'Stay yourselves on the Lord your God,' Well, then, faith is not
believing a number of theological articles, nor is it even accepting
the truth of the Gospel as it lies in Jesus Christ, but it is
accepting the Christ whom the truth of the Gospel reveals to us. And,
although we have to come to Him through the word that declares what He
is, and what He has done for us, the act of believing on Him is
something that lies beyond the mere understanding of, or giving
credence to, the message that tells us who He is and what He has done.
A man may have not the ghost of a doubt or hesitation about one tittle
of revealed truth, and if you were to cross-question him, could answer
satisfactorily all the questions of an orthodox inquisitor, and yet
there may not be one faintest flicker of faith in that man's whole
being, for all the correctness of his creed, and the comprehensiveness
of it, too. Trust is more than assent. If it is a Person on whom our
faith leans, then from that there follows clearly enough that the bond
which binds us to Him must be something far warmer, far deeper, and
far more under the control of our own will than the mere consent or
assent of our brains to a set of revealed truths. 'The Lord your God,'
and not even the Bible that tells you about Him; 'the Lord your God,'
and not even the revealed truths that manifest Him, but Him as
revealed by the truths--it is He that is the Object to which our faith
clings.
Jehoshaphat, in the same breath in which he exhorted his people to
'believe in the Lord, that they might be established,' also said,
'Believe His prophets, so shall ye prosper.' The immediate reference,
of course, was to the man who the day before had assured them of
victory. But the wider truth suggested is, that the only way to get to
God is through the word that speaks of Him, and which has come from
the lips either of prophets or of the Son who has spoken more, and
more sweetly and clearly, than all the prophets put together. If we
are to believe God, we must believe the prophets that tell us of Him.
And then there is another suggestion that may be made. The Object of
faith proposed to Judah is not only 'the Lord,' but 'the Lord
_your_ God.' I do not say that there can be no faith without the
'appropriating' action which takes the whole Godhead for mine, but I
doubt very much whether there is any. And it seems to me that to a
very large extent the difference between mere nominal, formal
Christians and men who really are living by the power of faith in God
as revealed in Jesus Christ, lies in that one little word, 'the Lord
your God.' That a man shall put out a grasping hand, and say, 'I take
for my own--for my very own--the universal blessing, I claim as my
possession that God of the spirits of all flesh, I believe that He
does stand in a real individualising relation to me, and I to Him,' is
surely of the very essence of faith. There is no presumption, but the
truest wisdom and lowliness in enclosing, if I may so say, a part of
this great common for ours, and putting a hedge about it, as it were,
and saying, 'That is mine.' We shall not have understood the sweetness
and the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ until we have pointed and
condensed the general declaration, 'He so loved the world,' into the
individualising and appropriating one, 'He loved me, and gave Himself
for me.' Oh! if we could only apply that process thoroughly to all the
broad glorious words and promises of Scripture, and feel that the
whole incidence of them was meant to fall upon us, one by one, and
that just as the sun, up in the heavens there, sends all his beams
into the tiniest daisy on the grass, as if there was nothing else in
the whole world, but only its little petals to be smoothed out and
opened, I think our Christianity would be more real, and we should
have more blessings in our hands. God in Christ and I, the only two
beings in the universe, and all His fullness mine, and all my weakness
supported and supplemented by Him--that is the view that we should
sometimes take. We should set ourselves apart from all mankind, and
claim Him as our very own, and so be filled with the fullness of God.
This, then, is the Object of faith, a Person who is all mine and all
yours too. The beam of light that falls on my eye falls on yours, and
no man makes a sunbeam the smaller because he sees by it; and in like
manner we may each possess the whole of God for our very own property.