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Faith and Salvation.
Be satisfied to have a faith that can hold in its hand this one truth: “While we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly.” He laid down His life for men while as yet they were not believing in Him, nor were able to believe in Him. He died for men — not as believers, but as sinners. He came to make these sinners into believers and saints; but when He died for them He viewed them as utterly without strength. If you hold to the truth that Christ died for the ungodly, and believe it, your faith will save you, and you may go in peace. If you will trust your soul with Jesus, who died for the ungodly, even though you can not believe all things, nor move mountains, nor do any other wonderful works, yet you are saved. It is not great faith, but true faith, that saves; and the salvation lies, not in the faith, but in the Christ in whom faith trusts. Faith as a grain of mustard seed will bring salvation. It is not the measure of faith, but the sincerity of faith, which is the point to be considered. Surely a man can believe what he knows to be true; and as you know Jesus to be true, you, my friend, can believe in Him.
— SPURGEON. The Faith of a Mariner.
Look at the faith of the master mariner! I have often wondered at it. He looses his cable — he steams away from the land. For days, weeks, or even months, he sees neither sail nor shore; yet on he goes day and night without fear, till one morning he finds himself exactly opposite to the desired haven toward which he has been steering. How has he found his way over the trackless deep? He has trusted in his compass, his nautical almanac, his glass and the heavenly bodies; and, obeying their guidance, without sighting land, he has steered so accurately that he has not to
steaming without sight. Spiritually it is a blessed thing to leave altogether the shores of sight and feeling, and to say “Goodbye” to inward feelings, cheering providences, signs, tokens, and so forth. It is glorious to be far out on the ocean of divine love, believing in God, and steering for Heaven straight away by the direction of the Word of God. — SPURGEON.
Faith in Trial.
At the battle of Crecy, where Edward, the Black Prince, then a youth of eighteen years of age, led the van, the king, his father, drew up a strong party on a rising ground, and there beheld the conflict in readiness to send relief when it should be wanted. The young prince being sharply charged and in some danger, sent to his father for succor; and as the king delayed to send it, another messenger was sent to crave immediate assistance. To him the king replied: “Go, tell my son that I am not so inexperienced a commander as not to know when succor is wanted, nor so careless a father as not to send it.” He intended the honor of the day should be his son’s, and therefore let him with courage stand to it, assured that help should be had when it might conduce most to his renown. God draws forth His servants to fight in the spiritual warfare, where they are engaged, not only against the strongholds of carnal reason and the exalted imaginations of their own hearts, but also in the pitched field against Satan and his wicked instruments. But they, poor hearts, when the charge is sharp, are ready to despond and cry with Peter: “Save, Lord; we perish.” God is too watchful to overlook their exigencies, and too much a Father to neglect their succor.
If help, however, be delayed, it is that the victory may be more glorious by the difficulty of overcoming. — SPURGEON.
Peter’s Faith.
When you see Peter climbing down out of that boat, as one has said, with the storm light on his face and the spray in his hair, you get just one glimpse of what Peter, by the grace of God, was always meant to be, and what you and I, by the grace of God, were always meant to be — a people filled with such a vision of the eternal Christ of God that all things seen and temporal fall away from us and utterly lose their power to hamper or
discourage us; a people in whom faith is sublimed to its highest reach and its loftiest and most noble exercise.
Walking on the water was impossible; but Peter did it so far. “When Peter was come down out of the ship, he walked on the water to go to Jesus.”
He did it; that is the puzzle of the commentators. It was not a commentator he was going to, or he would have said: “Stay where you are, you fanatic! Stay where you are.” No, he was going to Jesus; and Jesus said: “Come! Come! Come!” He is always glad to see faith come and lay hold of Him.
“When Peter was come down out of the ship, he walked on the water to go to Jesus. But when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid, and began to sink, and cried: ‘Lord, save me!’” What marred this beautiful story was that the commentators’ spirit got into the poor fellow. After beginning so well he began to get cautious. After beginning at such a sublime height of faith he feared and came down to the poor, pitiful level of a Kantian philosopher, subject to the categories of space and time. He began in the spirit, and he ended in the flesh. He became carnal, and walked as a man — or, rather, he sank as a man. — MCNEIL.
Faith the Way of Salvation.
I bless God again that the way of salvation is by faith, because it is a way to open to the most unlearned. What fine theology we get nowadays! Deep thinking they call it. The men go down so deep into their subjects, and so stir the mud at the bottom, that you can not see them and they can not see themselves. I apprehend that teachers of a certain school do not themselves know what they are talking about. Now, if salvation were only to be learned by reading through huge folios, what would become of the multitudes of poor souls in Bow, Bethnal Green and Seven Dials? If the Gospel had consisted of a mass of learning, how could the unlearned be saved? But now we can go to each one of them and say: “Jesus died.”
“There is life in a look at the Crucified One;
There is life at this moment for thee.”
SPURGEON.
“I know men, and I tell you that Jesus is not a man. The religion of Christ is a mystery which subsists by its own force, and proceeds from a mind which is not a human mind. We find in it a marked individuality, which originated a train of words and actions unknown before. Jesus is not a philosopher, for His proofs are miracles, and from the first His disciples adored Him. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne and myself founded empires;
but on what foundation did we rest the creatures of our genius? Upon force. But Jesus Christ founded an empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for Him. I die before my time, and my body will be given back to the earth to become food for worms. Such is the fate of him who has been called the great Napoleon. What an abyss between my deep misery and the eternal kingdom of Christ, which is proclaimed, loved, adored, and is still existing over the whole earth!” Then, turning to Gen.
Bertrand, the emperor added: “If you do not perceive that Jesus Christ is God, I did wrong in appointing you a general.”
Constant Faith.
Avoid, as dangerous, the impression that an unsettled faith or cherished dalliance with one’s religious convictions is a sign of intellectual courage or strength. Unbelief is quite as often cowardly as it is brave. It hesitates often because its “dare not” waits upon its “would.” Nothing can possibly be more injurious to the intellect than a prolonged hesitation to face questions of this sort, and to settle them in a manly spirit. Nothing can be more unmanly than to play hide-and-seek with arguments for and against the most important verities, or more servile than to wait for new revelations from some idolized leader of opinion. Nothing can be worse for the heart of the scholar than the withdrawal from the heavens of the living God and the banishment from the earth of the Christ who blessed and redeemed it; for when God and Christ depart from the faith of the thinker, his tenderness for man, his hope for man, his faith in man and his patience with man are likely to follow sooner or later. Even his sensibility to culture will become less and less refined or less and less satisfying.
Nothing can be worse for the conscience than that the magnetic presence of God should cease to enforce its often feeble and vacillating commands.
Nothing can be more harmful to the life of a man of intellectual consistent than that faith should wholly die out of it and cease to be the spring of its activities, its joys and hopes. And as for the community, one shudders with not unreasonable horror at the very thought of what will come if the atheistic theories with which the thinker of these days beguiles his readers or amuses himself are once put in practice by the men of labor and of action. The least we can say is that what seems as harmless as the summer lightning when manipulated in the brilliant experiments of the teacher may rend and consume the social structure which the faith of generations has
reared. — PRESIDENT PORTER.
Faith at Jericho.
On the seventh day they compassed the city seven times; and, as surely as God had spoken the word, the deed was done. He kept them from ventilating their doubts. He compelled them to look to Him and to trust in Him. He poured contempt on all their wisdom and all their strength, so that their unbelief just withered away at the root and died out in their hearts, because it had nothing to feed upon.
And God Almighty rose, and swelled more and more on their view day by day, until at last, I almost think, those men themselves physically swelled and grew bigger. God had come to them and filled them, so that at last, when Joshua did unmuzzle them and say: “Shout, for the Lord has given you the city!” from those thousands of pent-up hearts there went forward a great wave which, as the original suggests, carried the walls with it on the upgoing. The walls fell down under it. Under what? Under that shout.
There was so much of Almighty God in it, as well as of the pent-up enthusiasm of men that nothing could resist it. It swept clean to Heaven, and carried everything with it on the way. And that is faith in God, from the beginning to the end. I wish I had the tongues of men and angels to plead with this audience gathered here today. If the spirit of this did fall upon you and me, we could go out and yet shake London’s Damnation to
its center. — MCNEILL.
What is faith? In one great essential aspect of it — and I grant that it is a many sided thing, and that the atonement may have many sides, but the human side is very crisp and sharp and clear, and this thing called faith in one great essential aspect of it is — what? It is a simple, literal bowing of the soul in abject obedience. That is why you are so long in coming to it.
What does faith mean? It is bowing and bending, and saying in the depth of your heart: “Yes; amen.” Have you said that? You are not saved until you have. You and I and every soul of us standing before the Cross of Christ and the Passover Lamb who hangs thereon must say, with our whole heart bowing in the simplicity of the meek obedience of faith: “For me — yes” And, again, it comes out, contrariwise, that the very essence of unbelief now is — and the great day will bring that out in the gleaming lightnings that fly round about the judgment seat — the essence of unbelief is not a want of understanding, but a want of obedience. There is a moral taint in unbelief. I say bluntly I believe that, at bottom, unbelief is a stupidity intellectually and a crime morally. It comes not from the bigness of intellect, but from an intellect warped and twisted and stunted and biased from the very beginning.
Oh, for the obedience of faith, my brethren! If you are not a believer, I know that I may be rude and boisterous, and I may be setting you against me. Well, forgive me! I do not mean that; but I do want to do my best to bring down your soul — to bring down heady and high-minded thoughts to the obedience of Christ. Oh, that we may be brought down to simple faith and childlike trust! There is no salvation otherwise. Simply obey.
— MCNEILL. The Character of Faith.
Faith is common, natural, reasonable, sublime You put it to its highest power, its loftiest use, when it is turned to trust God in the word that He has spoken and in the love that He has displayed on Calvary.
— MCNEILL.
The Centurion’s Faith.
Suddenly one day, when you are going along and feeling yourself so lonely in the midst of thousands, there falls upon your ear a voice — some broad Scotch or (what to me is both unspeakable and unpronounceable) Welsh
— something of home, and fatherland, and motherland. At once your whole face lights up, and bells begin to ring in your soul, and you nearly fling your arms around that man’s neck, because his tones and his words brought to you thoughts and visions of home. Well, Christ knows all that.
O men and women! What a lonely world this must have been to the holy Son of God! How desolate! No wonder that sometimes, even after a hard day’s work, He refused, maybe, to stay with people, and climbed away up some lonely mountain side to get as near home and God and holiness as possible, and as far out of the sin, strangeness and unfriendliness. And what happened to Him was, but in far greater measure, just what I have tried to describe as happening to yourself in this strange, lonely and unfriendly world. When that centurion spoke those words of splendid faith it was as if the angel Gabriel stood at His side. It was as if a door opened in Heaven, and a burst of Heaven’s sunlight flooded Him, and a gust of Heaven’s matchless music filled His sad and lonely soul. He heard the language and tone of Heaven. Not Gabriel at the throne could have paid a more splendid tribute to the essential Godhead and divinity of that Man of Nazareth than did the centurion of Rome. It was grand. And the Son of God could not keep back His glad surprise. “I tell you,” said Christ, “I have not found so great faith — no, not in Israel.” — MCNEILL.
Faith and Conceit.
If we had more faith we should have less conceit of ourselves, and we should be grander, bigger, broader browed and warmer hearted men, both for God and our fellows, than unfortunately we are. A shriveling, narrowing, withering thing is unbelief. I know that it is mightily praised out yonder in the world. As I said here in our evangelistic meetings more than once, unbelief is mightily praised in excellent prose, and still more excellent prose; but it never looks well in the Bible. It always looks here to be a blear-eyed, dull, stupid kind of thing; and faith in God always looks grand — something more than mortal and more than human. And it is the
be this your shame, that this faith in God, this sublime faith of these men of old, seems to be so far beyond you. Ah, those were big men. Little men could not have done this. I can imagine a small breed of Israelites — men far too like ourselves — who on the first day’s round would have given vent to what we call “the rationalizing spirit,” and they would have said to their fellows: “Now, really, being Israelites has led us along some strange paths, but I will draw the line at this. As intelligent, sensible men, what mortal connection can there be between our walking round the walls with all this horn-blowing and tooting and the down coming of these walls?”
And do not the rationalists seem to have a deal to say for themselves? But when I put it that way, you see how stupid it would have been, judged by the after results. Always let us believe that faith in God is splendidly intelligent. Yes, and I think it was partly to stop the rationalistic spirit that Joshua issued this item of his plan of campaign. — MCNEILL.
Trust.
Faith has specially to believe in Him who is the sum and substance of all this revelation, even Jesus Christ, who became God in human flesh that He might redeem our fallen nature from all the evils of sin, and raise it to eternal felicity. We believe in Christ, on Christ and upon Christ; accepting Him because of the record which God has given to us concerning His Son
— that He is the propitiation for our sins. We accept God’s unspeakable gift, and receive Jesus as our all in all.
If I wanted to describe saving faith in one word, I should say that it is trust. It is so believing God and so believing in Christ that we trust ourselves and our eternal destinies in the hands of a reconciled God.
— SPURGEON. Give Faith a New Direction.
Take that faith, that confidence which you are exercising in brother man and sister woman every day — it is the very cement of society; society would tumble into chaos without it — take that faith of yours and give it a new direction. Give it an operation, which it never had before. “Believe