1. The object of Christian faith is Christ. Says Dorner, Faith can be called Christian faith in the full sense of the word only when, as regards its contents, it has united itself with the central fact of the Christian religion, with Jesus Christ as the personal unity of Divine life and human in whom the powers of redemption and perfection are included.
Faith in the Person of Christ is everywhere central in St. John’s Gospel. Nathanael “believes” that Christ is the Son of God and King of Israel, through a sign: Christ promises him a more spiritual basis for a higher kind of belief. In Joh_3:16-21, the evangelist’s comment on the discourse with Nicodemus, we have faith opposed to rebellion or disloyalty, and thus we get a nearer determination of faith as including obedience and loyalty. In the discourse about the Bread of Life, in Joh_6:36 the persistent demands of the Jews for a sign are rebuked by our Lord: “Ye have seen me, and yet believe not”; and their question, “What must we do, that we may work the works of God?” is met by the remarkable declaration, “This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent.” Personal devotion includes the “works of God,” and these works will never be done without it. In Joh_12:44 Christ says, “He that believeth on me, believeth not on me, but on him that sent me.” Faith in Christ and faith in God are identical; but the former is the way to the latter.
What is true of the Fourth Gospel is true of every book of the New Testament. The apostles of the Lord have many and varied descriptions of religious experience; but they unite in teaching that the object of faith is Christ, and that the act of faith is personal commitment to Him. This experience, identical among all Christians, is the differentia of Christianity, not from the religion of the Old Testament, for it too was a religion of grace and of faith, but from legalism in one extreme, and Neo-Platonic mysticism in the other. Faith, in the New Testament sense, saves, not because it does anything, not because of the moral quality it possesses as an act of obedience, not even because it is directed to Christ, but because it is the condition under which Christ can do His saving work. In the act in which the soul, discerning the sufficiency of Christ, commits itself to Him, Christ lays hold of it, delivers it, brings it to God, and saves it by Divine redemptive energy. The indispensableness of faith is a commonplace of New Testament evangelism. The evangelist, like his Lord, is powerless where it is absent, and he rejoices with exceeding gladness when he notes its presence, often most conspicuous in the least likely quarters. While, therefore, the evangelist cannot create faith, he labours for it, prays for it, waits for it, as the triumphant issue of what God is doing through his instrumentality.
The New Testament knows no means of producing faith, save “preaching Christ.” Preach Christ in the significance and value He has in the New Testament. Make Him manifest in the completeness of His salvation, the glory of His Person, and the supremacy of His Place and Power.
The New Testament prescribes nothing else than such a witness to the sufficiency and the sovereignty of Christ. But it does prescribe this. It knows no other means to the end. The modern Church cannot refuse the testing question: What is the outcome of its preaching, and its many activities? Is it faith in Christ? If not, it has failed of the vocation which has called it into being.
2. The great danger at present is to be content with faith in an ideal of our own conceiving, an ideal which is short of the Divine ideal of personality and love embodied in Jesus Christ. The great philosophers of the ancient world believed in love, truth, justice, and purity. They aspired to reach them and retain them, but they swept away from their embrace like phantom forms of cloud before a rushing wind. For, beautiful as their ideal was, it had no heart, no life, no human reality. No human love could be given to it. It was not bound up with social or domestic life. Faith in it produced little, for it was not a faith which worked by human love. Hence the life of the noblest heathen was a desperate effort to realize the mighty dreams and longings of the heart.
I have often fancied with delight the rapture of Socrates, Plato, Zeno, when the truth and the light they had been toiling all their lives to find burst upon them in the revelation of the Word made flesh; but here, on earth, there ever came after their brightest vision an encroaching shadow of doubt in which aspiration sank down, trembling with cold and palsy-stricken. They had nothing absolutely perfect in human nature on which to build their faith, no ground for assurance of human attainment in a human life which had attained and triumphed. But we have, and it is shame and sorrow if we do not walk worthy of our knowledge. [Note: Stopford A. Brooke, Sermons, 11.]
“God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” The Evangelist, we see, has no difficulty in stripping off the non-essentials and reaching at once the heart of belief. To him the belief of the saints is the belief in a Divine Person—not even the belief in the fact of the Incarnation, but, beyond that, the personal trust which leads us to accept the Person of Jesus Christ as the Lord of our life and the Master of our soul. For such belief is not merely part of a dogmatic creed, it is part of life itself. It is only apprehended and interpreted by being lived. When Dr. Liddon was described as a man who “seemed as one who was often thinking of the gaze of Christ lighting on him, the hand of Christ pointing to some act of service, the voice of Christ prompting some witness to the Faith,” we were brought very near to the thought of that belief in a living Person which is the belief of the saints. [Note: S. A. Alexander, The Saints’ Appeal, 21.]
3. We return again, therefore, to the fundamental fact that. Christian faith is trust in Christ. If the object of faith were certain truths, the assent of the understanding would be enough. If the object of faith were unseen things, the confident persuasion of them would be sufficient. If the object of faith were promises of future good, the hope rising to certainty of the possession of these would be sufficient. But if the object be more than truths, more than unseen realities, more than promises; if the object be a living Person—then there follows inseparably this, that faith is not merely the assent of the understanding, that faith is not merely the persuasion of the reality of unseen things, that faith is not merely the confident expectation of future good; but that faith is the personal relation of him that believes to the living Person its object—the relation which is expressed not more clearly, but perhaps a little more forcibly to us, by substituting another word, and saying, faith is trust.
By laying hold of that simple principle, “Because Christ is the object of faith, therefore faith must be trust,” we get bright and beautiful light upon the grandest truths of the gospel of God. If we will only take that as our explanation, we have not indeed defined faith by substituting the other word for it, but we have made it a little more clear to our apprehensions by using a non-theological word with which our daily acts teach us to connect an intelligible meaning. If we will only take that as our explanation, how simple, how grand, how familiar too it sounds—to trust Him! It is the very same kind of feeling, though different in degree, and glorified by the majesty and glory of its object, as that which we all know how to put forth in our relations with one another. We trust each other. That is faith. We have confidence in the love that has been around us, breathing benedictions and bringing blessings ever since we were little children. When the child looks up into the mother’s face, the symbol to it of all protection; or into the father’s eye, the symbol to it of all authority—that emotion by which the little one hangs upon the loving hand and trusts the loving heart that towers above it in order to bend over it and scatter good is the same as the one which, glorified and made Divine, rises strong and immortal in its power, when fixed and fastened on Christ, and saves the soul The gospel rests upon a mystery, but the practical part of it is no mystery.
When we come and preach to you, Trust in Christ and thou shalt be saved, we are not asking you to put into exercise some mysterious power. We are only asking you to give to Him that which you give to others, to transfer the old emotions, the blessed emotions, the exercise of which makes gladness in life here below, to transfer them to Him, and to rest safe in the Lord. Faith is trust. The living Person as its object rises before us there, in His majesty, in His power, in His gentleness; and He says, I shall be contented if thou wilt give to Me these emotions which thou dost fix now, to thy death and loss, on the creatures of a day. Faith is mighty, Divine, the gift of God; but oh! it is the exercise of a familiar habit, only fixed upon a Divine and eternal Person. [Note: A, Maclaren, Sermons Preached at Manchester, i. 170]
