Office and Province of Faith.
I. Faith is not primarily a light of the soul. Though its gaze ought ever to be fixed on the source of all light, it looks to that source rather in the first instance as being at the same time the source of all warmth and all life. It is the living principle by which the soul drinks in life from the heavenly fountain of life; and only as the recipient of the light from above does it become the light of every one in whom it shines. It is still given to Christ's disciples to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven. To those who believe in Him it is given, but to those who do not believe in Him it is not given. We are to seek and search, not with our eyes half closed, as though we were fearful lest we should see too much of truth, lest we should look beyond God into a region where God is not. In this respect also, seeing that we have such a High-priest, who Himself is passed into the heavens, we may approach boldly to the temple of wisdom, for He who has delivered our hearts and souls has also delivered our minds from the bondage of earth. Therefore let no man say to the waves of thought, "Thus far shall ye go, and no farther." Let faith propel them, and they shall roll onward, and ever onward, until they fall down at the foot of the eternal throne.
II. The true antithesis is not between faith and reason, but between faith and sight, or more generally between faith and sense. The objects of faith are not the things which lie beyond the reach of reason, but the things which lie beyond the reach of sight the things which are unseen, the things which as yet are objects of hope, and which therefore must be remote from the senses. Nor is it the office of faith to deliver man from the bondage of reason, but from the bondage of the senses, by which his reason has been deposed and enthralled, and hereby to enable him to become reason's willing, dutiful, active servant. In fact, the truths which are the objects of faith are in the main the very same with those which are the objects of reason, only, while reason is content to look at them from afar, or, it may be, handles them and turns them about, or analyses and recompounds them, but after all leaves them lying in a powerless, notional abstraction, faith, on the other hand, lays hold of them and brings them home to the heart, endowing them with a living reality, and nurtures itself by feeding on. them, and leans on them as a staff to walk with yea, fastens them on to the soul as wings wherewith it may fly. Thus faith surpasses reason in power and vitality; it also anticipates reason by centuries, sometimes by millenniums. It darts at once with the speed of sight to those truths which reason can only attain to slowly, step by step, often faltering, often slumbering, often wandering by the way. When faith dies away, the heart of a nation rots; and then, though its intellect may be acute and brilliant, it is the sharpness of a weapon of death and the brightness of a devouring fire.
J. C. Hare, The Victory of Faith,p. 63.
The Victory of Faith.
It is acknowledged by everybody that the world is a place of conflict; but it is not felt by everybody that there is an inestimable advantage in this: that the conditions of human life should be those of conflict. And yet, if we reflect, we shall not, I think, murmur that our lot should be cast in a world where there is every need for the putting forth of our energies, for surely it is by the stimulating influences of various oppositions that our powers will ripen and develop. Let us take such a survey of the conflict as will enable us to see that perhaps one of the reasons why there is so much complaint of failure lies in this fact: that men mistake the nature of the conflict, and as they mistake the nature of the conflict, so they mistake the nature of the weapons that should be employed.
I. They mistake, I think, the nature of the conflict. The world, they say, is a great arena of contest. It is true, and there are many foes. We may enumerate them. There is poverty, there is ignorance, there is obscurity, there is weakness; and as men take a survey of life, these are the enemies which they most dread. Of all they dread poverty as the worst. It seems to smite down man and to rob him of the powers of struggle, because it robs him of the power of hope. They dread obscurity, they dread ignorance, because if a man feels that he can only emerge into the full light, where he can be seen and can have a full, free scope for his energies, then perchance success will be his. The Apostle tells us in effect the foe is not care; the foe is not obscurity; it is not poverty. The thing which men mistake is the enemy that they have to assail, and they always will identify the real advantages of life with the things that they can see, which they can enjoy, whereas he tells us that the true enemy is not in the world, nor in the things that are in the world, but rather that it is in the world within the heart. The enemy, he says, is not poverty, but desire; the enemy is not obscurity, but lust; and therefore he brings out and shows where the true conflict is. Here, he says, are the enemies: "the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life"; and now I know that men may win the victory in imagination, and be defeated at the testing time. Not he who has broken through the barriers of the shade of inferiority and has found his way to the highest places of the earth, but rather he who has taken the chains of these lower things, and has broken them in pieces, and has risen out of the darkness of sin into the true light of the knowledge of purity and of God; not he who imagines that his power is sustained by men being at his feet, but he rather who has been victorious over the subtle passions of his own heart he has overcome the world.
II. Then there is another thought; that is, the weapon is mistaken also. If, indeed, poverty is the worst of evils, obscurity the worst of enemies, ignorance the worst of foes, then by all means let us take to our aid the weapons of human warfare. I know that the weapons of industry shall overcome poverty, and I know that industry and knowledge will vanquish obscurity and bid ignorance depart; but if these are not the foes, then must we try another weapon. The Apostle bids us to try the weapon of faith. This, he says, is the victory that overcomes the world. Take rather this weapon in hand, and the triumph shall be yours even your faith. At the essential root of all human life the measure of human success lies often in the spirit of confidence and faith. Therefore in the world of religion and in the great world for religion, after all, is only the art of living nobly and well this will be the victory that shall overcome the world, even our faith.
Bishop Boyd-Carpenter, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xvii., p. 321.
Faith's Conquest.
That there is a contest carried on in creation between opposite principles was so apparent even to the heathen that many of them imagined the existence of two opposite deities, the one dealing out good and the other engaged in counteracting that good. We who have the Divine revelation know better than this. We know that a fierce conflict goes on between evil and good, but that only good can be referred to the Creator, evil originating exclusively with the creature. This earth, which God designed for the habitation of an innocent, and therefore happy, race, has been converted, through the apostacy of that race, into a battle plain, upon which Satan and his emissaries measure their strength with Jehovah and His hosts. The contest between Christ and Satan is a contest for the souls of men, and its battles are fought on the narrow stage of individual hearts more frequently than on the wide area of nations and provinces.
I. It is asserted here that the renewed man overcometh the world. We must take a modified interpretation of St. John's strong sayings. The renewed man "overcomes," and the renewed man "does not sin," in the sense of the object which he has in view, rather than of the end to which he has attained. The sayings are to be interpreted of what is habitual, not of what is occasional. His habits are those of victory and righteousness. When he fails to conquer or falls from obedience, the failure and fall are exceptions to ordinary success and general steadfastness. Hence we may say, the renewed man overcomes because, though sometimes defeated, to be the victor, and not the vanquished, is his habit.
II. And now as to the agency by which this result is effected. Faith overcometh the world. In general it is worse than useless to concede to the world. The world very justly takes it for cowardice and gives it contempt. And this faith decides that the march of a righteous cause is not to be advanced by throwing a mantle over the uniform of its soldiers. It decides that they who would hate you if you showed yourself an out-and-out Christian can only love you in proportion as you play the renegade and buffoon. Thus by faith in the whole record of Scripture, by faith in the fact that the friendship of the world is enmity with God, by faith in Christ as able to effect the spread of the Gospel without requiring me to disguise it in myself, by faith in the Holy Spirit as ready to support me against all obloquy which absolute decision may provoke, I overcome the world; I resist its advances; I decline its courtesy; I reject its alliance. When a man is not afraid of standing out to be pointed at; when he will make no terms but that the world shall come over to his ground, that he will perish rather than advance one inch towards the world, then we affirm that a great victory has been achieved, and so preeminent has faith been in the conflict that at once we may declare with St. John, "This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith."
H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit,No. 2015.
Power of Faith among the Heathen and among the Jews.
I. God did not leave Himself without a witness on earth. He would not so forsake mankind as that there should not be a single eye of faith to look up to Him among all the nations, that there should not be a single altar, a single heart, from which prayer, and thanksgiving, and praise should mount to heaven. When the whole world was turning away from Him to enwrap itself in its own natural darkness, He called Abraham to be the father of them that believe, and promised that from him in the course of ages should spring One through faith in whom all the nations of the earth were to be blessed. Thus did God ordain that faith should overcome the world. When man had given himself up to the worship of the creature, of the earth and its fruits, of the flesh and its lusts, God said, I will light up the light of faith in the heart of Abraham.
II. The faith which was a living principle in the hearts of the Jews, and which manifested itself so often by heroic action and endurance nay, which became so inwrought in them that seventeen centuries of dispersion and oppression have not been able to destroy it was a faith in Jehovah as the God of their fathers and their own God, who in manifold wonderful ways had shown Himself to be the Protector of their fathers, and who had chosen them out from all the nations of the earth to be His peculiar people. The heathen never discerned that God was a God of holiness and justice; at least, their popular religion was often at direct variance with any recognition of this truth. To the Jews it had been declared and fully displayed, although they were perpetually blinding their hearts to it. Along with the historical groundwork of their faith, they had a law, by keeping which they were to show forth their faith; and every commandment in that law was, as it were, a fresh step towards overcoming the world. In reading the law, indeed, there was often a veil upon their hearts; often, too, they turned the law itself into a veil, the letter of which darkened and concealed its spirit. The Jews could trust in God, and could act nobly and boldly in that trust; for a high degree of such trust may exist apart from that earnest endeavour after righteousness which ought to go along with it. But few of them lived by faith: only the just can so live; and they alone who do live by faith can be just. Even those who were strongest in their faith or trust in God's upholding and protecting providence, and who by this faith were enabled in outward act to overcome the world to vanquish the most formidable outward enemies it could bring against them, even those who were full of this lively, animating trust, and who in this trust encountered and overthrew every obstacle even they could yet at times fall woefully and appallingly. The revelation made to the Jews was incomplete, and so it was seldom adequate to produce anything like a faith which will overcome the world.
J. C. Hare, The Victory of Faith,p. 151.
Power of Faith in Man's Natural Life.
If Christian faith has often been represented as a totally new quality, a gift of the Spirit, to which there is nothing analogous in the unregenerate man, this has arisen in great measure from the notion that faith is mere belief. For such faith being notoriously powerless, they who felt the inadequateness of such faith for the office assigned to it in the Christian scheme of salvation might naturally infer that the faith which is to be the living root of the Christian life must be something wholly and essentially different from any form of belief discoverable in the natural man. And so in truth it is. Whereas, if the business of faith be in all men equally to lift up the heart and the will, as well as the understanding, from things seen to things unseen, and to draw us away from the impulses of the present moment to the objects of hope held out by the future, to supply us with higher principles, and motives, and aims of action than those with which the senses pamper and drug us, then assuredly may the whole of man's life, so far as he is a being raised above the beasts of the field, be called a school and exercise and discipline of faith.
I. To take one of the simplest daily examples, when we lie down on our beds at night, we lie down in faith: we believe and trust that the dew of sleep will fall on our heavy eyes, and will bathe our weary limbs, and will refresh them and brace them anew. Again, when we rise in the morning and betake ourselves to our daily task, we rise and set to our task in faith: we believe and trust that the light will abide its wonted time in the sky, and that we may, each according to his station, go forth to our labour and to our work until the evening. And whatsoever that work may be, each step in it must rest on the ground of faith. Faith is absolutely indispensable to man even when he is dealing with outward things, in order to make them minister to his sustenance and outward well-being.
II. A child cannot learn his alphabet, cannot learn the name of anything, cannot learn the meaning of any word, except through faith. He must believe before he can know. That which is the law of our intellectual being at all stages of our progress in knowledge is most evidently so in the first stage. If the child did not believe his teachers, if he distrusted or doubted them, he could never learn anything. In like manner, the whole edifice of our knowledge must stand on the rock of faith, or it may be swallowed up at any moment, as has been seen in the history of philosophy, by the quicksands of scepticism. Faith, too, must be the cement whereby all its parts are bound together each to each, or a blast of wind will scatter them. Every fresh accession of knowledge requires fresh exercises of faith: faith in evidence; faith in the criterions and in the faculties by which that evidence is to be tried. Faith, too, is indispensable as the motive principle whereby alone we can be impelled to seek after knowledge. We must have seen in the visions of faith that our Rachel is beautiful and well-favoured; thus alone shall we be willing to serve seven years for her, which years will then seem but a few days for the love we bear to her.
J. C. Hare, The Victory of Faith,p. 103.
Faith a Practical Principle.
I. Nothing can be more fallacious than the notion that faith is not a practical principle. Were faith nothing more than the assent of the understanding, then, indeed, we should be forced to grant that it is not a practical principle. But this consequence of itself is enough to prove how totally inadequate that definition of faith must be. In truth, if we look thoughtfully through the history of the Church, or even of the world, we shall find that this, under one shape or other, has ever been the main principle and spring of all great and magnanimous action, even faith. The persons in whose character love has been the predominant feature have not seldom been disposed to rest in heavenly meditations and contemplations. Unless, too, it be corrected and nerved by faith, love shrinks from giving pain and giving offence. But the great, stirring motive spirits in the history of the world, the angels who have excelled in strength, and who have done God's commandments, hearkening unto the voice of His word, have been those who may be called the heroes of faith, those who by faith have dwelt in the immediate presence of God. By giving a substantial reality to that which is invisible, to that which is no object of the senses or of the natural understanding, and by animating the heart with an unshakable assurance of that for which it looks in hope, faith performs the task assigned to her of overcoming the world.
II. Bearing this in mind, we perceive how every act of faith, as the act of a man's whole personality, will be single, and that there is no confusion of thought, no mixing up of incongruous elements, in saying that it is not the act of the understanding alone, but of the understanding and still more emphatically and essentially of the will. If it were the act of the understanding alone, it would be the act of a fraction of a man's being. Only as the act of the will mainly and primarily is it the act of a man's whole being. The primary, germinal act must be that of the will, not of the understanding. There must be some motion of the will, however slight, which in the first instance directs the application of the understanding to an object before that object can be introduced through the understanding to act upon the will. Hereby we may be assisted in some degree to conceive how the influences of the Spirit should be of such momentous power in the work of our faith, in producing it from the very first and afterward in nourishing and maturing it. Were faith merely an act of the understanding, it would be without that region which is the peculiar sphere of the spirit. So far, however, as faith is a spiritual act, so far as it is the act of the will, which Christ came to redeem from the bondage of the flesh, we may feel assured that in every act of spiritual faith, in every act by which we evince a desire to become partakers in Christ's redeeming grace, to shake off the yoke of corruption, and to strive after the glorious liberty of the children of God in every such act, we may feel assured, the Spirit of God will be working along with our spirits.
J. C. Hare, The Victory of Faith,p. 32.
References: 1 John 5:4. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. i., No. 14; J. Natt, Posthumous Sermons,p. 332; E. Blencowe, Plain Sermons to a Country Congregation,vol. ii., p. 351; H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, The Life of Duty,vol. i., p. 209; E. Cooper, Practical Sermons,vol. i., p. 243; T. T. Crawford, The Preaching of the Cross,p. 135; Fleming, Church of England Pulpit,vol. v., p. 29; Homilist,3rd series, vol. iii., p. 221; A. P. Peabody, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xviii., p. 105; H. P. Liddon, Ibid.,vol. xxi., p. 241; Homiletic Quarterly,vol. ii., p. 243; J. Keble, Sermons from Easter to Ascensiontidep. 201.
Filial Faith overcomes the World.
I. The indefiniteness, the sort of unsatisfactory vagueness, that is sometimes felt to attach to the Scriptural idea of the world, is here somewhat obviated by the connection or train of thought in which it occurs. What is the world which faith overcomes? It is whatever system or way of life, whatever society or companionship of men, tends to make us feel God's commandments, or any of them, to be grievous. If this is a true account of the world as here presented to us, it must be very evident that it is a world to be overcome. We cannot deal with it, if we would avoid its deleterious and deadly influence, in any other way. The world cannot be shunned, neither can it be conciliated. The only effectual, the only possible, way is to overcome it. And the manner of overcoming it must be peculiar. It must be such as thoroughly to meet and obviate that tendency to minister to a rebellious frame of mind which constitutes the chief characteristic, and indeed the very essence, of what is here called the world.
II. Two explanations, accordingly, of this overcoming of the world are given, the one having reference to the original source, the other to the continued following out, of the victory. (1) "Whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world." So the victory begins; that is its seed or germ. And as to its seed or germ it is complete, potentially complete, though not so in actual result fully and in detail. Being born or begotten of God implies the overcoming of the world. There is that in our being born or begotten of God which secures, and which alone can secure, our overcoming the world. And what can that be but the begetting in us of a frame of mind which cuts up by the roots the whole strength of the world's hold over us the idea, namely, of God's commandments being grievous? (2) This implies faith, and faith in constant and lively exercise. Our overcoming the world is not an achievement completed at once, and once for all, in our being begotten of God. It is a lifelong business, a prolonged and continuous triumph in a prolonged and continuous strife. Our being born of God does, indeed, give us the victory; it puts us in the right position and endows us with the needful power for overcoming the world: but we have still before us the work of actually from day to day, all our life long in point of fact, overcoming the world; and it is by faith that we do so.
R. S. Candlish, Lectures on First John,vol. ii., p. 186.
Christian Faith.
Christian faith has this advantage over simple religious faith, in the more general sense of the word: that, having obtained clearer and fuller notions of God's perfections, it is rendered stronger and more triumphant over temptations.
I. Christian faith, or the faith that Jesus is the Son of God, gives us so much clearer and fuller notions of God that it makes us know both Him and ourselves and love Him far better than we could do without it. If the Christian turns to the temptations of the world, and casts the eye of faith towards that future and unseen recompense which is promised him, he bethinks him at what price it was purchased for him, and by what infinite love it was given; he feels, on the one hand, how worthless must be his own efforts to buy that which only the blood of the Son of God could buy, yet, on the other hand, with what zealous hope he may labour, sure that God is mightily working in him, giving him an earnest will and strengthening him to do steadily what he has willed sincerely. This, then, is a faith that overcometh the world, for it is a faith that looks to an eternal reward, and which is founded on such a display of God's love and holiness that the Christian may well say, "I know in whom I have believed."
II. The means of gaining this faith are principally three: reading the Scriptures, prayer, and a partaking of the Lord's Supper. You see what it is that is wanted namely, to make notions wholly remote from your common life take their place in your minds as more powerful than the things of common life, to make the future and the unseen prevail over what you see and hear now around you. Faith will come by reading, as of old time it came by hearing; and when we have thus become familiar with Christ, have learned to love Him and to know that He not only was, but is now, a living object of our love, the prospect of being with Him for ever will not seem like a vague promise of we know not what, but a real, substantial pleasure, which we would not forfeit for all the world can
T. Arnold, Sermons,vol. ii., p. 8.
References: 1 John 5:4; 1 John 5:5. C. Kingsley, Town and Country Sermons,p. 231; J. H. Thom, Laws of Life after the Mind of Christ,2nd series, p. 45; W. Anderson, Christian World Pulpit,vol. vi., p. 138.