I. Its achievements
I. Its achievements
It renders the personality of the man who has it effective for God; his finite capabilities are raised to superhuman power; it endows him with power for spiritual results. Barnabas was full of faith and of power. Power is the inseparable concomitant of fullness of faith; they are hemispheres of the same globe. The simplest definition of power is faith in God. He who is full of faith is mighty through God. Deprive D. L. Moody of this faith, and all his native personal force would achieve nothing in the great work of evangelization; he would be powerless.
Nothing other than John Wesleys superadded faith made his scholarship, culture, and marked individuality so effective and far-reaching for good as they have proved. This fullness of faith empowers all religious activities: it gives weight to our words of testimony, exhortation, and instruction; freighted with it they carry a spiritual avoirdupois which may break stolid hearts into penitence, or exert a spiritual force that may lift souls up to God.
With it a sentence often achieves more than a sermon without it.
An aged Christian lady visited a worldly, irreligious man at his home, and said to him: You ought not to lose your soul. Just what he had heard before in sermons and exhortations; but as they fell from the lips of that saintly woman, freighted with a great faith, they weighed, as he said, upon his heart so that he could not eat or sleep or work, or do aught else, until he had given his heart to Christ. Mr. Finney was a man of such faith that his words of reproof and appeal went in an airline to the heart, producing immediate impression in the soul. He met at one time a worldly young woman, who belonged to the family in which he was a guest, coming out of the Church at the close of one of his impressive services. He said to her: Where are you going? She replied: Home. Yes, rejoined Mr. Finney, to your long home.
Her countenance fell, she grew sober, walked silently and tremblingly to her home, and when Mr. Finney arrived she lay upon the floor in an agony of distress on account of her lost condition. I know a lady whose words in ordinary conversation have a spiritual edge which faith alone can put to language. Sitting one evening in the midst of a social company, she began to speak so impressively, in a natural and unpretentious way, of the Lords dealings with her soul that some began to weep. Noticing it, she modestly asked the privilege of praying. When they arose, a husband and wife had found the joy of a restored salvation, and a young lady had been enriched with the pearl of great price. Her words had been words of faith. Such a faith imparts an effectiveness to pulpit utterances, home counsels, and Sabbath-school instruction, as they can not have without it. The fullness of faith empowers the life of the child of God; it makes it tell; it invests it with a quietness of manner, a sweetness of spirit, and an earnestness of demeanor that is more influential in winning souls to Christ than any other thing. There was a young man who had become infatuated with the deceits of Ingersollism. He thought he had come to a full acceptance of its errors, and had about concluded that the Church was nothing to be respected, the Bible a human invention, and religion a mere fancy. Just about this time he went to write at the same desk in an office where there stood opposite him a devoted young man, full of faith and the Holy Ghost. There they stood facing each other, pushing busily their pens for several months.
Occasionally the young skeptic would flaunt out his reproaches upon Christianity, and his infidel objections. His godly associate refrained from any sharp retorts, and declined all controversy, but kept his soul so full of faith that he wore a bright face, carried a good spirit, and maintained an irreproachable life. One evening this skeptical young man fell in with the pastor of the Church to which his religious business companion belonged.
As they walked together this disciple of Ingersoll said very abruptly: I have made up my mind to join your Church. The pastor, much surprised, said: I am glad of it. Come next Sabbath and I will receive you; and now tell me what has changed your mind. O, said he, I have been writing for several months at a desk with a young man, a member of your Church. He never gets out of humor; he always seems so happy, and he is so kind that he has burned all my infidelity out of me, and I want just what he has, and I believe he has religion. The next Sabbath he united with the Church, and is now a happy and useful Christian. That Christian young man lived a life of faith, and it told. The fullness of faith always enables the Christian to live a spiritually energized life for God. The works and labors of love in Christian life are multiplied and enlarged under the power of a fullness of faith. It originates greater things, plans larger enterprises, inaugurates bolder endeavors, and compasses richer results than faith in its minor measures.
Its works for the salvation of men are wonderful; it always abounds in the work of the Lord. It carries forward a sustained work of prayer. The man full of faith is pre-eminently a man of prayer; he, like Payson, is audacious in prayer; asks large things, and asks with a boldness whose demands God never denies. Said one who listened to one of the simple prayers of that prince of faith, Bishop William Taylor, He isnt backward in asking the Lord for great things. No man of faith is. Success crowns the man full of faith; he doesnt fail; his labor is not in vain; whatsoever he doeth prospers; fruit appears; results follow. The fullness of faith accomplishes the grand achievements of transforming its possessor into a power for God, and of precipitating divine movements in the Church, the world, and human hearts, which eventuate in marked results in the salvation of souls.