A True and a False Faith

For in Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision; but faith which worketh by love. GALATIANS 5:6

One evening, walking down the aisle of a large music hall after a service, Catherine Booth had her hand seized by a respectable woman who wanted to know what was wrong with her. She believed everything the preacher had said. She had believed it for years. She prayed, she strove, she believed — and she was, in her own words, “just as big a slave to my sins as anybody else.” Catherine later said that the woman’s question struck her like a light from heaven. Here was a sample of thousands. Somewhere between believing and being saved there was a missing link, and she set herself to find it. The result was the address she called A True and a False Faith, and the sermon on Saving Faith in Godliness.

Two kinds of believing

Her first move was to insist that there are two quite different things called faith, and that only one of them saves. The first is simply the acceptance of facts. A young man, she said, believes that the earth goes round the sun, and it makes no difference whatever to the way he lives. He believes in William the Conqueror, and would defend the history if it were attacked, and it never touches his conduct. Many drunkards believe sincerely in sobriety. This kind of belief is real enough, and it is found in abundance in every Christian country. It is also, she said bluntly, the faith of devils.

Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble. But wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead? JAMES 2:19–20

The devil, she pointed out, is one of the most orthodox beings in the universe. He knew exactly who Jesus was when the Pharisees were still arguing about it. His belief did not change his character in the slightest. “There is a faith that damns, as well as a faith that saves,” she told her congregation, and then asked the only question that mattered: which have you got?

Nor is saving faith a feeling. People weep at a moving sermon about the cross and conclude that they must be Christians, or they would not feel so. She compared it to a man weeping over a novel, who lays down the book and goes his way unchanged. Feeling is not faith, any more than knowledge is.

Committal

What, then, is saving faith? She found her answer in a small observation about the Greek of the New Testament. The word translated believe is in several places translated commit. Jesus did not commit Himself unto them, John says, because He knew all men (John 2:24). The same word that describes our trusting Christ describes Christ declining to entrust Himself to people He could not trust. Faith, then, is not agreement with a proposition. It is the handing over of oneself to a person.

For I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day. 2 TIMOTHY 1:12

She loved the word whom in that verse, and pointed out that Paul did not say what he had believed. Saving faith, she said in A True and a False Faith, is the soul giving itself up to God, risking “my all, for this life and for the next, on the truthfulness and the goodness of God,” and then daring to live as if what God has said were true. She used the image of a marriage. A suitor does not want a woman merely to believe everything he says about himself and his prospects. He wants her. And God, she said, does not want our creeds or our head-faith. He wants the heart.

For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. ROMANS 10:10

Christ Himself

In Dealing with Anxious Souls she drew out the practical consequence. The object of faith is not the testimony about Christ, but Christ Himself. Many enquirers, she found, believed everything the Bible said about Jesus — that He died for them, that He intercedes for them — and did not trust Him to do any of it for them now. She illustrated this with a sick man told of a wonderful physician. He may believe every word about the physician’s skill and still never put himself in his hands. There is the whole difference between a dead faith and a living one. The first, she wrote, ends with the intellect; the second purifies the heart.

All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out. JOHN 6:37

Her counsel to such people was wonderfully practical. She would ask them when Jesus received the people who came to Him in the days of His flesh. When they came, of course — not an hour before, not an hour after. Then she would press them: you are coming now, confessing and forsaking your sins; does He take you in, or cast you out? And she would not let them retreat into I hope so. To hope that Christ means what He says, she thought, was to insult Him. She would have them say it after her until the heart followed the tongue: Thou dost not cast me out; Thou takest me in.

A voluntary thing

Perhaps her most liberating teaching on faith was for those tormented by intellectual doubt. She insisted that “faith is a voluntary thing.” We do not have absolute power over our intellects, she said, but we do have power over our wills. The honest doubter need not wait until every question is settled. He can say to God that he will take his stand on God’s word and follow the light as it comes, and she was confident that light would come. “God wants your heart,” she wrote. “Then He will enlighten your intellect.”

But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. HEBREWS 11:6

There is real wisdom here, and some danger. Her language of will and committal belongs to the Methodist tradition, and readers from a Reformed background will want to add, as she herself did in other places, that the power to believe is itself the gift of the Spirit. Faith is our act, but it is not our achievement. Her American editor, introducing Godliness, was careful to say that in her teaching the Holy Spirit enables the act of faith and bears witness to it. She would have agreed. What she would not allow was that anyone should use the doctrine of grace as a reason to sit still.

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. MATTHEW 11:28

A true faith, then, is a faith that works by love. It is not less than believing the facts, but it is much more: a person given over to a Person, and living from then on as if He were real. The woman in the music hall had the facts. What she needed was Christ.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. List what you believe about Christ. Then ask, of each item, whether you are actually trusting Him to do it for you now.

2. If you have believed the facts for years and remain enslaved to a sin, do not conclude that faith has failed. Consider whether you have ever committed yourself, rather than agreed.

3. If you are troubled by intellectual doubts, try her counsel: tell God plainly that you will follow whatever light He gives, and then act on the light you have.

4. Read John 6:37 aloud in the first person, slowly, three times. Stop hoping it is true and take Him at His word.

5. Ask whether your faith works by love. Name one act of love this week that would not have happened if you did not believe.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, I have believed about You for a long time. I have known the facts and defended them, and I have kept myself in my own hands.

I do not want the faith that devils have. I want to trust You, not merely to agree with what is said of You.

Here I am. I commit myself to You — my past, my sins, my weakness, my future. You have said You will not cast out anyone who comes. I come.

Give me the faith that works by love, and let my life show that I am Yours. Amen.