Fact, Faith, Feeling

Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. ROMANS 5:1

Three words stand at the head of one of Meyer’s shortest addresses, and they have probably helped more anxious Christians than anything else he wrote. Fact. Faith. Feeling. The trouble with most of us, he says, is not that we lack any of the three but that we put them in the wrong order. “We say, feeling, faith, fact. God says fact, faith, feeling.”

We want to feel forgiven before we believe we are forgiven, and to believe before we have looked at what God has done. It is like trying to build the top storey of a house before the foundations. Meyer’s order is the reverse, and he set it out in three lines: “God’s Facts, laid like a foundation of adamant. Our Faith, apprehending and resting on them.” And last, joyous feelings, which may come at once or after days and months, as God wills.

The facts first

The facts, Meyer says, are like stepping-stones across a brook. From a distance you cannot see how to cross. It is no use consulting your feelings about it from the bank. You must come down to the water, look at the stones, see how firmly they are set, and step.

He lists some of them. God loves each of us with a tender and particular love. In Christ every obstacle to our forgiveness has been removed. The one who trusts Christ is born into God’s family and is a child, whether he feels like one or not. God takes what we give Him as soon as we give it. In Christ we are seated in the heavenly places. There is a share in the gift of Pentecost waiting for every member of Christ.

Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ. PHILIPPIANS 1:6

None of these depends on how we feel. Meyer tells of soldiers hiding in the woods after the American Civil War, starving on berries long after peace had been signed, because they had not heard or did not believe the news. Their unbelief cost them dearly. It did not undo the peace.

Standing and experience

In the address called Where Am I Wrong? he draws the same line in different words. Many Christians, he says, confuse their standing with their experience. Experience is as changeable as April weather, sun and cloud chasing each other across the moor. Standing does not change, because it did not begin with us, was not bought by us, and is not kept by us.

He puts it in a picture from the world of money that his hearers would have understood at once. “Our standing in Jesus is our invested capital. Our emotions at the best are but our spending money,” always passing through our pockets and never quite the same. The heir’s fortune does not rise and fall with the coins in his purse.

Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever. HEBREWS 13:8

Living in the will

If feelings do not settle our standing, what does God look for in us? Meyer’s answer is the will. We cannot command our feelings, but we can direct our wills. “In His sight we are not what we feel, but what we will.” So he counsels his readers to live not in the summer-house of emotion but in the central citadel of the will.

He gives an example every Christian will recognise. At the Lord’s Table the heart is full, and every part of us joins in praise. Next morning it is the counting-house or the factory, and the glow has gone, and we wonder whether we were ever as devoted as we thought. Meyer’s counsel is to look up and tell God that though the tide of feeling has gone out, the will has not moved a hair’s breadth: we are as much His as we were at the Table. That, he says, is an offering God is pleased with.

Commit thy works unto the LORD, and thy thoughts shall be established. PROVERBS 16:3

Faith that looks away

What of faith itself? Here Meyer is at his most helpful. If you want a true faith, he says, do not think about your faith; look at the facts, and at the Person they concern. We rest not on the atonement but on Him who made it; not on the resurrection but on Him who rose. And when the anxious ask whether they have the right kind of faith, he gives them one of his best sentences: “All faith that turns towards Jesus is the right faith.” It may be as weak as the woman’s touch on the hem of His garment, or as desperate as Peter’s cry as he sank. If it turns to Christ, it is enough.

And Jesus answering saith unto them, Have faith in God. MARK 11:22

He learned, he says, to stop measuring his faith by God’s greatness and to lean it instead on God’s faithfulness. In dark hours of nervous depression he had gone to God and said that his faith was flickering out, but that God was faithful and he was reckoning on Him. “Do not trouble about your Faith; reckon on God’s Faithfulness.”

Feeling in its place

None of this makes Meyer an enemy of feeling. As a rule, he says, faith fruits in feeling; the prodigal came home to music and dancing. Joy is a fruit of the Spirit. But the lack of it does not always mean something is wrong. Our feelings are affected by our health, the weather, and whether we slept well, and God knows it. When Elijah lay under the juniper tree and asked to die, God did not rebuke him; He sent him sleep and food.

Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God. PSALM 42:11

Meyer also noticed that temperaments differ. Some people, he writes, seem born in the dark, their nature set in a minor key. They may never have the bright gladness others have, and they must not blame themselves for it. But there may still be rest, victory and serenity.

Where he must be read with care

Meyer’s counsel is wise, but one strand needs balancing. In the same address he urges his readers to be indifferent to emotion, and even, when they suffer, to give no sign of it, lest they be a stumbling-block to others. That can be heard as a counsel of pretence, and it has sometimes been used to make the grieving or depressed hide what they ought to bring into the open. The Psalms do not hide their tears, and Meyer himself, writing on sorrow, insists that tears are natural and that Jesus wept. Put the facts first, by all means, and do not live by feelings. But do not pretend to feelings you do not have, and do not despise the ones you do.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Write down three facts about your standing in Christ that do not depend on how you feel. Read them aloud each morning this week.

2. Notice the next time your feelings dip after a spiritual high. Tell God that your will has not moved.

3. Stop examining your faith for a week. Each time you are tempted to, look instead at one promise of God and reckon on His faithfulness.

4. If you are of a sombre temperament, stop measuring yourself by others’ gladness. Ask God for rest and serenity instead.

5. Is there a grief or darkness you have been hiding from those who love you? Consider telling one trusted friend.

A PRAYER

Father, I have tried to feel my way to You, and I have sunk every time.

Set my feet on the facts: that You love me, that Christ has died and risen, that I am Your child.

When my feelings fail, keep my will fixed on You. When my faith flickers, let me lean on Your faithfulness.

And give me, in Your own time, the joy that follows faith. Amen.