the best and the most blessed believer, is just the man who has absolutely no other life left him to live but the life of faith. Christ and his faith in Christ: that, now, sums up his whole life. Till to him also to live is Christ, and to die is gain. Properly speaking, he has no book now left him but his Bible; and he is scarce ever out of his Bible, either by reading or by meditation, day nor night. And that goes on with him till his faith is to him nothing less than the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen as yet.
One moment more: for I find this among my notes on this word faith; and I will give it, not to the congregation but to the divinity students present. I find this among my notes, after I think my sixth or seventh reading, and that pencil in hand, of Dr. Thomas Goodwin’s golden volume on The Object and Acts of Justifying Faith. This is my note:
‘Let any divinity student or young preacher master Goodwin’s eighth volume by repeated and by student-like readings, and he will be set up in his own soul and in his pulpit on that word faith for the rest of his life.’
God bless the divinity students with this great gift of saving faith. Till they preach faith to their believing people with that full assurance and that full authority which a personal experience of it alone can give.