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I wish this evening to discuss with you the twin subjects of repentance and faith. And I begin by a reading from Holy Scripture that illustrates perhaps better than anything in the New Testament the meaning and action of faith. For all who care for the reference, the reference is the gospel according to John, chapter four and verse forty six. The Gospel by John, chapter four and verse forty six. He came therefore again unto Cana of Galilee, where he made the water wine.
And there was a certain nobleman whose son was sick at Capernaum. When he heard that Jesus was come out of Judea into Galilee, he went unto him and besought him that he would come down and heal his son, for he was at the point of death. Jesus therefore said unto him, except ye see signs and wonders, ye will in no wise believe. The nobleman saith unto him, Sir, come down ere my child die. Jesus saith unto him, Go thy way, thy son liveth.
The man believed the word that Jesus spake unto him, and he went his way. And as he was now going down, his servants met him, saying that his son lived. So he inquired of them the hour when he began to amend. They said therefore unto him, yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him. So the father knew that it was at that hour in which Jesus said unto him, thy son liveth, and himself believed, and his whole house. This is again the second sign that Jesus did, having come out of Judea into Galilee.
Our studies so far have dealt, in large majority, with the objective truths of Christianity. We must, before, spend at least one evening thinking of our subjective side, that is, that exercise of heart which is necessary if we will find and enjoy personally and practically God's salvation. Those exercises of heart are called in the Bible repentance and faith, and they are generally spoken of in that order. Repentance towards God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ was the apostolic prescription for men and women who would find God's salvation.
Let us think first of all, then, of repentance. I propose to discuss for a while with you the ministry of John the Baptist, in as much as John the Baptist's ministry was primarily concerned with this matter of repentance. And though he stands before the full-blown Christianity that was to come, nevertheless, we may learn many a helpful lesson from him. He was, so to speak, the specialist in the preaching of repentance. But before we do so, perhaps we ought to pay a little attention to the meanings of words.
Unhappily, the word repentance has gathered around it in the English language a lot of ideas that, strictly speaking, belong to other words and not to repentance itself. That is because our English word repentance has not a little relationship with the Latin word paenitentia, which Latin word paenitentia later on became in the English language penance, and has produced a buildup of ideas in people's mind that when the Bible talks of repentance, it is prescribing a sort of penance, that it is talking about a miserable state of soul, a kind of thing that the Jews did on their great day of atonement when they afflicted their souls.
For other people, it has come to mean a feeling of remorse, a feeling of self-loathing. And with others, it indicates certain meritorious works, which they feel they are obliged to do to make reparation to God for their sins. Now, as you know, our New Testament is translated not from Latin, but from Greek. And in the Greek, the word for repentance means a change of mind.
It is primarily an activity of a man's mind, rather than of his emotions. It has to do with his moral judgment, and it means that when a man repents, he comes to change his judgment, his thinking on that score, and agree with God, and if need be, condemn himself.
Now we see that, um, the importance of that ob- these observations very well illustrated in the example that I quoted to you briefly last evening. By your leave, I quote it again. The story of Esau illustrates so well the difference between feelings and a change of mind, a change of moral judgment. Esau, we are told, after he had sold his birthright and lost the birthright, thereafter he would, if he could have done, he would have inherited it.
And he sought it with bucket loads of tears. And you might have said, well, now look here, there is evidence of contrition on Esau's part. Look at his tears. Look at his evident grief. But he didn't get the birthright. And the Bible explains why, in spite of all his tears and grief, he found no place for changing his mind. He found no place of change of mind. That was true, I suppose, in this meaning, that E- Isaac, his father, was now no longer at liberty to change his mind and withdraw the birthright from, uh, Jacob, to whom it had been given, and give it to Esau.
But it evidently means likewise that Esau, though he felt very sore about losing the birthright, did not change his mind over that initial decision. If you would have given him the choice between birthright and pottage once again, he would have chosen hostage. pottage. Even though it cost him the birthright to do so. There are many people that have felt deep within them the desirability of God's salvation.
They have felt deeply moved as they have listened to preaching. And yet, when they see it means giving up and letting go, things that are sinful, maybe companionships that are unhealthy, or business advantages that are dishonest. Or whatever it may be. Though they would like salvation with all their hearts, they are not prepared to repent.
They are not prepared to face those burdens, those little things, or it may be they seem big things. They are not prepared to face them and judge them for what they are. They are not prepared to agree with God that they are wrong and sinful. And consequently all their deep feeling and desires after God's salvation never materialize. They are not prepared to repent. I remember a woman telling me so outright. Oh, I need to be saved, and I would like to be saved, but I'm just not prepared to give up certain things that I do that I know are sinful.
You may see the same thing illustrated in the results of John the Baptist's preaching. The historian Luke records us that- records the fact that there were two main results from John the Baptist's strong preaching of repentance. Let me read you the verses from Luke chapter seven. He says, and all the people, when they heard, and the publicans justified God being baptized with the baptism of John. But the Pharisees and the lawyers rejected for themselves the counsel of God, being not baptized of him.
Two results. The tax gatherers and the people in general, as they listened to that fiery prophet, justified God. We remember, of course, that the word justify does not mean to make righteous. You can't make God righteous, he is that already. It means to consider and to judge somebody to be right. And when these tax gatherers and people heard John speak, heard him denounce themselves as sinners, they admitted the truth of that. They honestly agreed that God was right, though it meant that they were wrong.
And in public admission of that fact, they got themselves baptized. That is repentance. That being baptized didn't wash away one of their sins. That water had no efficacy at all to atone for sin before God. In fact, they had to wait for the coming of the Lord Jesus, and John himself told them that in addition to being baptized like that, they must believe on the Lord Jesus to obtain the forgiveness that they needed. But the first step was necessary.
They must agree that God was right, that God's judgment of their sin was just. They must admit that if they had their desserts, it would be God's unqualified judgment. They must agree that they are, they are wrong and in need of salvation. The Pharisees came and listened to John, for they were nominally interested in anything that was religious. But when they heard what kind of preaching it was, a forthright condemnation of sin and a call to repentance, we read that they rejected the counsel of God against themselves.
They refused to be baptized. They told John bluntly they didn't see the need of such a thing. Might be all right for a few publicans, maybe, and the heathen, but they didn't need to be baptized. Sure enough, they would have admitted that they were guilty of the occasional slip and one or two peccadilloes, but they genuinely thought that take their life through the good deeds, taking a sober view of things, did outweigh the bad. And there wasn't any need for all this fuss.
And God being the God of love that he is, he didn't surely expect people to get concerned like this and make a public show of affairs. They felt that they were more or less good enough as they stood. Now, no doubt that they dismissed John's, uh, preaching as the ranting of an overcued evangelical. But the Holy Spirit's comment is that they rejected the counsel of God. They refused to agree that God was right and they were wrong.
The consequence is, of course, that they did not get saved, as you might expect. Though events took a very curious turn with them when our Lord came and pronounced to the repenting and now believing people the forgiveness of sins, and told them explicitly in so many words that their sins were forgiven, and that they might know it. These so same Pharisees took objection to that too. They said that this was blasphemous. That this was likely to encourage people in sinning, to tell them outright that their sins were forgiven.
They were like children, our Lord says, sitting in the marketplace. You couldn't please them either way, whether you danced and piped a merry-go-round, or whether you put on a lugubrious dirge and mourned, you wouldn't please them either way. So would these Pharisees. They wouldn't have this matter of being saved and knowing one's sins are forgiven either. And it is not difficult to see why their sins were not forgiven. They were not saved. And for other people to come alongside and claim that they were saved would very understandably provoke their indignation and jealousy.
But you see where the root of this attitude is. An unwillingness to agree with God against oneself. A willingness to change one's own thinking and let it be conformed with God's word. And without throwing any stones at all, but just being realist, I can point out how common an attitude that is, and how commonly today, perhaps as in the days of these Pharisees, that attitude cloaks itself with the outward works of Christianity.
If you find people who will deny that they deserve the extreme penalty of sin, if you find people that will deny the eternal perdition that our sins deserve. You make the test yourself and see how many of those people will likewise deny that it is possible for one to know oneself saved here in this life. The two attitudes spring from the same root.
The Bible declares really that the wages of our sin is death, that is eternal death. To deny that is to deny God. The Bible pla- states it plainly that we may know, we can know that we are born again and that our sins are forgiven here in this life, and to say that it is impossible for anybody to be sure again shows the unrepentant heart that refuses to change its thinking and agree with what God says. And it must be evident to us all that without such repentance there is no salvation.
Let us think a little bit more deeply on the, on this matter. I want to point out that John the Baptist, when people came to him, only baptized each person once, as far as we are, as far as we know. You may think that's a super- superficial observation to make, but it is necess- nes- nevertheless important. It wasn't the fact that people did a sin today and came along to John and says, Lord, uh, John, baptize me, I've sinned. And then tomorrow they did another sin and repenting of that came along to John the Baptist and he baptized them again. No. John's baptism was a once and for all thing.
It was the summing up of the whole life. And a being willing to admit that the whole life, from first to last, was stained with sin and unworthy of God's heaven. And when folk were prepared to admit that, that their whole of life fell short of God's requirements and deserved his judgment, then they were ready to see that Lamb of God that takes away not odd sins here and there, but deals with the whole of a man's life, and therefore can offer him forgiveness once and for all.
That still remains true. It is perhaps unnecessary to point out that following that, so to speak, that once and for all repentance, a Christian will find it necessary to repent seven times, perhaps seventy times a day thereafter. But we should not confuse the issue in our minds. The one thing takes place when first we come to Christ for salvation. We are dealing with the whole of life.
We are coming for a salvation, for a forgiveness, for a justification that covers the whole of life in toto. We admit that the whole of life is a wreck, deserving the wages of sin, and we take from the Savior's hand eternal life, which by its very nature and definition knows no end. It is as long as eternity itself. But that does not mean that a Christian thereafter grows slack and careless about his personal sins because he has a, a, a, a salvation that is as big as eternity.
When a man gets saved, it may well be, it often is the fact, that there are many things he does and many attitudes he adopts that are sinful, though he is not aware of it at the time. God loves that man even while he is yet a sinner, and if he's prepared to come and admit the fact that he is a sinner altogether, God is prepared to save him. But then that will mean that God thereafter will, as that man is able to bear it, raise the matter of individual sins and require that that man face them and repent of them, judge them wrong, and allow the Savior to save him from them.
We are told that if we do that, we shall not be judged. But if as Christian people, possessed of eternal life, we refuse to cooperate with God in these matters and allow sin to carry on unjudged, then God will take very decided steps to teach us that sin is sin, and to bring us to judge it in the light of his presence. But then, let us think again of the stress that John the Baptist laid in his preaching on the matter of works.
Works meet for repentance, he called them. I hasten to add that he is not alone in this. This is not some, uh, pre-Christian attitude that we Christian people can afford to neglect. The Apostle Paul, before King Agrippa, announced that he likewise taught this thing. He taught all his converts that they should bring forth works meet for repentance. We must study that a little bit more closely. What does that mean? Why, we are told at length what it meant with John. Uh, we read in the second, uh, in the third chapter of Saint Luke's Gospel, that the multitudes asked him, saying, what then must we do?
And he answered and said unto them, he that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none, and he that hath food, let him do likewise. And there came also publicans to be baptized, and they said unto him, Master, what must we do? And he said unto them, Extort no more than that which is appointed you. And soldiers also asked him, saying, And we, what must we do? And he said unto them, Do violence to no man, neither exact anything wrongfully, and be content with your wages. Here, in most force-like manner, John lays it down that works are to accompany repentance.
Now, at once we may be certain that none of those works earn forgiveness, else the Bible would glaringly contradict itself. None of those works made reparation, made atonement for sins before God. That can only be done by the sacrifice of Christ. Why then were the works necessary? They were necessary as evidence that the repentance was genuine. If those works had not been forthcoming, one might seriously have doubted whether the repentance professed was genuine.
Suppose I have here a man, he comes asking the word of God's salvation. He professes to be repentant for his past life. He sees that forgiveness can only be had through Christ, and forgiveness is offered free without any works at all. But inquiry shows that the man has stolen a thousand pounds from a friend of his. The thousand pounds is safely lodged in the bank to his own account. He has the money, he could pay back the money if he would. But presently he says, you know, I want to be saved, but tell me a moment, does that mean I've got to give that money back?
And you say, of course it does. Oh, well, he says, I'm not prepared to give the money back. And you say, but I thought you said just now that you were repentant. Oh, so I am. And I want to be forgiven my sin. Oh no, oh no, oh no. There must be, there must be that work of giving back that thousand pounds, else how can the man possibly say that he is repentant? Let me take another example.
You doubtless have, uh, remember the terms, uh, which the Apostle Peter laid down to the Jews in the city of Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost. After his sermon, we read that the people were deeply cut to their hearts, and they said to the apostle, well then, what shall we do? He said, what will you do? You will repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. You may have observed how different those terms are from what happened in the house of the Gentile Cornelius the Centurion.
When Peter went to preach to that Gentile man, he was in the course of preaching the gospel. In fact, he had not reached the end of his sermon when that gift of the Holy G- Ghost was poured out upon them there and then. And it was not, in fact, till after they had received the Holy Spirit that those people were baptized. Why then the difference? Well, certainly not because God has favorites and is prepared to save some people and give them his Holy Spirit on easier terms than others. It's not that at all. But you see, the Jews in Jerusalem were guilty of a something that the man Cornelius was not guilty of.
The men to whom the apostle was preaching in Jerusalem were men who had stood publicly in that city, and with their own mouths they had shouted, away with him, crucify him. They had done it publicly. Now they profess that they are sorry and repentant. They need God's salvation for their desperate sins, and this in particular, they need forgiveness for the sin of the murder of Christ. Conditions? Of course, repentance. But if that repentance be genuine, these men will be willing to show in that same city, and likewise in similarly public fashion, that they have renounced their former verdict.
Publicly they had said, away with him, crucify him. If they are genuinely repentant, they will now publicly confess themselves wrong. They will confess the name of Jesus publicly and be baptized in that name. And if they were not prepared thus to show the genuineness of their repentance. Do you think the apostles would publicly have received them as Christians? With Cornelius, the issue did not arise, of course. He had not been in Jerusalem. He was not personally guilty of the murder of Christ.
Oh, it didn't mean that his life may have been dotted here and there all over with wrong practices, but the man was genuine, ready to confess his sin. There was nothing glaringly outstanding, and the matter of his salvation could proceed. But again, I stress, all those works that are the evidence that our repentance is genuine, all of them together cannot avail to bring us forgiveness. They do not buy God's forgiveness. They do not purchase salvation.
That must come solely through Christ. There is one other consideration that we ought to remember before we proceed to discuss the other matter of faith. And that is that ever behind and helping us towards repentance is the power of God's gracious Holy Spirit. In God's supreme mercy, he does not leave our consciences to themselves. He does not leave us merely with the evidence of natural law, not merely with the evidence of his written word.
Not we are given to understand that his Holy Spirit visits men and women from time to time and illuminates their minds and presses upon them the need for repentance and shows them the seriousness of sin. We may thank God for that lovely ministry of the Holy Spirit. It is described in the Bible as the rain that cometh down from heaven, softening the ground that the ground might eventually yield its fruit, softening the ground that that ground might receive the seed, and that seed may grow. We may thank God that he does not leave us to our own choosings, but follows us constantly, and on times very vividly and persistently in the days when specially he visits us.
We ought to remember the sad possibility. It is possible that when the Holy Spirit has done everything he can to enlighten the mind and inform the conscience and urge repentance, and faith in Christ. It is still possible at the end of that for the human spirit to make its own decision. And just as is it possible for the human spirit to say yes to God then, it is possible for the human spirit to say no.
And the Bible is very solemn on this score. When the human heart says its final no to the pleadings of God's Holy Spirit, and deliberately and with eyes open turns back on God. There comes a time when it is no more possible to renew such a certain person unto repentance. Now, those verses have upset some people, and sometimes they have had upset Christians with over-tender consciences.
Sometimes people get under the weather in health. Hit by pain and suffering and misfortune and calamity, a genuine Christian people come to have doubts and get it into their heads that they have committed this unpardonable sin, and go through months and sometimes years of unutterable anguish. Far be it from me to cause or precipitate such a thing in anybody's mind. Let us notice what the verse says. It is impossible to renew such people unto repentance. That is to say, you will never get them to change their mind again.
They will be permanently indifferent. Now, if anybody here feels that he has committed the unpardonable sin and is in great distress of mind, longing to be saved, but feels he can't be saved because perhaps he doesn't know quite how, but he might have committed the unpardonable sin, let me tell you, the very fact you feel concerned at all shows that you haven't committed that sin. For of those people, it is said, you never get them to change their minds. They're happy to go on as they are. They turn their back on God and his Holy Spirit by their personal choice, and God being unable to do anything more for them, he would if he could, but being unable to do more for them is letting them go the way of their choice, and they're quite happy to go that way.
That is a sad thing. Let it warn any of us with whom God's Holy Spirit might at this moment be striving that we yield to the Savior. Let it warn and advise us to decide in the right direction, lest we weary God's Holy Spirit and pass beyond the point of no return. But now, what does it mean to believe, on the other hand? Repentance, necessary as it is by itself, of course, is not enough. It is the negative side.
Faith, so to speak, is the positive side. It's not enough, of course, just to repent. Without positive faith. That we might learn from the vivid example of Judas Iscariot. When he was confronted with the outcome of his foul deed, we read he repented himself. And if we ask how genuine his repentance was, we can only observe from what he did. He brought again his gain, the thirty pieces of silver. Manfully he went to the priests, and openly he confessed his wrong.
I have sinned, he says. I have betrayed innocent blood. And he made restitution as far as he could possibly make. He threw down the silver in the temple treasury. But he wasn't saved. There was no glimmer of personal faith in the Lord Jesus. There was no evidence of the reaching out of his empty hand to take now in reality from the Savior that son that before he took in utter insincerity.
He didn't believe. No personal relationship between him and the Savior formed. There was no faith. It drove a man to a suicide's death. The early Christian preachers were insistent on this thing if they found people that had been baptized merely by John's baptism. Good as that was, they would insist that they went the next step. For John's message had been to repent of sin as a necessary preliminary, but then that they should personally believe on Jesus.
Repentance towards God, faith next in our Lord Jesus Christ. I do trust that at this stage I am not making things sound difficult. I am discussing in faith what is the easiest and simplest thing in all the world, maybe. Oftentimes many people find it difficult. Let me try and strip off from the fact, the the matter of faith, many of the difficulties with which people have encumbered it in their thinking. You will observe, as I proceed through these various things and point out what faith is not, I am not progressively making the thing harder.
You will observe that I am progressively making the thing easier. Faith is not presumption. Let us just start here and clear our thinking. Faith is our response to God and to something God has said. It is not just wishful thinking. It sometimes happens if you ask to somebody, do you believe in the Lord Jesus? Oh, I have great faith. How are you saved? Well, uh, I, I do my best to live out the Christian life.
Oh, but you surely must know that, uh, salvation is not that way round. It is not by works. And then the reply will come, well, I don't think it really matters what we believe so long as we sincerely believe it. It's sincerity that counts, you know. So long as we are all sincere and seeking the right thing, you know, we shall all end up the same way, shall we really? That is utter presumption. If you are ill with the flu and you go to your medicine cupboard and you have twenty bottles of different sorts of medicine, try the argument out. Select one at random, whatever it is, and say to yourself, it doesn't matter, you know, whatever these doctors give us. Uh, so long as you are sincere in the taking of it, it will work.
Well, that is nonsense. That could be fatal. And the Bible in its early chapters reminds us of this thing in the story that we know so well, the story of Cain and Abel. Abel offered a more excellent sacrifice by faith. It wasn't that he somehow had a bright idea one day that this might be a good thing to do. God had indicated it to our first parents that he now required sacrifice and the shedding of blood. Without that, there was no forgiveness.
And Abel in faith responds to what God says and comes God's way. Cain, on the other hand, comes his own way. I've no doubt that he was full of confidence that his sacrifice would be accepted too. And he may well have argued with himself that his sacrifice was as good as Abel's, perhaps a little bit better. After all, Abel only had to let the old land grow and feed it occasionally, where he had had to till the soil right hard. But all Cain's unbounded confidence did not bring him acceptance with God, for it was sheer presumption, was it not?
Wishful thinking will not do. We must see that our faith is the genuine thing. It is in God's word. It is in response to what God has said and done. On the other hand, faith is not presumption. If God has said something, then it is not presumption for me to believe it with all my heart, just because God has said it. It is sometimes thrown at people who claim that they are saved and know it, that this is awfully presumptuous.
Not so at all, of course. When the Bible says these things are written that you may know that you have eternal life, it is not presumption for us to say that we do know it. In fact, it would be making God a liar to say it couldn't be known. Faith is a response to God and what God has said. At that same time, it is not, as Christian preachers have labored millions of times to point out, it is not a question of feelings. Faith is our response to God's facts.
Let us not confuse the fact with any consequent feelings. We know our feelings sometimes, uh, reflect the true state of affairs, but very often they don't. Here's a man, he's on his summer holiday, sitting on the beach in a deck chair in a cozy little bay i- in the south of Cornwall. He dozes off in the sun, and as he sleeps, the tide quietly creeps in. It is already surrounded the other parts of the beach and has crept up behind him, and the bay is quite cut off, and behind him are only sheer towering cliffs, and he can't escape. The man is in deadly peril, but he's snosing away quite happily in his deck chair, all asleep and unaware of the situation.
His feelings are utterly no guide to the true situation. Here's a good lady in bed one dark night, and her husband is aware on business. Presently, she is startled out of her sleep by an awful clattering and a banging downstairs in the lounge. Now, what has actually happened is that the poker has been standing a slant by the tiles, but eventually, by the law of gravity, the thing has slipped down and made an awful din. But she can't see what the true cause of the noise is, and she's upstairs.
You know what happens, don't you? Vivid pictures begin to arise of masked burglars and guns and bandits, and I don't know what. The feelings do not reflect the facts. And alas, how often that is in the experience of our hearts and souls. People say, yes, I do believe the Lord Jesus. I don't feel I'm saved. Now that's unfortunate. It is a beautiful thing when faith brings us into God's salvation, and that salvation reflects itself in our feelings.
But the feelings are not necessary. They are not essential. There is no verse in the Bible that tells us how many feelings we've got to have before we may be saved. Very often the impression, even those joyful feelings that sometimes we get, are effaced temporarily by a stomach ache, maybe, or a toothache, or too much cheese eaten the night before, or sudden bereavement, or an illness. Oh, don't let us confuse feelings with faith.
The story and the illustration is told. Someone has likened it this way, that fact, faith, and feeling were walking along the top of a brick wall. Fact went first. And so long as, um, faith kept its eyes glued in front of it on the facts, feeling followed quite respectably behind. Presently, faith looked round to see how feelings were getting on, and taking its eyes off the facts, found that feeling was very wobbly. And the more it tried to get feeling on the right path, the more wobbly feeling got.
It is always so. No, faith centers itself on God's unchangeable facts and leaves feeling to take care of itself. After all, in this matter of forgiveness, it is what God says that counts. If God has not forgiven me, then even if I feel as happy as the day is long, I am in danger of eternal perdition. If God has forgiven me, though I feel all confused inside, the fact is I am eternally saved.
Our passage that we read on this score reminded us that faith is not sight. When that nobleman came to the Lord Jesus... and pleaded with him to come down before his child died, said our Lord, except you see signs and wonders, you will not believe, will you? The man would have preferred that the Lord came down and did the miracle, and he saw the results, and then he was prepared to believe. That is useless. The thing that God is wanting is that we believe before we see the results.
How many folk are waiting until they see the results of God's spirit working in their lives before they will be sure? They feel that this is real honesty. They want to see genuine Christian work in their own lives. Until they see that, they are not prepared to say they're Christians. Oh, I see, except you see the wonder of Christ working in your soul, you are not prepared to believe. But then you are s- that's like wanting to get water out of your kitchen tap without first turning on the stopcock in the road outside. You want to believe, but you say, I'm not prepared to believe there is any water in that reservoir over there until I see the water coming out of the tap.
No, you'll have to go down your garden or out to the front pavement and turn on the main, and then you'll have to wait some minutes, like you do in some bathrooms, till the water comes up. And this man was made to wait. In the nature of things, he could not see for some hours, whether what Christ said was true or not. Would he believe? Would he just take Christ's naked word when in the nature of things he couldn't see any result or feel any result? And all the authority he had for knowing that the thing was true was that Christ had said it. Oh, what a challenge to that man's heart.
When at home he had a boy at the very gates of death with fever. And yet they are the terms. God does not ask us to wait until we see the evidence of his workings in our hearts. He asks us to believe Christ and take his naked word for it. I would like to stress that faith is not a sense of conviction. Conviction comes with growing knowledge, with growing experience of God.
Faith is the willingness to commit us myself to a person, whatever happens. Here's a man and he stands in his bedroom on the seventy fourth floor of a skyscraper, and his retreat has been cut off by fire, and the fireman appears at the window. He says, no, old fellow, come to me, I'll carry you down here. And he comes to the window and has a look at that long, long distance down, and he's scared stiff, and he can't scarce move. Come on, says the fireman, I want you to trust yourself to me, and I'll take you down. The man says, I'm scared, I daren't. And the fireman says, never mind, you, you just let yourself go in my hands and relax and shut your eyes, and I'll do it all.
I've taken hundreds of people down ladders like this. I've never lost one of them yet. The man says, I'd like to believe that, but I don't feel, I don't feel you can. Look here, old fellow, he says, if you don't make up your mind and come to your decision soon, the floor is going to drop out underneath you. And faced with that dreadful fear, the man says, right, there's only one way out of this. Then I do, I trust myself to this man. I'm sure he'll break my neck, but still, that's the only way, and I trust myself to him. And the fireman gets hold of him, and every single step down the ladder, the man is in fear of his life, but he gets to the bottom safe. He hasn't a lot of conviction, but he has come to his decision and entrusted himself to his savior.
There's a mighty world of difference between that, that man that knelt on the ground and said to the Lord in his anguish, Lord, I believe, but help thou mine unbelief. A man at his first experience of Christ, chock full of doubt and difficulty and fear, and yet making the decision in his heart, bringing his will to bear upon the matter and saying, I will believe. Help thou mine unbelief. A mighty great difference between him and an aged apostle with years of experience of God saying, I am persuaded. But the one man was saved as well as the other.
Believing in Christ, you'll see, is a matter of our will. I will trust him and commit to him all the difficulties and the doubts and the fears and the worries, committing it to him. And so I end with a remark or two on how this faith comes. It doesn't come by our trying. It comes, says the Bible, faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God, listening to what he says, letting his word provoke the faith. It will depend on what we think of God, of what we think of Christ in the last analysis.
In fact, the Hebrew word for believing means just this: I believe in somebody when I consider him to be utterly reliable. Christ stands in front of each one of us and says, he that hears my word, believes on him that sent me, has everlasting life and shall not come into judgment. And then it's a question between two persons, myself and Christ, and what I think of him. I've got to decide whether I think he's a liar, all told, or whether I think perhaps in some things he said the truth and in other things he was grossly astray.
I've got to decide whether I think that Christ would say one thing today and another thing tomorrow. I've got to decide whether I really think that he meant every word he said, and it's impossible for him to lie. And if I do consider that it is utterly impossible for him to lie, then I shall commit my all to him and enter into rest. We may see the tremendous importance of this. We face eternity.
Knowing ourselves sinners, and God's judgment is against sin, we need to be saved. Soon we shall be beyond the place where it's possible to choose. We are confronted with the situation where we must decide whom we are going to choose, whom we are going to believe. Am I going to believe myself? Am I going to trust my feelings? Am I going to let them be the judge of the matter and trust myself?
I tell you that that is hell begun on earth. To go out in- into eternity trusting ourselves is to be all eternity one tiny little speck of humanity locked within the prison house of itself forever. That's hell. The Savior who died on Calvary stands in front of us, imploring us to cast the anchor of our soul outside of self in him. And he guarantees if we place it in him, that anchor will never drift in this life or in the next.
Shall we take the matter to God in prayer? Now, O God, we pray that thou who knowest the hearts and readest our thoughts afar off, thou wilt to graciously attend each one of us. By thy spirit, show us the sinfulness of sin, we beseech thee. And give us to see clearly in our moral judgments the end of sin unrepented of. Show us something of thy love and of thy readiness to save us at once, the very moment we call on the name of the Lord.
And as we people here may be face this decision, some of us for the first time ever. Oh God, grant thy Holy Spirit's aid. We seeing the reality of these things, decide aright. And as best we know how, come to the Savior. Crying, if need be, Lord, I do believe, help thou mine unbelief. Grant, O Lord, that we who here tonight have sat so near thy salvation, shall none of us perish through the folly of unrepentance or through the ignorance of unbelief.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
