1. The gospel, or message of salvation, which is offered to faith is more than a discourse concerning Christ. It is an actual presentation of Christ, a definite offer of Christ; and Christ, with all His saving power; is present by His Spirit in the Word, which preaches Him. The due response to the message, therefore, cannot be merely an intellectual assent to the propositions it contains regarding Christ, even when these, are accompanied by aesthetic admiration, or emotional delight. It must consist in a hearty consent to the claims made on behalf of Christ, which indeed He makes for Himself—an owning of Christ, in an individual act of homage, as supreme in the whole realm of human life; a personal acceptance of Him as Saviour and Lord; a trustful commitment of the soul to Him, as. the One who alone can redeem from the guilt and power of sin, with all its penalties; a definite choice of Christ, as the highest good and satisfaction of man, as He is also the perfect revelation of God.. The- usage of Scripture, confirmed by Christian experience, warrants us in giving this religious, soteriological significance to faith. In it God reaches man, and occupies him wholly; and man reaches God, committing himself absolutely to the love crowned on Calvary.
I am persuaded that faith in the gospel always is and always must be an appropriating faith, and that there is no true faith in the gospel which is not so. When a man opens his eyes upon the sun, he necessarily appropriates his share of its light, and he cannot look upon the sun without making this appropriation. In like manner no man can look upon the Sun of righteousness, which is the love of God manifested in Christ Jesus, without appropriating his own share of its blessed light. He that believes really in the love of God to the world cannot but believe in the love of God to himself. The general belief and the appropriating belief are not two beliefs, but one just as the general receiving the light of the sun, and the particular receiving our own share, are not two receivings, but one. God tells me in His Word that “He is in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing unto them their trespasses.” When this message comes to me, can I put any other interpretation on it than that God is reconciling me, and not imputing my trespasses to me? I think that any person who understands the meaning of these words, and believes them to be the true words of God, must see that they imply forgiveness for himself. [Note: T. Erskine, Tice Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel, 62.]
The more I think of the teaching of our Lord concerning faith the more I have the sense that around us there is a sea of power and love and strength and life, and that the thing that we need to learn above all else is to become so receptive that that sea can break in upon us. Is not that the message that we need as we confront the duty that lies before us? Truth is given only to men and women who are facing their duty. As we face the task that we have to do, somehow there comes to us the revelation of God that can help us to do it. If we shun our whole duty our thought of God contracts, and less seems possible to us. As you and I face what lies before us now, let us realize that it may be that we are also face to face with the greatest potentiality of getting to know God that we have ever had in our lives, and our victory depends upon our opening our minds to Him in order that He may come in to flood them with His strength and life. [Note: D. S. Cairns, in Friends and the War, 84.]
2. This receptivity of faith is one of the overlooked, or at least under-estimated, facts in Christian experience. The evangelist is quite aware of its truth, and yet he fails to emphasize it. It seems too high and too mystic to the ordinary believer. It leads us into mysteries for which many have no care. Yet it is really as simple and as natural as most of the tenderer and sweeter and more potent experiences of life.
(1) How much inspiration and courage and hope, and how much healing and vitality, is continually passing from man to man. That is a certainty to which every student who has been intellectually quickened sets his seal. In his formative and plastic youth he came under the influence of some teacher whom he learned to trust, and of whose good-will and eager desire to help he gained assurance. That teacher’s word awoke his dull and dormant mind, and quickened his sluggish energies. To be with him, to hear him speak, and to catch the kindling light in his eye was to find that the teacher’s virtue was passing into the scholar.
Carlyle has told us that he spent ten absorbing days in reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. At their close the spirit of Gibbon, his zeal for knowledge, his love of large and far-seeing generalizations, and his power of visualizing the scenes of the past, became in some measure the possession of his reader. In simpler and in swifter fashion we know how the spirit of a general on the field of battle will animate and renerve every regiment of his line. In that deeper world of spiritual experience the receptivity of faith comes to the fulness of its power. Most men and women believe in man before they believe in God. Little children gain first an assurance and a conviction of their father’s wisdom and their mother’s love, and through these they pass to faith in God. The awaking of a young soul, and the rising up within him of zeal and of desire, are usually due to some strong personality in whom he whole-heartedly believes. Faith is a subtle contagion. As he comes into contact with the man or woman he trusts the words spoken sink down into his heart, the prayers uttered become the liturgy of his petitions, the hopes which are his leader’s motives make the young disciple’s face to shine. There were men and women who felt that McCheyne’s spiritual passion passed from him into their souls. There were devout believers who made long and costly journeys that they might be reconsecrated by an hour in Spurgeon’s presence. There were students trembling under their temptations who felt that Henry Drummond’s influence was the elixir of life to their wills. His unfaltering loyalty and intense purity seemed to run along the chords of their being. [Note: W. M. Clow, The Secret of the Lord, 288.]
(2) But no man, however wise and however godly, can be to his fellow-man what Christ is to His people. When we trust Him we lay ourselves soul and spirit and body before Him, and His Divine energy floods our being. We receive because we believe, and we receive according to our faith. We understand how all things are possible to him that believeth. As we trust and open out our nature to Him, we receive new life into our dying souls, new strength into our flagging wills, new vigour into our drooping thoughts, new power into our withered faculties. We can receive new vitality not only into our soul and our spirit, but into our body.
This is the truth which Christian Science has been feeling after, although it has stumbled on its very threshold. It is not God’s way to work needless miracles. It is not His will to prevent our suffering when we break His laws. It is not Christ’s way to keep us from dashing our foot against the stone if we fling ourselves from some pinnacle in self-will. It is not God’s will to heal all our sorrows and to quench all our pain. God has a message in sorrow and a ministry in pain. Neither sorrow nor pain is evil. It is the sin behind them that burdens God’s heart. But it is an uncontestable fact, which even a sceptical science has begun to realize, that a healing and renewing energy from Christ can pass, not only into the soul and the spirit, but into the body of the man who trusts Him. He receives his healing because he believes.. Only in the atmosphere of faith can Christ work His miracles of healing. Virtue goes out of Christ into those who touch with faith only the hem of His garment.
Faith spans up blisse; what sin and death
Puts us quite from,
Lest we should run for’t out of breath,
Faith brings us home ;
So that I need no more, but say
I do believe,
And my most loving Lord straitway
Doth answer, Live! [Note:Henry Vaughan, “Faith.”]
3. The receptiveness of faith is like all knowledge of truth and all use of forces. Man does not create any truth. He discovers it, receives it. Man does not add a particle to the power in existence. He adjusts himself to it,, appropriates it. Faith, however, is not mere passivity. Faith is the supreme energy of man in self-committal, as he puts himself under the law and spirit of Christ. The action of man in receiving and responding has been minimized almost to nothing, because the faith alone without its object is nothing, as if man’s energy, because it is unavailing without the forces of nature, were unessential, whereas-those forces are unavailing unless man understands them and directs them to his uses intellectual reception is not passive. Instruction, we say, has only to be received. But, to receive it, one must be teachable, attentive, alert. One has only to receive reproof, but, to receive it, he must be humble and repentant. To receive Christ by faith, one must make himself over, in his whole purpose and energy, to the law and leading of Christ. As a strong personality dominates another intellectually, inspiring him with the zeal of knowledge, or influences his character, so Christ dominates His followers through the faith which His perfection and love inspire.
One of the passengers on board the Atlantic, which was wrecked Off Fisher’s Island, was Principal J. R. Andrews of New London. ‘He could not swim but he determined to make a desperate effort to ‘save his life. Binding a life-preserver about him, he stood on the edge of the deck waiting his opportunity, and when he saw a wave moving shoreward, he jumped into the rough breakers and was borne safely to land. He was saved by faith. He accepted the conditions of salvation. Forty perished in a scene where he was saved. In one sense he saved himself; in another sense he depended upon God. It was a combination of personal activity and dependence upon God that resulted in his salvation. If he had not used the life-preserver, he would have perished; if he had not cast himself into the sea, he would have perished. So faith in Christ is reliance upon Him for salvation; but it is also our own making of a new start in life and the showing of our trust by action. [Note: A. H. Strong, Systematic Theology, iii. 840.]
4. But faith is more than reception. It is more than the reception of a personal Saviour. It is appropriation. It is the reception of Christ as one’s own “proper” Saviour. For it is not enough for the sinner’s peace that he believes that God is gracious. He must believe that God is gracious to him. It is not enough that he believes that Christ made atonement for sins. He must believe that Christ made atonement for his sins. He must find the word me in the bosom of the word world. The language of his faith must be—“God so loved ‘me’ that he gave his only-begotten Son that believing in him, should not perish but have everlasting life. The Son of God loved ‘me’ and gave himself for me’.” The believer thus realizes his property, or, as it was often called, his “right of propriety,” in the grace of the Great Father, and the atoning work of the Great Saviour. He appropriates to himself what God is, and did, and does, in so far as He is exhibited in the gospel—in so far as He is the Father of mercies. He appropriates to himself what Christ did, and does, and is, in so far ad He too is exhibited in the gospel—in so far as He is a merciful High Priest and Saviour.
It is at once the privilege and the duty of the sinner to “ply diligently,” as Luther used to express it, “the first personal pronoun,” and say me, me.
“What avails to believe that God is a Father,” asks John Rogers reasonably, “if I believe him not to be mine?” What avails to believe “that Christ is a perfect Saviour, who died for man’s sins, and rose again for his righteousness, except I believe that he did these for me?”What avails to believe in” the forgiveness of sins, and the resurrection to eternal life, except I believe they belong to me?” [Note: “Doctrine of Faith, 27.]
How beautiful is that verse, Psa_31:14, “I have trusted in thee, O Jehovah: I have said, Thou art my God.” Those last four words sublimely express appropriation. And if you want to see how the Psalmist understood appropriation, look in Psalm 18. Nine times he uses the possessive personal pronoun in the singular number—my. “I will love Thee, O Lord, my strength.” “The Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust; my buckler, and the horn of my salvation, and my high tower.” That is about as many “rays” as we can get into one verse. [Note: A. T. Pierson, Foundation Truths, 36.]
