The psychology of faith i - Chambers, Oswald
1. The constitution of faith
And without faith it is impossible to be well-pleasing unto him. (Hebrews 11:6 RV )
There is not possible a normal healthy human being apart from religious faith. Faith claims the whole man and all gods grace can make him.
Forsyth
The conception of faith given in the new testament is that it must embrace the whole man. Faith is not a faculty, faith is the whole man rightly related to god by the power of the spirit of Jesus. We are apt to apply faith to certain domains of our lives only we have faith in god when we ask him to save us, or ask him for the holy spirit, but we trust something other than god in the actual details of our lives. Faith claims the whole man and all that gods grace can make him, just as it claimed the whole of our lords life. Our lord represents the normal man, not the average man, but the man according to gods norm. His life was not cut up into compartments, one part sacred and another secular, it was not in any way a mutilated life. Jesus Christ was concentrated on one line, viz. , the will of his father, in every detail of his life. That
Is the normal standard for each of us, and the miracle of the gospel is that he can put us into the condition where we can grow into the same image. Our lord lived his life not in order to show how good he was, but to give us the normal standard for our lives. The life he lived is made ours by means of his death; by the gift of the holy spirit and obedience to him. We are put into the relationship to god that Jesus had that they may be one, even as we are one.
Faith is a tremendously active principle of trust in Jesus which is ready to venture on every word he speaks: lord, thou hast said (e. G. , Matthew 6:33: but seek ye first the kingdom of god, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you); it looks mad, but i am going to venture on it; i will sink or swim on thy word. We cannot have faith in every word of Jesus whenever we think we will. The holy spirit brings a word of Jesus to our remembrance and applies it to the circumstances we are in, and the point is, will we obey that particular word? We may have seen Jesus and known his power and yet never have ventured out in faith on him. Faith must be tested because only through conflict can head-faith be turned into a personal possession. Faith according to Jesus must have its object real, no one can worship an ideal. We cannot have faith in god unless we know him in Jesus Christ. God is a mere abstraction to our outlook until we see him in Jesus and hear him say, he that hath seen me hath seen the father, then we have something to build upon and faith becomes boundless.
2. Faith and confusing issues
Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone. ( James 2:17; see vv. 1720)
An inadequate theory of faith distorts practice.
Forsyth
The apostle James continually says, if you have faith prove it by your life. Experience is never the ground of my faith; experience is the evidence of my faith. Many of us have had a marvellous experience of deliverance from sin and of the baptism of the holy ghost, not a fictional experience, but a real experience whereby we prove to our amazement every day that god has delivered us, then comes the danger that we pin our faith to our experience instead of to Jesus Christ, and if we do, faith becomes distorted. When the baptism of the holy ghost came upon the early disciples it made them the written epistles of what they taught, and it is to be the same with us. Our experience is the proof that our faith is right. Jesus Christ is always infinitely mightier than our faith, mightier than our experience, but our experience will be along the line of the faith we have in him. Have we faith to bear this testimony to those who know us that we are what we are because of our faith in Jesus? We have faith in Jesus to save us, but do we prove that he has saved us by living a new life? I say i believe that Jesus can do this and that; well, has he done it? But by the grace of god i am what i am. Are we monuments of the grace of god, or do we only experience gods supernatural power in our work for him? Extraordinary spiritual experiences spring from something wrong in the life, you never get the exquisite simple faith in god along any special line of experience, but only along the common line of regeneration through faith in Jesus. Be sceptical of any revelation that has not got as its source the simplicity by means of which a babe can enter in, and which a fool can express.
3. Faith and consecrated issues
. . . Work out your own salvation. (Philippians 2:12)
The normal course of all religious experience is expansion followed by concentration.
Forsyth
When god gives a vision of what sanctification means or what the life of faith means, we have instantly to pay for the vision, and we pay for it by the inevitable law that expansion must be followed by concentration. That means we must concentrate on the vision until it becomes real. Over and over again the vision is mistaken for the reality. Gods great divine anticipation can only be made manifest by our human participation, these two must not be put asunder. Every expansion of brain and heart that god gives in meetings or in private reading of the bible must be paid for inevitably and inexorably by concentration on our part, not by consecration. God will continually bring us into circumstances to make us prove whether we will work out with determined concentration what he has worked in. If you have had a vivid religious experience of the baptism of the holy ghost, what are you going to do with it? We are sanctified by gods grace and made one with Jesus in order that we might sanctify our holiness to god as Jesus did. And for their sakes i sanctify myself ( john 17:19). There is no difficulty in get- ting sanctified if my will and affections have at their heart the earnest desire for gods glory. If i am willing for god to strangle in me the thing that makes me everlastingly hanker after my own point of view, my own interests, my own whiteness if i am willing for all that to be put to death, then the god of peace will sanctify me wholly. Sanctification means a radical and absolute identification with Jesus until the springs of his life are the springs of my life. Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it.
The great need to-day is for Christians to toe the line: and the heathen shall know that i am the lord, saith the lord god, when i shall be sanctified in you before their eyes (Ezekiel 36:23). Unless Christians are facing up to gods commands there is no use pushing forward to meet the life of our time. Jesus wants us to face the life of our time in the power of the holy ghost. Do we proclaim by our lives, by our thinking, by our faith in god, that Jesus Christ is sufficient for every problem life can present? That there is no force too great for him to cope with and overcome? If our faith is not living and active it is because we need reviving; we have a faith that is limited by certain doctrines instead of being the faith of god.
The apostle Paul is always tremendously practical, he comes right down to where we live, he says we must work out the salvation god has worked in. All power is given unto me, said jesus, and by the holy spirits presence we can do those things which please god are we doing them? By the power of the indwelling holy spirit we can bring every thought and imagination into captivity to the obedience of Christ, and can keep this body the chaste temple of the holy ghost are we doing it? By the power of the holy spirit we can keep our communications with other people the exact expression of what god is working in us are we doing it? The proof that we have a healthy vigorous faith is that we are expressing it in our lives, and bear- ing testimony with our lips as to how it came about.
There is no end to the life of faith; sanctification itself is only the abc of the christian life. The life of Jesus from Bethlehem on wards is a picture of the sanctified life, and anything that would make our souls stagnate produces a distortion. It is a continual learning, but not of the same lesson, if we have to be taught the same lesson it is because we have been very stupid. God will bring us into circumstances and make us learn the particular lessons he wants us to learn, and slowly and surely we will work out all that he works in. There is no patience equal to the patience of God.