The Perfect Faith # 4

The Perfect Faith # 4

When Christ came it was distinctly for this purpose, to make men know God, - God Himself, God in, behind, His actions. This was the purpose of the Incarnation. No longer on difficult and hazardous deductions from His treatment of them were men to depend alone for the understanding of God's nature. "The Light of the Knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ," says Paul; "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father," says Jesus. Still helped, no doubt, by what they saw God do, but shown by Jesus what God was behind His doing, what the God was who did all that was done to them, - so they who received the truth of Christ were to attain in the fatherliness of their Heavenly Father.

In the few minutes which remain, let us consider how such a faith shape and influence our life. I have already spoken of it all along with reference to the way in which it must affect our thoughts of joy and sorrow. Have not your hearts, my friends, at least sometimes, caught sight of a possible faith in God by which you might believe in Him, believe on Him, trust Him, even although no tokens of His presence or His love came to you in the shape of special pleasures, or even of the ordinary joys of living, even although there came to you from Him what men who simply saw His treatment of you, land knew nothing of your insight into His character, thought as they watched it must be a sure destruction of your faith? To stand with the good things of life all stripped away, to sand beaten and buffeted by storms of disaster and disappointment, to stand with all our brethren saying, "Behold, how God hates him," and yet to know as surely in our own hearts that God loves us, to know it so assuredly, with the intercourse that lies between our heart and His, that we can freely let go the outward tokens of His love, as the most true and trusty friends do not need to take gifts from one another for assurance of their affection, - this surely is the perfection of a faithful life. It is the gathering up of all happiness into one happiness which is so rich that it can live without them all, and yet regally receive them into itself as the ocean receives the rivers.

There are two other gifts which every true man values vastly more than happiness. They are light and work. It would be sad indeed if our principle did not apply to them; but it does! To stand in the darkness and yet know that God is light; to want to know the truth about a thousand mysteries, the answer to a thousand problems, and not to find the truth, the answers, anywhere, and yet to know beyond a peradventure that God is not hiding from us anything which it is possible and useful for us to know, to stand in the darkness and yet know that God is light, - that is a great and noble faith, a faith to which no man can come who does not know God. 

And so too about work. To want to do some labor in the world, to think that useless life is only premature death, to find ourselves apparently shut out from usefulness, and yet to believe that God wants us to grow into His likeness by whom all the work of the great working universe proceeds, - that is indeed a puzzle to one's faith. It may be that God used to give you plentiful chance of work for Him. Your days went singing by, each winged with some enthusiastic duty for Master whom you loved. Then it was easy to believe that He was training you; His contact with your life was manifest. By and by came a change. He took all that away. What then? Have you been still, in idleness, in what seems uselessness, to keep the assurance of His care for you? Did your old work really really bring you to know God? If it did, if in it all, while you delighted in doing it, the principle blessing of it all was that it permitted you to look into God's soul and see how self-complete and perfect and supreme He was; how, after all His workings, it was not in His works but in His nature, not in His doing but in His being, that God's true glory lay. Then when He takes your work away and bids you no longer to do good and obedient things but only to be good and obedient, surely that is not the death of faith. That may be faith's transfiguration. You can be idle for Him, if so He wills, with the same joy with which you labored for Him. The sick-bed or the prison is as welcome as the harvest field or the battlefield, when once your soul has come to value as the end of life the privilege of seeking and of finding Him.

So our of all our thought this afternoon there comes one prayer which sums up everything; Lord, by all Thy dealings with us, whether of joy or pain, of light or darkness, let us be brought to Thee. Let us value no treatment of Thy grace simply because it makes us happy or because it makes us sad, because it gives us or denies us what we want; but may all that Thou sendest us bring us to Thee, that knowing Thy perfectness we may be sure in every disappointment that Thou art still loving us, and in every darkness that Thou art still enlightening us, and in every enforced idleness that Thou art still using us; yea, in every death that Thou art giving us life, as in His death Thou didst give life to Thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen

~Phillips Brooks~

(The End)