There is a remarkable consensus among apostolic writers in looking upon the Christian life as a new state of being.
1. So new is it that they speak of it unhesitatingly as resulting from a new creation or new birth. In evidence of this the following passages- may be quoted. “Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God. . . . Except a man be born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God” (Joh_3:3; Joh_3:5). “As many as received him, to them gave he the right to become children of God, even to them that believe on his name: which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (Joh_1:12-13). “Lie not one to another; seeing that ye have put off the old man with his doings, and have put on the new man, which is being renewed unto knowledge after the image of him that created him” (Col_3:9-10). “Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures” (Jam_1:18). “Seeing ye have purified your souls in your obedience to the truth unto unfeigned love of the brethren, love one another from the heart fervently: having been begotten again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, through the word of God, which liveth and abideth” (1Pe_1:22-23).
2. It has often been said that Christianity is summed up in the two commands—“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind,” and “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” In fact, this is not Christianity at all; this is Christ’s summary of Judaism, His summary of the law which defines man’s obligation to God. But this definition of man’s obligation to God is not distinctively Christian; it is hardly even distinctively Jewish. Christianity is the statement of what God has done and is doing for man; and what it affirms God has done and is doing for man is this: God has come into life and filled one human life full of Himself that He may fill all human lives full of Himself, and in doing this He has brought the world deliverance from its sins, and transformed its sorrows into sources of a joy deeper than any sorrowless joy.
When Ernest Wilberforce was appointed to the See of Newcastle he received a letter from Wilkinson of St. Peter’s, Eaton Square, who was himself to be raised to the Episcopate before many months had elapsed: “May God bless you, my dear Ernest, in this great work. Mrs. Wilberforce remembers what I have more than once said to her as to the gifts which God has given you. You remember a walk we once had in the Park when we talked of faith in its wider sense as expressing the power which is given to man of opening his heart to receive what God has already given us in Christ Jesus our Lord. Dear Ernest, open wide your heart and receive the fulness of the Power of the Holy Ghost, and let that Divine Spirit bring out for the use of the Church all the gifts which are only waiting for His touch to be developed. Believe that God has chosen you to be His instrument —to be the channel through which His life may flow out to your diocese. The more you feel your natural weakness so much the more do you dwell on the Divine Power which only requires for its manifestation the comprehension of our own nothingness and faith in the reality of His in-dwelling Presence.” [Note: Life of the Right Reverend Ernest Roland Wilberforce, 98.]
3. How is it that we can have such unbounded confidence in faith as the principle of this new life? By what means does it make the new life in Christ a life of sanctity? St. Paul gives an answer. There are two ways in which faith produces holiness of life—it brings the believer into fellowship with Christ, and it is energetic through love.
(1) Fellowship.—Weknow what we mean by communion or intercourse with our fellow-men. By the written word, by word of mouth, even by the silent touch or look, a man enters into relations with his fellow. The one mind acts and reacts upon the other; it gives and receives; it is influenced much or little: the whole personality may be changed by contact with another, whether for better or for worse.
Fellowship with Christ is not essentially different. However mystic and transcendental this fellowship may appear to some minds, it will not be denied that in proportion as it is realized in any Christian experience it must prove a powerful stimulus to Christlike living. No man can, like the apostle, think of himself as dying, rising, and ascending with Christ without being stirred up to strenuous effort after moral heroism. No man, be his temperament what it may, can understand and believe in the lovingkindness of God, as proclaimed in the gospel, without being put under constraint of conscience by his faith. The man who earnestly believes himself to be a son of God must needs try to be Godlike. Even if in spiritual character he be of the unimaginative, unpoetic, matter-of-fact type, he will feel his obligation none the less; it will appear to him a plain question of sincerity, common honesty, and practical consistency. In comparison with the mystic, he may have to plod on his way without aid of the eagle wings of a fervid religious imagination; nevertheless observe him, and you shall see him walk on persistently without fainting. He knows little of devotee raptures; Paul’s way of thinking concerning co-dying and co-rising is too high for him. He does not presume to criticize it, or depreciate its characteristic utterances as the extravagant language of an inflated enthusiasm; he simply leaves it on one side and, renouncing all thought of flying, is content with the pedestrian rate of movement. But the steadiness of his advance approves him also to be a true son of faith.
There thus grows up a mystic union with Christ, an identification of the believer and his Redeemer, so that Christ’s acts become his acts. There is a beautiful reciprocity and interchange of giving and receiving, love answering to love, and life to life. In this self-forgetful surrender of the whole man to Christ, the old ego with its inner strife and trembling vanishes, and a new selfless personality, a new spiritual manhood, takes its place, of which we can give no other explanation than that which Paul offers us, as the secret of his own experience—“I live; and yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me” (Gal_2:20). “Faith in Christ” means “life in Christ.” And this complete yielding of self and vital union with the Saviour, this dying and rising again, is at once man’s supreme ideal and the source of all moral greatness.
In all human history and experience have men ever discovered a more uplifting moral force than the companionship of Jesus Christ? Think of the transforming influence that He exerted, in the days of His earthly life, upon the characters of that little band of men and women who companied with Him among the hills of Galilee. Business men and tax-gatherers, fishermen and soldiers, women in their homes and women on the streets—all climbed to heights of which they had never dreamed, and this simply through the influence of this strange Man they had come to love. They may not have been able to analyse, perhaps hardly even realize, what had happened to them; all they knew was that He had come into their lives, and that that had made all the difference. And, after He had left the earth as a visible presence, this kind of thing went on happening. Indeed, the magic of His presence was even more potent than before. Those who needed Him, and longed for Him, found Him entirely available, even though not visible to their earthly eyes. And this discovery was always as sunlight flooding into darkened lives. Here is, indeed, the very heart and core of Christian experience; and from generation to generation it has never failed. Into lives wearied by failure, bruised by pain and sorrow, barren of hope, empty of meaning and purpose, He comes, when the door is open, and His coming always turns the scale. “Jesus Christ came into my cell last night,” wrote Samuel Rutherford, in prison in Aberdeen, “and every stone of it glowed like a ruby.” “Beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness”—these are some of Christ’s exchanges. Is there a man or woman among us who does not need this transfiguring touch on character and circumstance? Is there one of us who can afford to do without the proffered friendship of Jesus Christ? [Note: E. S. Woods, “On Service,” 18.]
(2) Love.—InGal_5:6 Paul speaks of faith “energizing through love.” Now if faith be really an energetic principle, and if it do indeed work from love as its motive, then we may expect from its presence in the soul right conduct of the highest order. Out of the energy of faith will spring all sorts of right works, and those works will not be vitiated by base motives, as in religions of fear, in connexion with which superstitious dread of God proves itself not less mighty than faith, but mighty to malign effects, making men even give of the very fruit of their body for the sin of their soul. The only question therefore remaining is: Are the apostle’s statements concerning faith true? is faith an energetic force? does it work from love as its motive?
There should be no hesitation in admitting the truth of both statements. That faith is an energetic principle all human experience attests. Faith, no matter what its object, ever shows itself mighty as a propeller to action. If a man believes a certain enterprise to be possible and worthy, his faith will stir him up to persistent effort for its achievement. The eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews settles the question as to the might inherent in faith. In this might all faith shares, therefore the faith of Christians in God.
But why should the faith of Christians work by love? Why not by some other motive, say fear, which has been such a potent factor in the religious history of mankind? Is there any intrinsic necessary connexion between Christian faith and love? There is, and it is due to the Christian idea of God. All turns on that. The God of our faith is a God of grace. He is our Father in heaven, and we, however unworthy, are His children. Therefore our faith inevitably. works by love. First and obviously by the love of gratitude for mercy received. For, whereas the question of a religion of fear is: “Wherewithal shall I come before the Lord that I may appease his wrath,” faith speaks in this wise: “What shall I render unto the Lord for all his benefits?” But not through the love of gratitude alone; also through the love of adoration for the highest conceivable ethical ideal realized in the Divine nature. God is love, benignant, self-communicating, self-sacrificing. To believe in such a God is to make love, similar in spirit if limited in capacity, the law of life.
1. “The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened.” If the parable of the mustard seed bids us look upon the growth of faith, considered simply in itself, that of leaven bids us look upon it in its effect and influence upon what lies outside it. We know how leaven or barm works; place it in the middle of a lump of dough, and leave it, and very soon it begins to make the dough heave and swell; little by little it penetrates the whole of it and leavens the whole mass. And in just the same way faith acts upon the heart; it stirs it all up, and little by little it changes its whole nature. It never lies idle, from the first moment of its beginning to work, but keeps spreading, first in one direction, and then in another, and never leaves off till it has leavened the whole lump, and brought it all into the same nature with itself. It cannot rest whilst there is a single bad passion remaining in the heart. Wherever faith and sin meet, they meet as deadly enemies, one of which must subdue and drive out the other; and there can be no rest or peace in the heart till that is accomplished.
(1) Think first of what may be faith’s possibilities in the mastery of evil, its negative achievements. Through the faith of Christ we are to overcome, it is said, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life. We master carnal appetite; we master envy, jealousy, and resentment; we master pride, vanity, and ambition. Faith conquers in other directions also; we refrain from indulgence in fretfulness, anxiety, and care. In a word, those who are begotten of God sin not, writes John. The world, the devil, and the natural self are overcome. We enjoy marked freedom from the invasions of conscious iniquity.
(2) Faith’s possibilities appear also on the positive side of spiritual life, to be seen in the graces with which the new nature is adorned. The beauties of holiness become increasingly visible in conduct and character. The love of God and the love of one’s neighbour gain the mastery within, manifesting themselves as the ruling powers; we obey the first and second great commandments.
The patience and gentleness of the Lord Jesus show themselves in temper and behaviour. Being quickened by the Holy Spirit we tread in the steps of the Master. A growing measure of Christ-likeness gets to be the dominant feature in life. We are the pure in heart, and see God.
Do not think that faith is something above and beyond you; there is none here that has not done a deed of faith as well as the noblest servant of God. Whenever you have resisted temptation to idleness, and done your work; whenever you have shrunk from a lie which would have made things more pleasant; whenever you have by prayer or struggle banished a mean or angry or impure thought; whenever you have forgiven an injury; whenever you have sided with the right against the wrong, you have shown Faith. There is none here who has not known what it is. [Note: J. M. Wilson, School Homilies, i. 3.]
(3) Besides the usual and quieter modes of growth, faith is not without its occasional and extraordinary forms of advancement, in which progress is made as with leaps and bounds. We read of such in the apostolic age, happening now and then; and the like occur still, happening now and then.
Was Stephen favoured with a glowing rapture just before his martyrdom? Fletcher of Madeley, on the eve of his departure, may be said to have had a similar transport; visited with such a disclosure of the Divine goodness as filled his soul with an overpowering ecstasy of delight. “God is love!” he exclaimed. “Shout! Shout aloud! Oh, it so fills me that I want a gust of praise to go to the ends of the earth!”
Was the hostile career of Saul of Tarsus suddenly closed by a manifestation from on high? So was that of Colonel Gardiner; the man’s old and reprobate course instantly stopped by a vision from the unseen, and his new career of pious devotion soon entered on for the rest of his days. And the like has to be affirmed of Jacob Parsons; who, returning from his usual haunts of vice, retired to bed a drunken sot, but arose in the morning a changed character; after which, as one that knew him well could testify, “for thirty-five years he lived a perfectly blameless life, beloved by everybody.” In explanation of this wondrous transformation of being, the man himself ever insisted that, during this the most memorable night of his life, the Lord Jesus had appeared to him; and to his dying day he remained what may be called a. miracle of Divine grace.
Again, was Paul caught up to the third heaven, there to hear unspeakable words which no man could utter? So was William Tennant, the American friend of George Whitefield. And most devoted was the active spiritual life which followed, the force of the rapture holding the good man for long as if in another world. And, as the little ones have a place in the ministries of Divine love, the incident may be told of the young girl, merriest of her circle, who, after a heavy fall on ice, was grieved beyond measure to learn, from the medical verdict on her case, that she was never to walk again. “Oh, that I could but die!” she exclaimed. But a vision of the night came to her relief. She dreamed of heaven and its happy tenants. Some of the celestials came to her. She even saw the Lord Jesus. And in her eyes tokens of lasting joy took the place of tears.” Mother,” said she, “I am not going to fret, even though I shall not be able to run about any more. Oh! the King is so lovely, so lovely; and if He wants me to lie still for Him, why, I can do it.” And the child kept her word. In spite of pain and weariness, the room in which the young invalid lay came to be the spot around which all the sunshine of the house seemed to gather.
(4) But these epochs and critical moments in the spiritual life just referred to will nearly always be found to stand related to something habitual which went before them as preparation. St. Paul’s habit of prayer, for example, his formed instinct to turn to Christ under crushing need instead of letting the need merely paralyse him, led up in an organic order to the Divine answer which suddenly glorified his misery into victory. Our immediate business in the spiritual life is to bring our spirit to meet the Divine Spirit, however true it is that He all the while divideth “to every man severally as he will.” Therefore let us form the habit of faith amidst “all the changing scenes of life,” under the conditions of the common day as they come not to others but to us.
How shall we do so best? On the whole, in very simple ways. First of all, let us form the spiritual habit of “setting the Lord always before us.” We can never too often remember, nor too simply, that the true power of true faith lies in its Object.
Therefore let us recollect the Object. Let us habitually say within the soul the creed of life: “I believe in God, in God in Christ, in the Christ of God.”
He lives, He loves, He knows;
Nothing that thought can dim;
He gives the very best to those
Who leave the choice to Him.
It is possible so to think that truth, and so to confess it, if only to ourselves, that it shall grow out of an act into a habit, and become the attitude and not merely a motion of the soul. We may contribute to the process in many ways. We may foster it by fresh thought, with prayer, upon the vast ranges of reason that gather round the certainty; by recalling and treasuring up the innumerable testimonies to the fact of God borne to us by the experiences of the saints; by definite acts of devotion; by persistent companionship with the Bible; by use in spirit and in truth of the sacrament of the body and the blood of the Son of God.
2. Growth in holiness is not always steady and unwavering. The bright spring-time of faith, when all is as if bathed in sunlight, is not lasting in the experience of any person. The days of struggle, weariness, and comparative gloom soon recur. Not that faith has vanished, or that its benefits prove to be hollow; the faith is fixed, and the choice is made, and there is profound peace and lasting confidence as the effect. The course of life is established, not wavering: the feet are planted as on a rock. Yet there comes to be a sense of remaining want; the experience of exquisite and unmixed joy passes away; many questions are raised. There is a descent from the heights to the rude common world. There is an advance through conflict within and without, and as the result of faithfulness and patient waiting.
In the region of faith and personality this must always be so. Our material goods, the results of our civilization, we can lock up and pass on. We consolidate and transmit them. We transmit our improvements. But our spiritual goods we must daily regain, daily adjust, and daily fecundate. The certainty of yesterday will not do for today. It must be recertified today. Always we must go back to adjust our compass at the inexhaustible Cross.
We must return to our living authority for our obedience and reassurance. What we are so sure of is a positive Word, with features changeless and always recognizable for what it is; but it is also a living and waxing Word, as living for today as for yesterday and for ever, which, the more it changes, is the more the same. It is a Word, and not a scheme. It is a personal power, and not an intellectual palladium which we snatch up, throw on our shoulders, and carry out of the fire. And therefore it is that moral progress is so slow—because we cannot make a thing of it, and transmit it, as we do material gain. Each man has to verify for himself, and to acquire his legacy. He may accept gravitation, but he has to acquire sanctification, and win his soul.
Faith is no mere charter for comfort. It has no rentiers. And the experience of salvation’s ripening power is the only real way to continued certainty of its truth. Apologetic is not so valuable to convert the world as to confirm the Church which does convert, to give faith a foundation in the world’s reality, and to unify its knowledge of the Son of God. The same Apostle of the first Epistle to the Corinthians, who insisted in the second chapter that faith did not come by the arguments of men, but by the power of the Spirit, goes on in the fifteenth chapter to confirm the Church’s wavering faith in the resurrection of Christ by many infallible proofs. [Note: P. T. Forsyth, The Principle of Authority, 37.]
3. Is it possible to reach perfection by faith? Yes, if faith is never separate from perfection. Christianity is the perfect religion because it is the religion of perfection. It holds up a perfect ideal, it calls us incessantly to this ideal, and it calls all to this ideal. Each man is called, and each man is always called, to it. It is a religion that issues from the perfect One, and returns to His perfection. But it returns through a far country and a dread. It returns by way of redemption, so that the means of reaching this perfection for us sinners is not achievement but faith.
There are two notions of perfection which are wrong, and a third which is right. The first idea is Pietist; the second is Popish; the third is Protestant, Apostolic, Christian.
(1) The Pietist idea pursues perfection as mere quietist sinlessness with a tendency to ecstasy. Its advocates are people sometimes of great grace and beauty; but it represents a one-sided, narrow, and negative spirituality. Its religion is largely emotional, mystical, and introspective. Its adherents are apt to be the victims of visions and moods. They seek perfection in a state of sinlessness. It is a condition largely subjective, ascetic, anaemic, feminine. It prescribes an arbitrary withdrawal from the interests, pursuits, and passions of life. It is a cloistered virtue. It is distrait, not actual. There is an absence of true humility.
(2) The Popish idea of perfection has much in common with the Pietist. It is unworldly in the negative sense; it flees from the world, it does not master it. It is embodied in the monk and the nun. In the Roman system the monk is the ideal man, the nun the ideal woman. The whole Roman system rests on the double morality involved in this distinction. It is a religion by double entry. It teaches that only some are called to perfection, while for the majority the demands made are much more ordinary. Rome succeeds, like certain governments, by lowering the educational standard for the masses, by not being too hard on the natural man. But it canonizes a starved and non-natural man, on whom it is very exacting. It compounds for its laxity with its adherents by its severity with its devotees. There are precepts, it says, which all must obey, and there are counsels which are only for those few destined to perfection.
(3) These Pietist and Papist ideas of perfection are Catholic more than Evangelical, and thus are destroyed by the vital, free, final, sufficient, and perfect principle of Christian faith. The true perfection is the perfection which is of God in faith. The perfect obedience is not the obedience which is associated with faith or flows from it, but the obedience of the soul which is faith and which is the saving power and perfection for all. To be perfect is to be in Christ Jesus by faith. It is the right relation to God in Christ, not the complete achievement of Christian character. [Note: P. T. Forsyth, Christian Perfection, 63.]
The error at the root of all false ideas of perfection is this: it is rating our behaviour before God higher than our relation to God—putting conduct before faith, deeds before trust, work before worship. That is the root of all pharisaism, Romanism, paganism, and natural and worldly morality. It is the same tendency at bottom which puts the sacraments above simple faith, which neglects the worship of the sanctuary for work in a mission, or replaces the gospel by ethical culture.
Christian perfection is not a perfection of culture. It is not a thing of ideas or of finish. Such perfection is for the select few, for a natural elect. It is the perfection of the elite. This is so even with ethical culture. Its fine programme is yet no gospel. The soul’s true and universal perfection is of faith. It is a perfection of attitude rather than of achievement, of relation more than of realization, of trust more than of behaviour. Conduct may occupy three-fourths of our time, but it is not three-fourths of life. To say that it is, is to return from the qualitative to the quantitative way of thinking, from which culture was expected to deliver us. The greatest element in life is not what occupies most of its time, else sleep would stand high in the scale. Nor is it even what engrosses most of its thought, else money would be very high. It is what exerts intrinsically the most power over life. The two or three hours of worship and preaching weekly has perhaps been the greatest single influence on English life. Half an hour of prayer, morning or evening, every day, may be a greater element in shaping our course than all our conduct and all our thought; for it guides them both. And a touch or a blow which falls on the heart in a moment may affect the whole of life in a way that no amount of business or of design can do. [Note: P. T. Forsyth, Christian Perfection, 76.]
