WHILE specially associated in Christian thought with justification, that initial act of consecration to God with which the Christian life in its higher forms commonly begins, faith is by no means confined to it. On the contrary, it abides as a permanent element in the religious life. It is the instrument not only of justification, but of sanctification as well. It is the presupposition of all the higher religious virtues, and enters so indissolubly into the making of the Christian life that the words of the apostle are literally true: “Whatsoever is not of faith is sin” (Rom_14:23).
Faith is not the only means of sanctification. The Cross of Christ sanctifies, the Holy Spirit sanctifies, prayer sanctifies. But that faith also is an instrument of sanctification there is no doubt. “According to your faith be it unto you,” Jesus used to say to the sick and impotent folk who sought His healing when He was on earth. The exalted Christ had a similar message for Saul the persecutor, when He changed him into Paul the apostle. “I send thee unto the Gentiles,” He told His new-found bondman and freeman, “that they may receive an inheritance among them that are sanctified by faith in me” (Act_26:18). And in the last word of Peter which the Book of Acts records, that spoken to the Jerusalem Council, we listen to the same note. God, Peter declared, “made no distinction” between us Jews and those strangers and foreigners who had been drawn to Him from heathendom,”purifying” or “cleansing their hearts by faith,” just as He did and does our own (Act_15:7-9). According to our faith is our spiritual health. We are sanctified by faith in Christ. God cleanses and purifies the heart by faith. The teaching of the New Testament seems consistent and clear.
There is an old book that rings with the music to which some of us are never tired of hearkening—the book which Walter Marshall wrote more than two hundred years ago, and which he called The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification. Ebenezer and Ralph Erskine, and that redoubtable swordsman Adam Gib, recommended it, in the century after its publication, to Scottish saints; and so the most cautious and conservative theologian among us need not look askance at its doctrine. The book sprang, as the best books do, out of a personal experience. Walter Marshall was a Presbyterian minister in England in the times of the Commonwealth and the Restoration. But for many years he was exercised with troubled thoughts, and by his own mortifying efforts he sought for peace of conscience. The peace did not come; his trials still increased. Whereupon he consulted others, and particularly Mr. Baxter, whose writings had been his daily counsellors; and Richard Baxter, as wise as he was humble, told him that these writings were harming instead of helping him, for he was taking them too legally. Afterwards, still hungering after the hidden treasure, he sought out “an eminent divine, Dr. T. G.,” as the prefatory note to The Gospel Mystery designates him—that is, Dr. Thomas Goodwin. He gave him an account of the state of his soul. He went minutely over the sins which lay on him like a weighty burden. But Goodwin replied that he had forgotten to mention the greatest sin of all, that of unbelief, in not believing on the Lord Jesus Christ both for the remission of his guilt and for the sanctifying of his nature. Goodwin was a true spiritual surgeon that day; he diagnosed the malady, and his scalpel laid hare the mischief; his word was a word in season. Walter Marshall saw at last the truth which Francis Quarles preaches, and which not a few Christians are culpably slow to learn, that
It is an error ev’n as foul to call
Our sins too great for pardon as too small.
He set himself to the studying of Christ as he had not studied Him before; and he attained to eminent holiness, much peace of conscience, and joy in the Holy Ghost. When King Charles came home, they put him, the quaint Preface says, “under the Bartholomew Bushel, with near two thousand more lights, whose illuminations made the land a Goshen.” But the Bartholomew Bushel distressed him exceedingly little; for he had received his baptism of assurance and strength; and out of his own history he spun for you and me his golden book. What is the Gospel Mystery of Sanctification? It is, Walter Marshall answers, the simplicity and the continuance of a faith which is always waiting on Christ, and taking from Christ, and rejoicing in Christ. [Note: A. Smellie, Lift Up Your Heart, 73.]
The work which the Lord had assigned her [Madame Guyon] was wholly different from what she had anticipated. God often works thus. Thus, at the foot of the Alps, when she thought her great business was to make ointments, and cut linen, and bind up wounds, and tend the sick, and teach poor children the alphabet and the catechism (important vocations to those whom Providence calls to them), she uttered a word from her burdened heart, in her simplicity without knowing or thinking how widely it would affect the interests of humanity, or through how many distant ages it would be re-echoed. And that word was, Sanctification by Faith. Both the thing and the manner of the thing struck those who heard her with astonishment. Sanctification itself was repugnant; and sanctification by faith inexplicable. In the Protestant Church, it would have been hardly tolerable; but in the Roman Catholic Church, which is characterized by ceremonial observances, the toleration of a sentiment which ascribes the highest results of inward experience to faith alone, was impossible. So that, instead of being regarded as an humble and devout Catholic, as she supposed herself to be, she found herself suddenly denounced as a heretic. But the Word was in her heart, formed there by infinite wisdom; and in obedience to that deep and sanctified conviction which constitutes the soul’s inward voice, she uttered it; uttered it now, and uttered it always, “though bonds and imprisonments awaited her.” [Note: T. C. Upham, The Life of Madame Guyon, 155.]
