You know that the commonplace of evangelical teaching opposes faith to
works; and the opposition is perfectly correct, if it be rightly
understood. But I have a strong impression that a great deal of our
preaching goes clean over the heads of our hearers, because we take for
granted, and they fancy that they understand, the meaning of terms
because the terms themselves are so familiar. And I believe that many
people go to churches and chapels all their lives long, and hear this
doctrine dinned into them, that they are to be saved by faith, and not
by works, and never approach a definite understanding of what it means.
So let me just for a moment try to clear up the terms of this
apparently paradoxical statement that faith is a work. What do we mean
by faith? What do you mean by saying that you have faith in your
friend, in your wife, in your husband, in your guide? You simply mean,
and we mean, that you trust the person, grasping him by the act of
trust. On trust the whole fabric of human society depends, as well as
in another aspect of the same expression does the whole fabric of
Manchester commerce. Faith, confidence, the leaning of myself on one
discerned to be true, trusty, strong, sufficient for the purpose in
hand, whatever it may be—that, and nothing more mysterious, nothing
further away from daily life and the common emotions which knit us to
one another, is, as I take it, what the New Testament means when it
insists upon faith.
Ah, we all exercise it. You put it forth in certain low levels and
directions. 'The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her,' is the
short summary of the happy lives of many, I have no doubt, of my
present hearers. Have you none of that confidence to spare for God? Is
it all meant to be poured out upon weak, fallible, changeful creatures
like ourselves, and none of it to rise to the One in whom absolute
confidence may eternally be fixed?
But then, of course, as we may see by the exercise of the same emotion
in regard to one Another, the under side (as I have been accustomed to
say to you) of this confidence in God or Christ is diffidence of
myself. There is no real exercise of confidence which does not involve,
as an essential part of itself, the going out from myself in order that
I may lay all the weight and the responsibility of the matter in hand
upon Him in whom I trust. And so Christian faith is compounded of these
two elements, or rather, it has these two sides which correspond to one
another. The same figure is convex or concave according as you look at
it from one side or another. If you look at faith from one side, it
rises towards God; if from the other, it hollows itself out into a
great emptiness. And so the under side of faith is distrust; and he
that puts his confidence in God thereby goes out of himself, and
declares that in himself there is nothing to rest upon.
Now that two-sided confidence and diffidence, trust and distrust, which
are one, is truly a work. It is not an easy one either; it is the
exercise of our own inmost nature. It is an effort of will. It has to
be done by coercing ourselves. It has to be maintained in the face of
many temptations and difficulties. The contrast between faith and work
is between an inward act and a crowd of outward performances. But the
faith which knits me to God is my act, and I am responsible for it.
But yet it is not a work, just because it is a ceasing from my own
works, and going out from myself that He may enter in. Only remember,
when we say, 'Not by works of righteousness, but by the faith of
Christ,' we are but proclaiming that the inward man must exercise that
act of self-abnegation and confession of its own impotence, and ceasing
from all reliance on anything which it does, whereby, and whereby
alone, it can be knit to God. 'Labour not for the meat that perisheth,
but for that meat which endureth unto eternal life…. This is the work
of God, that ye believe.' You are responsible for doing that, or for
not doing it.
II. Secondly, faith, and not a multitude of separate acts, is what
pleases God.
Mark the difference between the form of the question and that of the
answer. The people say, 'What are we to do that we may work the _works_
of God?' Christ answers in the singular: 'This is the _work_.' They
thought of a great variety of observances and deeds. He gathers them
all up into one. They thought of a pile, and that the higher it rose
the more likely they were to be accepted. He unified the requirement,
and He brought it all down to this one act, in which all other acts are
included, and on which alone the whole weight of a man's salvation is
to rest. 'What shall we do that we might work the works of God?' is a
question asked in all sorts of ways, by the hearts of men all round
about us; and what a babble of answers comes! The priest says, 'Rites
and ceremonies.' The thinker says, 'Culture, education.' The moralist
says, 'Do this, that, and the other thing,' and enumerates a whole
series of separate acts. Jesus Christ says, 'One thing is needful….
This is the work of God.' He brushes away the sacerdotal answer and the
answer of the mere moralist, and He says, 'No! Not _do_; but _trust_.'
In so far as that is act, it is the only act that you need.
That is evidently reasonable. The man is more than his work; motive is
more important than action; character is deeper than conduct. God is
pleased, not by what men do, but by what men are. We must _be_ first,
and then we shall _do_. And it is obviously reasonable, because we can
find analogies to the requirement in all other relations of life. What
would you care for a child that scrupulously obeyed, and did not love
or trust? What would a prince think of a subject who was ostentatious
in acts of loyalty, and all the while was plotting and nurturing
treason in his heart?
If doing separate acts of righteousness be the way to work the works of
God, then no man has ever done them. For it is a plain fact that every
man falls below his own conscience—which conscience is less scrupulous
than the divine law. The worst of us knows a great deal more than the
best of us does; and our lives, universally, are, at the best, lives of
partial effort after unreached attainments of obedience and of virtue.
But, even supposing that we could perform, far more completely than we
do, the requirements of our own consciences, and conform to the evident
duties of our position and relations, do you think that without faith
we should be therein working the works of God? Suppose a man were able
fully to realise his own ideal of goodness, without any confidence in
God underlying all his acts; do you think that these would be acts that
would please God? It seems to me that, however lovely and worthy of
admiration, looked at with human eyes only, many lives are, which have
nobly and resolutely fought against evil, and struggled after good, if
they have lacked the crowning grace of doing this for God's sake, they
lack, I was going to say, almost everything; I will not say that, but I
will say that they lack that which makes them acceptable, well-pleasing
to Him. The poorest, the most imperfect realisation of our duty and
ideal of conduct which has in it a love towards God and a faith in Him
that would fain do better if it could, is a nobler thing, I venture to
say, in the eyes of Heaven—which are the truth-seeing eyes—than the
noblest achievements of an untrusting soul. It does not seem to me that
to say so is bigotry or narrowness or anything else but the plain
deduction from this, that a man's relation to God is the deepest thing
about him, and that if that be right, other things will come right, and
if that be wrong nothing is as right as it might be.
Here we have Jesus Christ laying the foundation for the doctrine which
is often said to be Pauline, as if that meant something else than
coming from Jesus Christ. We often hear people say, 'Oh, your
evangelical teaching of justification by faith, and all that, comes out
of Paul's Epistles, not out of Christ's teaching, nor out of John's
Gospel.' Well, there is a difference, which it is blindness not to
recognise, between the seeds of teaching in our Lord's words, and the
flowers and fruit of these seeds, which we get in the more systematised
and developed teaching of the Epistles. I frankly admit that, and I
should expect it, with my belief as to who Christ is, and who Paul is.
But in that saying, 'This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him
whom He hath sent,' is the germ of everything that Paul has taught us
about the works of the law being of no avail, and faith being alone and
unfailing in its power of uniting men to God, and bringing them into
the possession of eternal life. The saying stands in John's Gospel, and
so Paul and John alike received, though in different fashions, and
wrought out on different lines of subsequent teaching, the germinal
impulse from these words of the Master. Let us hear no more about
salvation by faith being a Pauline addition to Christ's Gospel, for the
lips of Christ Himself have declared 'this is the work of God, that ye
believe on Him whom He hath sent.'
III. Thirdly, this faith is the productive parent of all separate works
of God.
The teaching that I have been trying to enforce has, I know, been so
presented as to make a pillow for indolence, and to be closely allied
to immorality. It has been so presented, but it has not been so
presented half as often as its enemies would have us believe. For I
know of but very few, and those by no means the most prominent and
powerful of the preachers of the great doctrine of salvation by faith,
who have not added, as its greatest teacher did: 'Let ours also be
careful to maintain good works for necessary uses.' But the true
teaching is not that trust is a substitute for work, but that it is the
foundation of work. The Gospel is, first of all, Trust; then, set
yourselves to do the works of faith. It works by love, it is the
opening of the heart to the entrance of the life of Christ, and, of
course, when that life comes in, it will act in the man in a manner
appropriate to its origin and source, and he that by faith has been
joined to Jesus Christ, and has opened his heart to receive into that
heart the life of Christ, will, as a matter of course, bring forth, in
the measure of his faith, the fruits of righteousness.
We are surely not despising fruits and flowers when we insist upon the
root from which they shall come. A man may take separate acts of
partial goodness, as you see children in the springtime sticking
daisies on the spikes of a thorn-twig picked from the hedges. But these
will die. The basis of all righteousness is faith, and the
manifestation of faith is practical righteousness. 'Show Me thy faith
by thy works' is Christ's teaching quite as much as it is the teaching
of His sturdy servant James. And so, dear friends, we are going the
shortest way to enrich lives with all the beauties of possible human
perfection when we say, 'Begin at the beginning. The longest way round
is the shortest way home; trust Him with all your hearts first, and
that will effloresce into "whatsoever things are lovely and whatever
things are of good report."' In the beautiful metaphor of the Apostle
Peter, in his second Epistle, Faith is the damsel who leads in the
chorus of consequent graces; and we are exhorted to 'add to our faith
virtue,' and all the others that unfold themselves in harmonious
sequence from that one central source.
If I had time I should be glad to turn for a moment to the light which
such considerations cast upon subjects that are largely occupying the
attention of the Christian Church to-day. I should like to insist that,
before you talk much about applied Christianity, you should be very
sure that in men there _is_ a Christianity to apply. I venture to
profess my own humble belief that in ninety-nine cases out of a
hundred, Christian ministers and churches will do no more for the
social, political, and intellectual and moral advancement of men and
the elevation of the people by sticking to their own work and preaching
this Gospel—'This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him whom He
hath sent.'