Faith in Jesus is an energy. It requires the effort of spiritual insight and the surrender of personal trust.
1. Spiritual insight.—We have seen how faith in Jesus apprehends His majesty and power, and we have seen how it apprehends His love; let us now see how it calls upon spiritual thought and purpose. “The disciples came to the other side and forgot to take bread. And Jesus said unto them, Take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees. And they reasoned among themselves, saying, We took no bread. And Jesus perceiving it said, O ye of little faith, why reason ye among yourselves, because ye have no bread? Do ye not yet perceive, neither remember the five loaves of the five thousand, and how many baskets ye took up? How is it that ye do not perceive that I spake not to you concerning bread? But beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees. Then understood they how that he bade them not beware of the leaven of bread, but of the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees” (Mat_16:5-12). Only a short time previously Jesus had been engaged in a painful interview with some of the Pharisees and Sadducees, on which interview, and on His general work and spiritual teaching, they might, had they been possessed of more sympathetic insight, have judged that His thoughts were now dwelling, rather than on their omission to provide bread; more especially as this was an omission which they might know it was fully within His power to supply in case of need. But they, being concerned chiefly about things of sense, and having little perception of the spiritual thought of Jesus, attached a carnal signification to the word “leaven,” and so were reproached by Him for the smallness of their faith.
Such faith is the result not of sight, but of insight; and insight is faith. “Touch me not,” said the risen Christ to the eager Mary. Why? asks St. Bernard. And his answer is: to teach her, and through her all Christ’s followers, that in matters of religion, in things of the spirit, it is not on the evidence of the senses they must rest, but on faith, which reads the deeper evidence, goes straight to the inmost soul, penetrates to the inherent congruity of things, and believes because it has met the truth, and can do no other.
Oh, I am tired out today:
The whole world leans against my door: Cities and centuries. I pray,—
For praying makes me brave once more.
—I should have lived long, long ago,
Before this age of steel and fire.
I am not strong enough to throw
A noose around my soul’s desire
And strangle it, because it cries
To keep its old, unreasoned place
In some bright simple Paradise,
Before a God’s too-human face.
I know that in this breathless fray
I am not fit to fight and cry.
My soul grows faint and far away,
From blood and shouting, till I fly
A blinded coward, back, to hide
My face against the dim old knees
Of that too-human God, denied
By these quick ‘crashing centuries.
And there I learn deep secret things:
Too frail for speech, too strong for doubt:
How through the dark of demon-wings
The same still face of God gleams out;
How through the deadly riotous roar
The voice of God speaks on.
And then I trust Him, as one might before
Faith grew too fond to comfort men.
—I should have lived far, far away
From this great age of grime and gold:
For still, I know He hears me pray,—
That close, too-human God of old! [Note:Fannie S. Davis, Myself and I, 62.]
2. Personal trust.—It was not in the first instance to a belief in any doctrine of His Person that our Lord called His followers. He seemed deliberately to avoid statements about Himself; He did not even announce Himself as the Christ; He silenced the evil spirits who recognized Him. He imposed no form of belief upon those who came to Him: His one demand was personal submission, unbounded confidence in the Master, readiness to follow His leading under all circumstances. This was what He meant by “faith,” and on this purely personal trust He made all to depend. The apostles carried on this teaching. To believe on the Lord Jesus Christ was the condition of salvation which they constantly offered. They held up before the world not a philosophy or a system of doctrines, but a living Person, upon whom they endeavoured to fix the attention, and for whom they claimed the absolute loyalty, of men.
Upon an attitude of reliance He laid the utmost stress. Now by precept, now by parable, now by the discipline of circumstance, He commended that attitude to His followers as all-pleasing to Himself and all-helpful to their highest good. There was nothing which more delighted Him than to see that attitude taken by the human hearts that turned to Him for the succour of His power, for the bliss and rest of His lovingkindness. If ever anything like an abnormal exercise of faith was visible to His gracious eyes He met it not only with complacency but with a wondering pleasure, unspeakably moving as we see it in Him. Whatever the reason, such was the fact; to the Lord Jesus there was in the faith of a human suppliant something which He met with a vivid pleasure and to which His response, at once or after a brief discipline of delay, was always generously large.
In the early years of the Carrubber’s Close Mission, a lady came over from Hamburg for the express purpose of attending its meetings. She was engaged to be married to a Swiss missionary, but in the great revival of 1859-60 she discovered that she was no true Christian, and feared that she would only be a hindrance instead of a help to her future husband in his work.
Having heard in Hamburg of the blessing’ in Edinburgh she resolved to cross over to the latter city in the hope that she too might be blessed.
One of our workers spoke with her night after night, but apparently without any result. One evening on leaving the mission premises it occurred to him to conduct her to her hotel in Princes Street by another and a shorter road. This shorter road led from the foot of Carrubber’s Close, the scene of the mission’s earlier premises, which were then housed in the old Whitfield Chapel, by a narrow low arched passage, not too well lighted, underneath the North Bridge, and then on to Princes Street. Just as they were underneath the old chapel windows he paused and remarked to her, “Now you have come with me this strange road. You have trusted yourself to me, an entire stranger, in the faith that I shall take you to your hotel. Could you not trust your soul to Jesus?”
“Oh, is that it?” she answered; “if I had a thousand souls, I could trust them all to Jesus.” And then she added, “I might have known this at Hamburg.” She returned home full of the joy of the Lord. [Note: William Robertson of the Carrubbers Close Mission, 128.]
