1. In its first stage, faith may be compared to a seed. Christ Himself makes use of this very comparison, when, in answer to His disciples’ prayer, “Lord, increase our faith,” He says, “If ye had faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye might say unto this sycamine tree, Be thou plucked up by the root, and be thou planted in the sea; and it should obey you.” And for the full meaning of this saying we have only to turn to His parable of the Mustard Seed, and we shall see that He points to the steady unfolding of faith. From being hid away in a corner of the heart, it springs up by degrees into a stately tree laden with fruit; and yet all along it is the same faith, the same in its first, almost invisible, beginning and in its final stateliness, as the oak is but the unfolded acorn, and the acorn contains within itself the future growth and strength of the oak.
Is it not to be deplored, that faith should so often be accepted as an end, rather than a great beginning. Following a great beginning, there ought to be a great progress, that there may be a great end. In Christ, your character has a right and a real beginning. You will never have to repent of, nor to alter, this beginning. Your beginning is truly for eternity; for Christ is Eternal. He is “All and in all.” “It hath pleased the Father that in Him all fullness should dwell.” All creations and possibilities are in Him and from Him. “If you have received Christ Jesus the Lord,” do not stand still,—“walk in Him.” Faith is but the starting-post of your race: you must keep the racecourse, “forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth unto those things which are before,” if you mean to win “the prize.” According to another figure; Faith is not your eternal house, but the first stone thereof on the Foundation, Jesus Christ: you must go on to build up your house, and you must take heed how you build thereupon. [Note: J. Pulsford, Quiet Hours, ii. 16.]
2. But the progress of faith is not a mere instinctive act or series of actions. It is our Lord’s teaching that before beginning to build we must count the cost. The faith which, in the plant, goes forward in the absence of prudential considerations, will not go forward in us until the difficulties arising from such considerations have been solved. Our faith must count the cost before beginning to build, and be sure of being able to finish. If I, with power to count the cost, with the capacity of anticipating difficulty and disaster common to man, and perhaps with an inveterate tendency more special to myself of foreboding failure, can go forward as unhesitatingly as the mustard seed grows, it can be only because I have laid such firm hold on the fact of my relation to God that I know myself under His commandment—my feet in the way of obedience—and am, therefore, assured of His help. It is not that a delusion, which I am pleased to call “faith,” has blinded my eyes to facts. I know the difficulties in my way to be as serious as before, the obstacles as many; but I know also that the things that are impossible with men are possible with God. This consciousness of a Divine commission, which makes personally applicable to me every Divine promise, overcometh the world.
If there be growth within us, we know it, for we are changed. Once, slaves to our passions—are we now the children of the will of God? Once, the opinion and the favour of the world were our guides and our goal—do we now suffer carelessly the loss of these things, so only we may approve ourselves to Him who judgeth righteously? Once, yielding readily to wrong, when wrong was pleasant and made life interesting—are we now resolute against temptation? Once, living wholly for this world, utterly wretched at the thought of death—are we now, while we bear the burdens of others here, pilgrims also of the invisible, and not ashamed to die? Once, careless or contemptuous of the thought of God, lightly or impertinently weary of any worship, any religion, do we now reverence the mighty realities of God and His Fatherhood, the reality of His life in the soul, of the love and communion of Christ Jesus, of our spiritual union with the race of man dead and alive, of eternal life, of duty, faith, self-sacrifice in and for God, and for man in God? [Note: S. A. Brooke, Sunshine and Shadow, 107.]
3. In the prosecution of our own schemes, in following the devices and desires of our own hearts, we need to calculate very carefully what means we have at our disposal, to see what they are beforehand, and to test strictly their value. But when we are about our Father’s business, when a Divine voice is calling us to service, we are justified in our expectation of rendering such service, not at our own charges, but supplied from Divine resources. We count the cost and estimate our means as accurately in the one case as in the other; but we have the faith of the grain of mustard seed in the, latter case. Knowing ourselves servants of God, we know that the wealth of heaven and earth is ours in this service; and, therefore, though we count the cost we do it without anxiety.
What men in their senses would tell four thousand or five thousand men to sit down on the grass and enter upon the task of feeding them with some half-dozen loaves and two or three fishes? The disciples never contemplated any such thing. Before they began to distribute their bread among the hungry ranks of men they believed they were entrusted with supplies other and more than the few paltry loaves they were handling. This was no philanthropic design of their own; it was the will of Him whose power they did not expect to see exhausted. Here at least they had the faith of the grain of mustard seed, and drew upon unseen resources. [Note: A. J. Bamford, Things that are Made, 139.]
In simple trust like theirs who heard,
Beside the Syrian sea,
The gracious calling of the Lord,
Let us, like them, without a word,
Rise up and follow Thee.
4. This conscious energetic life of faith should make progress steadily, uninterruptedly. It is motion in a straight line, and not in a closed curve. It is not like an Irish penance around a sacred well where we make progress with the final result of being where we started, and perhaps ready for another revolution, as indeed it must appear to some Christians whose circle is a week and whose starting-point a Sunday. Neither is it like the pilgrimage up Pilate’s staircase at Rome, in which the pain of going up on our knees is varied only by the discomfort of coming down again and finding ourselves just about where we were before, as it must appear to some good people who live the up-and-down life. It is an upward and onward life; on our knees, if you will, but upward and upward and, like the stairs in Ezekiel’s vision, still upward. And the Scriptures encourage us forward, bidding us leave the word of the beginning of Christ and go (not crawl) on unto perfection.
It is, however, a common experience that after the enthusiasm and joy of the beginning there comes a period of stagnation, sometimes even of backsliding. This has been attributed to the continued presence of legalism. History attests that it has ever been found a bard thing to remain standing on the platform of free grace. Descent from that high level to a lower, from grace to law, from faith to technical “good works,” from liberty to bondage, seems to be a matter of course in religious experience, individual and collective. What happened in Galatia repeats itself from age to age, and in all churches. Legalism in some form recurs with the regularity of a law of nature.
How, then, are we to reconcile this fact with the all-sufficiency of faith? We shall best do this by taking into account the law of growth in the Kingdom of God, enunciated by our Lord in the parable of the blade, the ear, and the ripe corn. Legalism is a characteristic of the stage of the green ear, in the spiritual life of the individual and of the community. The blossom and the ripe fruit, the beginning and the end of a normal Christian experience, exhibit the beauty of pure evangelic faith. The green fruit is a lapse from the simplicity of the beginning, a lapse which is at the same time a step in advance, as it prepares the way for a higher stage, in which evangelic faith shall reappear victorious over the legal spirit of fear, distrust, and self-reliance.
The cherry blossom was so proud, so gay,
She told me yesterday
That she would never die,
That her white, exquisite, apparent immaturity
Would spread itself for ever,
While the bee
Sucked, humming love songs, sweetness that would never
Cease to be sweet
From stamens rich amazingly
And meet
Eternally to furnish golden love dust
For endless wooings meant.
She was so proud, so gay,
So confident,
I could not choose but trust
All that I heard her saying yesterday.
Today a little lonely, fluttering,
Pale, fragile, frenzied thing
Came panic strick’n and dumb ;
(Pathetically scared it seemed, poor leafling, so to come)
It settled on my shoulder
Breathlessly,
And feeling it I felt the world grow older
Until it shrank
And shrivelled to nonentity,
A blank
Unmeaning world, annihilate, undivine.
But in a flash there came
Knowledge that swiftly grew,
Spreading like flame.
I have seen the sign, the sign!
Have known her boast irrevocably true. [Note: S. Miles, Dunch, 69.]
5. What warning there for the soul which goes to sleep upon childhood’s first beliefs! What encouragement to the honestly perplexed with difficulties! Belief is a growth: let it grow then, and, as man’s stature outgrows its unsymmetries, let faith outgrow its disharmonies.
O that I may grow!
I see the leaves out-pushing hour by hour,
With steady joy the buds burst out aflower
Urged gladly on by Nature’s waking power.
O that I may grow.
O that I may grow!
What though Time cuts his furrows in my face,
My heart may ever add grace unto grace,
Graces with added days still keeping pace.
O that I may grow. [Note: M. D. Babcock, Thoughts for Every-Day Living, 167.]
