Paul here gives a precise standard, or 'measure' as he calls it,
according to which we are to estimate ourselves. 'Faith' is the
measure of our gifts, and is itself a gift from God. The strength of
a Christian man's faith determines his whole Christian character.
Faith is trust, the attitude of receptivity. There are in it a
consciousness of need, a yearning desire and a confidence of
expectation. It is the open empty hand held up with the assurance
that it will be filled; it is the empty pitcher let down into the
well with the assurance that it will be drawn up filled. It is the
precise opposite of the self-dependent isolation which shuts us out
from God. The law of the Christian life is ever, 'according to your
faith be it unto you'; 'believe that ye receive and ye have them.' So
then the more faith a man exercises the more of God and Christ he
has. It is the measure of our capacity, hence there may be indefinite
increase in the gifts which God bestows on faithful souls. Each of us
will have as much as he desires and is capable of containing. The
walls of the heart are elastic, and desire expands them.
The grace given by faith works in the line of its possessor's natural
faculties; but these are supernaturally reinforced and strengthened
while, at the same time, they are curbed and controlled, by the
divine gift, and the natural gifts thus dealt with become what Paul
calls _charisms_. The whole nature of a Christian should be ennobled,
elevated, made more delicate and intense, when the 'Spirit of life
that is in Christ Jesus' abides in and inspires it. Just as a sunless
landscape is smitten into sudden beauty by a burst of sunshine which
heightens the colouring of the flowers on the river's bank, and is
flashed back from every silvery ripple on the stream, so the faith
which brings the life of Christ into the life of the Christian makes
him more of a man than he was before. So, there will be infinite
variety in the resulting characters. It is the same force in various
forms that rolls in the thunder or gleams in the dewdrops, that
paints the butterfly's feathers or flashes in a star. All individual
idiosyncrasies should be developed in the Christian Church, and will
be when its members yield themselves fully to the indwelling Spirit,
and can truly declare that the lives which they live in the flesh
they live by the faith of the Son of God.
But Paul here regards the measure of faith as itself 'dealt to every
man'; and however we may construe the grammar of this sentence there
is a deep sense in which our faith is God's gift to us. We have to
give equal emphasis to the two conceptions of faith as a human act
and as a divine bestowal, which have so often been pitted against
each other as contradictory when really they are complementary. The
apparent antagonism between them is but one instance of the great
antithesis to which we come to at last in reference to all human
thought on the relations of man to God. 'It is He that worketh in us
both to will and to do of His own good pleasure'; and all our
goodness is God-given goodness, and yet it is our goodness. Every
devout heart has a consciousness that the faith which knits it to God
is God's work in it, and that left to itself it would have remained
alienated and faithless. The consciousness that his faith was his own
act blended in full harmony with the twin consciousness that it was
Christ's gift, in the agonised father's prayer, 'Lord, I believe,
help Thou mine unbelief.'