1. What is the difference between little faith and great faith? It is a difference of vitality. This is clearly shown by our Lord when He spoke of what faith could do if it were as a grain of mustard seed. “As a grain of mustard seed” (Mat_17:20), small and insignificant but alive, faith grows in soul and society, till harmonies of living song find home and shelter therein. Such is the nature of faith as Jesus presents it.
(1) The mustard seed has vitality. It is only an annual, yet in Palestine it grows to the height of about twelve feet. One of the rabbis said that his mustard tree flourished so much in a certain year that he could climb into the branches of it. Whether that is true or not it illustrates the character of the mustard seed. It may begin small, but it cannot stay small; a grain of sand may, but not a mustard seed. Plant it and it takes hold of all the advantages of its environment; the tiny white tendrils shoot out and drain all the chemical powers that are stored in the ground, and draw the moisture from below, so that ere long it is on its way to become a fair tree.
So faith is represented by Christ as that which, if only possessed in the magnitude of a mustard seed, may be capable of great spiritual results; but it is to be possessed as a seed, and a seed is capable of becoming a tree, if only it is complete; it is not the size of the seed that determines its importance, a portion of a large seed is not the same as the whole of a small one; no, the seed contains a principle of life, and so faith in the heart, if it be but genuine, may grow and bear most wonderful fruits. The question then for a man to ask himself is, What faith have I? am I believing in God, or am I believing in the world? am I walking through this life as one to whom this life is everything, as one whose highest end it is to enjoy the pleasures of sense for a season, and to allow all selfish passions and desires to run riot in excess; or am I walking through it in the fear of God, as one who knows that God’s eye is upon his most secret thoughts, or still more as one who feels that having been redeemed by Christ ‘from the dominion of Satan and sin, he is bound to yield himself up, body, soul, and spirit, to do Christ’s will?
(2) Because it has vitality it has power. It is able to “remove mountains.” That is literally true as a scientific statement. One of the most interesting features in denudation, as the geologists call it, is the way in which a little seed will fall into a fissure of rock, and begin to swell and grow, until in process of time the rock splits and breaks off, then crumbles and is borne by the rain into the nearest rivulet, which carries it down till it becomes sand on the sea-shore: the seed is moving the mountain into the sea. It is very slow, you say, but is it less certain? Imperceptible motion is no proof of immobility. The frozen glacier is really a flowing stream. Remember how in Mark 11 we read the story of the leafy but fruitless fig tree. Christ spoke a solemn ban, and apparently nothing happened. The fig tree looked none the worse. Next morning however the result was apparent. As Mark says (Mar_11:14; Mar_11:20), the withering was from the roots, invisible but immediate.
The mustard seed has that which the mountain has not. Emerson has a quaint little poem about a mountain and a squirrel quarrelling. The mountain taunted the squirrel with his insignificance, and the squirrel replied that though he could not bear a forest on his back, he could crack a nut as the mountain could not. [Note: H. C. Lees, The Sunshine of the Good News, 182.]
(3) If faith has vitality as a grain of mustard seed it will have power to remove mountains. But not all at once. God gives us power for what He wants us to be; i.e. power for the next step; and all our future life is conditioned upon that. We say, “Increase our faith,” and He says, “Exercise the faith you have.” We must exercise the lower power before we attain to the higher. Suppose there is a powerful steam-engine which is able to do for you a year’s work in a day: it is a reservoir of power, but the power is conditioned upon the exercise of a lower power; you must bring coals and fetch water and make up fire, and by and by the power becomes accessible to you. He that is faithful in least is faithful also in much; we must be faithful to the light already given us, faithful to our powers of love, thought, and obedience, if we are to be brought to the reception of the power in which saints have walked.
I see a man with no very brilliant intellect, filled with faith, go down to some mission district where there is a perfect mountain of prejudice, paganism, and indifference. It seems a slight thing to go down just this man with his faith. I go there five or ten years afterwards, and find the church crowded to the doors, and round him a warm-hearted, enthusiastic band of people, some of the public-houses shut up, and the moral tone of the whole place changed. How has it been done? Simply and solely by his faith. Faith has removed mountains; he has thrown himself upon GOD — GOD has answered to the call. He has gone in the name of JESUS CHRIST, and the LORD has been working with him, and therefore what has happened is that his faith has removed mountains, as was promised. [Note: A. F. W. Ingram, The Gospel in Action, 119.]
2. Great faith is due not to the range of belief but to its reality. Faith, however limited or feeble, if only genuine and vital, is full of efficacy. A grain of genuine trust in the righteous God, in the supernatural universe, in the Divine government, in the virtue of the Cross, in the power of grace, iii the life everlasting, contains within itself all virtue and promise. A hundred guineas were recently refused for a microscopic speck of the pollen of a rare orchid, so precious is the dust of beauty. The fact is, that microscopic speck of pollen would have enabled its purchaser to produce no one knows what abundance of hybrid and original orchids; to have adorned his own and a thousand other conservatories with new and delightful flowers. So our Lord teaches that out of a microscopic speck of genuine faith in God, in His most holy Word, in His eternal promise in Christ Jesus, will spring purity and peace, strength and victory, high character and heroic service—in this world all the graces of the Spirit, and in the next all the flowers and fruits of paradise. A vague, passive faith that is neither belief nor disbelief is worth little; a sterling faith, however weak- and hesitating, holds the potency and promise of universal grace and glory.
Some men seem to think they strengthen themselves against unbelief by multiplying the number of things they believe. They turn Romanists for fear of infidelity, as if a man should think that by filling the bottom of the boat with stones he keeps the sea further from him. [Note: J. Ker, Thoughts for Havre and Life, 112.]
3. The question is sometimes asked, What is the minimum of belief for the profession of Christianity? How little may a man believe and still call himself a follower of Christ? It is a mistaken question. The question never is how little or how much but what does a man believe, and how. There is at present a persistent demand for greater simplicity of doctrine, and that demand usually means fewer doctrines. But it is not a smaller amount of doctrine, it is a larger unity of doctrine. It is a more profound entrance into the heart of doctrine, in which its unity and simplicity reside, a more true grasp and enforcement of its spiritual meaning.
Take an example. There is none better for our purpose than that which is continually thrusting itself upon us in the discussion of the duration of future punishment. The condition of that question is one of the strangest of the phenomena of thought that ever have been seen. These two features in it impress us: first, it is being gravely and earnestly asserted that the principal question, at any rate a vital question, concerning the religion which teaches man that as the son of God it is his privilege and duty to love and obey his Father, is, What will become of him if he refuses to obey and love? And secondly, a multitude of men are found discussing whether punishment is to be temporary or eternal, who do not in their hearts believe that there is to be any punishment at all.
This state of things must have come from the loss or obscuration of the central truth, about which the whole problem of man’s destiny must take its shape, which is the malignant and persistent character of human sin. Not as a question of what a few texts mean, not as a curious search after arbitrary enactments, but as a deep study into the inevitable necessities of spiritual life, with a profound conviction that whatever comes to any man in the other life will come because it must come, because nothing else could come to such a man as he is, so ought the truth of future punishment to be investigated and enforced.
For after all the preaching of rewards and punishments through all these centuries, the truth remains that no man in any century ever yet healthily and helpfully desired heaven who did not first desire holiness, and no man ever yet healthily and helpfully feared hell who did not first fear sin.
Men must be made to feel that the Christian religion is not a mass of separate questions having little connexion with one another, on all of which a man must have made up his mind before he can be counted a believer. The spiritual unity of the faith must be brought out and its simplicity asserted in the prominence given to the personal life and work of Jesus Christ and loyalty to Him as the test of all discipleship. There are excrescences upon the faith which puzzle and bewilder men and make them think themselves unbelievers when their hearts are really faithful. Such excrescences must be cast away, not by violent excision from without, but by the natural and healthy action of the system on which they have been fastened, which, as it grows stronger, will shed them, because they do not really belong to it. There are doctrinal statements which have done vast good though they were but the temporary aspects of truth as it struggled to its completest exhibition. They are doing vast good today, men are living by them still, but it is as men are seeing still the light of stars that were extinguished in the heavens years ago. Such partial, temporary statements men are still living by; but the time must come when they will disappear, and then it will be of all importance, when the star goes out, whether the men who have been looking at it and walking by it have known all along of the sun by whose light it shone, and which will shine on after this accidental and temporary point of its exhibition has disappeared for ever.
God, if this were enough,
That I see things bare to the buff
And up to the buttocks in mire;
That I ask nor hope nor hire,
Nut in the husk,
Nor dawn beyond the dusk,
Nor life beyond death:
God, if this were faith?
Having felt thy wind in my face
Spit sorrow and disgrace,
Having seen thine evil doom
In Golgotha and Khartoum,
And the brutes, the work of thine hands,
Fill with injustice lands
And stain with blood the sea:
If still in my veins the glee
Of the black night and the sun
And the lost battle, run :
If, an adept,
The iniquitous lists I still accept
With joy, and joy to endure and be withstood,
And still to battle and perish for a dream of good;
God, if that were enough?
If to feel in the ink of the slough,
And the sink of the mire,
Veins of glory and fire
Run through and transpierce and transpire,
And a secret purpose of glory in every part,
And the answering glory of battle fill my heart;
To thrill with the joy of girded men,
To go on for ever and fail and go on again,
And be mauled to the earth and arise,
And contend for the shade of a word and a thing not seen with the eyes :
With the half of a broken hope for a pillow at night
That somehow the right is the right
And the smooth shall bloom for the rough:
Lord, if that were enough? [Note: R. L. Stevenscn, “If this were Faith.”]
