Look and Live

Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else. ISAIAH 45:22

Moody spent more hours than almost anyone of his century talking with people who wanted to be saved and did not know how. The question he heard most often was not whether they should believe, but what believing was. They had heard the words believe on the Lord Jesus Christ all their lives. They did not know what to do with them. Much of The Way to God, and several of the sermons in the Ochorus library, are his attempt to answer that question in words a child could follow.

The bitten camp

His favourite picture of faith was the brazen serpent. He would describe the Israelite camp in the wilderness, with fiery serpents in the tents and graves along the road, and a mother bending over her dying son. Then the news runs through the camp: God has provided a remedy. Moses has set a serpent of brass on a pole, and whoever looks at it will live. The mother lifts the boy to the door of the tent, and he is too weak to see. Keep looking, she tells him. At last he catches the glint of the brass, and he is well.

And the LORD said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live. NUMBERS 21:8

Moody drew several lessons. The first was that looking is simple. It does not require education; a child who cannot read learns to look before he can walk. The second was that looking at the wound does not heal. Many anxious people, he said, are always examining their sins and their feelings. It was a Belfast surgeon, he says, who told his patients to take a good look at the wound and then fix their eyes on him and not take them off, and Moody turned it into counsel for the enquirer: “Sinner, take a good look at your wound; and then fix your eyes on Christ, and do not take them off.”

The third lesson was aimed at the clever. In Moody’s telling, a young man in the camp refuses to look until someone explains how brass on a pole can cure a snakebite, and dies demanding an explanation. His friend’s answer is Moody’s answer to every intellectual objection that is really an excuse: “Let your philosophy go: look and live.”

Taking God at His word

When Moody defined faith, he kept it very plain. Faith is taking God at His word. We live by trusting testimony all the time, he said; commerce would stop in two days if no one believed anyone. If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater.

If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater: for this is the witness of God which he hath testified of his Son. 1 JOHN 5:9

“Faith is a belief in testimony. It is not a leap in the dark, as some tell us.” God does not ask anyone to believe without giving him something to believe. That is why Moody sent anxious people to the Bible rather than into themselves.

So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. ROMANS 10:17

In The Right Kind of Faith he confesses that he used to pray for faith while all the time neglecting the Bible, and he sends his hearers to the Gospel of John, written, as John says, that ye might believe. Faith is not a mood that descends on us from nowhere. It grows where God’s word is heard.

Knowledge, assent and appropriation

Moody was not content with a merely mental faith. He knew that the devils believe, and tremble. So in The Way to God he borrows an old threefold definition. “There are three things indispensable to faith—knowledge, assent, and appropriation.” We must know who Christ is and what He has done. We must agree that it is true. And we must take Him for ourselves.

It is the third that people miss. Moody compared it to bread: a hungry man may admit that there are a thousand loaves in the house and still starve if he never eats one. Or to a drowning man and a rope. He must not only see the rope; he must let go of everything else and hold on to it.

He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him. JOHN 3:36

Faith is not a feeling

The commonest obstacle Moody met was feeling. People would not believe until they felt something, and because they did not feel it, they did not believe. His answer was blunt. “Feeling has nothing whatever to do with Believing.” The Bible does not say that he who feels has everlasting life. It says that he who believes has it. Feelings come and go with the weather and the digestion. God’s word does not.

He added a related counsel for those who kept examining their faith to see whether it was the right kind. “Faith is the hand that takes the blessing.” A beggar who has been given a thousand dollars does not worry whether he received it with the right hand or the left. What matters is not the quality of the hand but the gift in it. In the same way, he says, it is far more important to see that we have the right kind of Christ than to agonise over whether our faith is strong enough.

And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. JOHN 10:28

A gift, not a purchase

In The Way of Salvation Moody puts the same truth another way. Suppose, he says, he offered a Bible to whosoever would take it, and a man came forward and insisted on paying a penny for it. The moment he paid, it ceased to be a gift. So it is with salvation. Many people want to give God something for it: tears, resolutions, a better life. God will not sell it. He gives it.

For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. ROMANS 6:23

Moody pressed this to its practical end. How long does it take to accept a gift? There is a moment when it is another’s and the next moment when it is yours. That is why he believed a person could come to Christ in a moment, in a meeting, or walking home.

A caution

Moody’s simplicity here is a great gift to anxious people, and it has helped millions. But the reader should notice two dangers. The first is that take God at His word can shrink into agreeing to a proposition, without the turning of the whole person that Scripture calls faith. Moody guarded against that with his three elements and his insistence on repentance, which is the subject of the next chapter. The second is that the emphasis on a moment of decision can make people anxious about whether they believed correctly at that moment. Moody’s own answer to that is the right one: stop looking at your faith and look at Christ. It is not the look that saves. It is the One looked at.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Have you been waiting for a feeling before you will trust Christ? Read John 5:24 and ask what it says, not what you feel.

2. Moody prayed for faith while neglecting the Bible. How much of God’s word have you actually read this month?

3. Of knowledge, assent and appropriation, which is weakest in you? What would it mean to take Christ for yourself today?

4. Stop examining your hand. Spend ten minutes this week simply looking at Christ in one of the Gospels.

5. Read The Right Kind of Faith or The Way of Salvation, both in the Ochorus library.

A PRAYER

Lord, I have looked at my wound so long that I have almost forgotten there is a remedy.

I lift my eyes to You, lifted up on the cross for me. I take You at Your word.

I do not bring a penny to pay for what You give freely. I receive it as a gift, with empty hands.

When my feelings fail, let my faith rest on what You have said, and keep my eyes on You until I see You face to face. Amen.