CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 6
Difficulties Concerning Faith
The next step after consecration in the soul’s progress is that of faith. And here, as in the first step, the soul encounters at once certain forms of difficulty and hindrance.
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.
“Of course it is by faith,” he says, “for 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 nor how to get it.” Baffled at the very outset by this insuperable 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 easiest of exercise.
Your idea of faith is either a religious exercise of soul or an inward, gracious disposition of heart, something tangible. When you have secured it, you can look at and rejoice over it and use it as a passport to God’s favor 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 the least like this. It is nothing at all tangible. It is simply believing God. 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. If you believe the truth, you are saved; if you believe a lie, you are lost. Your salvation comes, not because your faith saves you, but because it links you to the Savior who saves.
Recognize, then, the extreme simplicity of faith—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. What does it mean 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 this trust 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 babysitters 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.
Try to imagine yourself acting in your human relations as you do in your spiritual relations. 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 into 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.” When your friends met 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 utter folly. Ask yourself: If this want of faith in your fellowmen is so dreadful and such utter folly, what must it be when you tell God that you have no power to trust Him, nor 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 fellowmen 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 Savior who laid down His life for you and of whom it is declared that He is “able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him”?
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? 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.
God 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. 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 that 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? I remember, very early in my Christian life, having every tender and loyal impulse within me stirred to the depths by an appeal I met within a volume of old sermons, to all who loved 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 the glory of being called to walk in paths so dark that only an utter recklessness of trust would be possible!
You have trusted God in a few things, and He has not failed you. Trust Him now for everything, and see if He does not do for you exceeding 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. It is a law of 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.
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 appearance, but no matter. Set your face like a flint to say, “I will believe, and I know I shall not be destroyed.” If you are a child of God at all, 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 none of the powers of earth or hell shall be able to make me doubt my wonderful, glorious, faithful Redeemer!”
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 unto praise and honour and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ.”