Faith and Things Hoped for and Unseen.
I. Faith appears at first sight a very simple thing; it is nothing else but believing the word of God. We know what it is to receive the word of a man, to believe statements, thought strange and surpassing our experience, because we regard the character of him who makes them with respect and confidence. But then, remember, as God is greater than man, as God's word is heaven, high above any human word, so the reception of this word, the believing of this word, is necessarily something quite different from the reception of any human word or testimony. As is the voice, so is the echo; as is the seal, so is the impression; as is the word or revelation, so is the faith. The Divine word produces in the heart of man faith, which is Divine in its nature and power. To assent to the word of God is therefore to enter into a perfectly new life, a perfectly new mode of power and existence.
II. True faith takes hold of the Divine word; it is weak or strong, great or small, as it receives, keeps, and uses, the word of God. The source of weak faith is in the ignorance and slowness of the heart with reference to the Divine testimony. The strength of faith is the humility of a helpless and broken heart cleaving to the promise. There was one who, next to the apostles, was perhaps the greatest gift of God to the Church, whom we all admire for his faith. And yet Martin Luther was wont to say, "Oh, if I had faith!" And often he confessed that, unless every day he read the Scriptures, and meditated on Christ, and repeated the Creed, and prayed the Psalms, his heart became dead and cold, full of dark and hard thoughts of God, and of dreary and tormenting doubts and fears. Let us dwell, then, on Christ; let us consider Him in steadfast, frequent, daily meditation; let the word of Christ dwell richly in our hearts, minds; and homes.
A. Saphir, Lectures on Hebrews,vol. ii., p. 257.
Faith.
Ages, like individuals, have their besetting sins, and prominent among those of the present day is faithlessness. We have many excellent characteristics, without doubt; we should be inhuman if it were not so. We are earnest after our fashion, enterprising, intellectually veracious, humane, liberal, tolerant; but underneath, and behind all this, we are emphatically a faithless generation. The one thing conspicuous by its absence from our social and political dealings, from our literature, from our art, from our thought, from the conduct of our lives, is faith; and yet, "whatsoever is not of faith is sin," and "without faith it is impossible to please God."
I. Consider what faith is. We too often think and speak of it as a speculative faculty, co-ordinate with reason, and differing from reason only in being concerned with a different subjectmatter; as if, while reason assures us that honesty is the best policy, or that probability is the guide of life, or that the laws of nature are uniform, faith supplies us with similar judgments about God, and spirit, and immortality; judgments that is, which may or may not have an important bearing on our lives, but which are exhausted, as far as faith is concerned, by the intelligent recital of the orthodox creed. But this is not St. Paul's view. Sight, intuition, vision, by whatever name you call it, is a higher thing than reason, for it is that in which reason ends; and faith is higher than even sight, for it is sight become creative. It sees in darkness, believes without evidence, is certain of impossibilities, grapples with and forces the blank, dark, empty nothingness into substance, and consistency, and reality, and life; it is the reflection, almost too bright for frail human nature, of the Divine power that can create ex nihilo.
II. Why is it that when our health, and wealth, and time, and opportunity, are not actively misused for evil, they are so often frittered away? Simply for want of faith. You start in life with high ideas and an exuberance of energy, but you have not courage to bring the two into relation i.e.,you have not faith. Your ideas are like the visions that float before the artist: they are unreal to begin with; but you are endowed with a creative faculty, and you can call them into existence by the bare fact of your faith. You can makethem what they are not, as the heroes and saints have done before you, but you willnot, and so you allow the God-sent vision of your destiny to fade away unfulfilled, till in the end it will be nothing more to you than the melancholy memory of some sunrise long ago.
J. R. Illingworth, Sermons,p. 116.
Faith.
I. Faith is here opposed to sight. It is, in the first place, the resting of the soul upon the unseen. This, the writer says, has been the common feature of all great, heroic, saintly deeds and lives. He draws his illustrations from the history of the race to which he writes. Every one whose name was great in its history, its founders, legislators, rulers; its warriors, and its martyrs; its prophets, and its poets; those without its limits who had helped it in days of adversity; all had one common characteristic. They had looked beyond what they could see. They had believed in the future, in the possible, in powers of which their senses gave them no assurance.
II. Faith is the vivid life-moving realisation of the unseen, the distant, the ideal. It is not the same as hope, but it is the spring of hope that on which hope rests the substance, the reality of things hoped for. In this sense it colours all history. It gives to all life its beauty, its romance, its spiritual energy. The faith of which the chapter speaks is generally not merely the faculty, the will, to see beyond the present and the visible; it is the eye open to the sun of the unseen world.
III. Let me suggest two thoughts on this point: (1) That we do well to feed our imaginations and fortify our instincts by gathering, by dwelling upon, even as the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews dwells upon pictures of this virtue of heroes. This is the great good to us of poetry, and of the great scenes of history. (2) This is one thought; the other is that we should each strive to see, if we may use the paradox, the unseenside, the ideal side of our work. That dream-world is the true, the real world. All those visions of beauty truth and love and justice are not phantoms of our brains, but the outlines dimly seen of One infinitely perfect, by whom and in whom are we and all things.
E. C. Wickham, Wellington College Sermons,p. 42.
Faith.
I. Faith is that feeling or faculty within us by which the future becomes to our minds greater than the present; and that which we do not see, more powerful to influence us than what we do see. It is very true, that if we knew nothing of God, still there would be the same feeling of preferring the future and the unseen to the present; and this feeling, wherever it rested, would raise and improve the mind. But the moment that we are told of God, we see that He is an object of faith, far more excellent than any other, and that it is when directed towards Him that the feeling can be brought towards its full perfection.
II. It is a very necessary part of faith that the thing which we believe be told us by some one whom we have reason for believing some one whom we know to be, so far as we are concerned, good and wise. The moment we are told of God, so perfect in wisdom, so perfect in goodness, so perfect in power we find One on whose assurance we may rely with a most certain trust, and whose commands will be as good and wise, as the fulfilment of His threats will be sure. Again, it is a great trial of faith when the good or the evil expected is distant, and still greater when it is not only distant, but imperfectly understood. Now the good or evil which God promises and threatens to Christians is so distant, that it will only come after our earthly lives are over; it is so imperfectly understood, that eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath entered into the heart of man to conceive, the things which God has prepared for them that love Him; nor yet, I may add, the wrath which He has prepared for those who do not love Him. So then, faith in God, in His promises, and His threatenings, seems to be perfect in all the points required to perfect it.
T. Arnold, Sermons,vol. ii., p. 1.
References: Hebrews 11:1. R. W. Dale, The Jewish Temple and the Christian Church,p. 242; Homiletic Quarterly,vol. v., p. 175; Clergyman's Magazine,vol. i., pp. 163, 170; Church of England Pulpit,vol. v., p. 305; Homilist,1st series, vol. iv., p. 338; Ibid.,2nd series, vol. ii., p. 587; C. J. Vaughan, Christian World Pulpit,vol. viii., pp. 286, 296. Hebrews 1:1-10. E. W. Shalders, Ibid.,pp. 298, 317, 325, 349, 356; H. W. Beecher, Ibid.,vol. xvi., p. 28; Ibid.,vol. xxiii., pp. 31-40; A. Mursell, Ibid.,vol. xviii., p. 248; G. Macdonald, Ibid., vol.xxi., p. 385.Hebrews 11:1-3. Ibid.,vol. xvii., p. 264; Homiletic Magazine,vol. vii., p. 191.
The Work of the Few and the Many.
The history of mankind, whether secular or religious, resolves itself into the history of a few individuals. It is not that all the rest do not live their own lives, or can shirk their own eternal responsibilities; but it is that the march and movement of the many is as surely influenced by the genius of the few as is the swing of the tide by the law of gravitation. It is a law of our being that we should belong the vast majority of us to the unknown, to the unrecorded masses, who, long before the very things we own have perished, shall have passed away out of all remembrance as utterly as though we had never been.
I. There, then, is one great fact of life; another, and a far sadder one, is that, by a sort of fatal gravitation, the human race seems of itself to tend downwards. It is impulse, passion, temptation, more than reason, that often sways the heart of each man, and therefore of all men. It is the few only who are saints; the few only who are heroes.
II. How does God carry out His work of continuous redemption? It is by the energy of His chosen few. Into their hearts He pours the power of His Spirit; upon their heads He lays the hands of His consecration. The history of mankind is like the history of Israel in the days of the Judges. The deliverance of mankind has never been wrought by the multitude; always by the individual.
III. We learn from this subject: (1) the secret, the sole secret, of moral power. Who that reads the signs of the times can fail to perceive how much this age needs to learn the secret. By faith, each in his age and order, these saints of God delivered his generation, inspired his successors, wrought righteousness in a faithless world. (2) We may notice also that the work of these saints of God, being always and necessarily human, is never permanent in its special results. There is an infinite pathos in the predestined failure of men and institutions which leave no adequate heirs to propagate their impulse, to carry on their purposes. Abraham dies, and in a century his descendants are slaves. When the influence of God's saints has spent its force, if the work pauses for a moment, everything falls into ruin and corruption. Only as an inspiring, passionate, continuous energy can Christianity regenerate the world. (3) These apparent failures were never absolute. No good man, no saint of God, has ever lived or died in vain. The very best of us leaves his tale half untold, his message imperfect; but if we have but been faithful, then, because of us, some one who follows us with a happier heart and in happier times, shall utter our message better and tell our tale more perfectly. Some one shall run and not be faint; some one shall fly with wings where we have walked with weary feet.
F. W. Farrar, Sermons and Addresses in America,p. 202.