Consecration and Faith

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. ROMANS 12:1

When Hannah Whitall Smith describes how to enter the life of faith, she makes a surprising move before she says anything about effort. She insists that this life is not something we reach but something we receive. In her words, we must not look upon it “as an attainment but as an obtainment.” It is a gift of God in Christ, and the only thing to do with a gift is to take it and thank the giver. Then she names the two conditions on which the gift is received. The first is consecration. The second is faith. They belong together as the two hands of one act — the hand that lets go and the hand that takes hold — and this chapter follows her through both.

The whole case

Consecration, she says, is not a price we pay. It is simply the removal of the obstacle. A potter cannot make a vessel of clay he is not allowed to hold. So the soul that wants God to work in it must put itself wholly into His hands.

She tells of trying to explain this to a doctor who could not see the point. At last she asked him what he would do with a patient who begged to be cured but would not tell him all his symptoms, and who proposed to follow some of his directions and ignore the rest. The doctor answered indignantly that he would leave such a man to his own devices; a patient must obey implicitly or he could do nothing for him. That, she said, is consecration. “God must have the whole case, without reserves.” The doctor saw it at once, and said God should have His way with him from then on.

My son, give me thine heart, and let thine eyes observe my ways. PROVERBS 23:26

The lovely will of God

The real reason Christians hesitate to hand themselves over, she believed, is that they suspect God’s will. They think that if they say Thy will be done, God will take the opportunity to make them miserable, to take away every comfort and send them to the hardest place on earth. She was ashamed, she wrote, even to set the thought down, and yet it was making hundreds of lives wretched.

Her answer was a story. A mother who feared to say Thy will be done was asked to imagine her only little boy running to her and saying that from now on he would let her have her way with him, because he trusted her love. Would she seize the chance to fill his life with hard and disagreeable things? The mother protested that she would hug him and fill his life with every good thing. Was she more loving than God? She saw her mistake.

Saying, Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done. LUKE 22:42

The prayer of Gethsemane is not a small thing. Our Lord prayed it in agony. Hannah does not pretend that surrender never costs; she insists that it never costs what we fear. Near the end of her life, in The Unselfishness of God, she went further: once she had seen how good God is, consecration seemed to her not a lofty achievement for a devout few but a privilege any sensible soul would seize. If a guide offered to lead you out of a trackless wilderness, would it feel like a sacrifice to say, lead on?

Laid on the altar

Having urged surrender, Hannah turned at once to the difficulty that follows it. A believer consecrates himself, as honestly as he knows how, and feels no different. So he wonders whether he has really done it, and does it again the next day, and the next, for months.

Her diagnosis was blunt. The temptation at this point is always to wait for a feeling. But God’s rule, she wrote, is “faith first, feelings second, in all things.” Imagine giving an estate to a friend and then, because you felt no different the next morning, giving it again, and again the day after. The friend would begin to doubt you had ever meant it, and you would no longer know whose the estate was. That, she said, is exactly how many Christians treat God. Under the old law, a thing once laid on the altar belonged to the Lord, and it was not the giver’s sincerity that made the offering holy but the altar.

Ye fools and blind: for whether is greater, the gift, or the altar that sanctifieth the gift? MATTHEW 23:19

So, she counselled, surrender yourself as fully as you know how. Ask the Holy Spirit to show you anything held back, and yield it when He shows it. Then count the transaction done. One caution belongs here: her advice that if the Spirit shows you nothing held back you may conclude there is nothing can be a mercy to a scrupulous conscience, but it can also make us too quickly satisfied. Consecration covers what we can see; God will show us more as we are able to bear it, and the handing over will be asked again on new ground. That is not a failure of the first surrender. It is the Potter continuing His work.

What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s. 1 CORINTHIANS 6:19–20

Faith is not a thing

Here the earnest seeker often gets stuck in a peculiar way. Every teacher tells him that this life is received by faith, and he agrees; but that is exactly his difficulty. He has no faith, he says. He has prayed for it for years, and nothing has come.

Hannah’s answer, in The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life, is one of her most liberating. The trouble, she says, is that we imagine faith to be a kind of substance — a religious feeling or a gracious disposition, something we could look inside and find, and then offer to God like a coin. But faith is not that sort of thing at all. “It is simply believing God, and, like sight, it is nothing apart from its object.” You might as well shut your eyes and look inside to see whether you have sight. You know you can see because you see something. And then comes the sentence that has set many anxious souls free: “The virtue does not lie in your believing, but in the thing you believe.”

Abraham believed God, and it was counted unto him for righteousness. ROMANS 4:3

Faith, then, is only the link. It is not the Saviour; it joins us to the Saviour. A weak faith in a strong Christ is worth more than a strong faith in anything else.

She makes the point with gentle ridicule. We trust other people constantly and never think it remarkable. We eat what the cook has prepared without suspecting poison. We board a train and trust our lives to a driver we have never met. If we can trust our fellow creatures, who may fail us at any moment, how is it that we say without embarrassment that we cannot trust God? She asked her readers, whenever they said I have no faith, to finish the sentence honestly: I have no faith in God. Said plainly, it sounds as terrible as it is.

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

The fact, the faith, the feeling

Her most memorable illustration came from the recent history of her own country. Emancipation had been proclaimed; the enslaved were free in law. But she told of a woman in a remote place who, years after the war, had never been sure of it. She had heard she was free, and asked her master, who said she was not; so she lived between hope and fear. When at last someone told her plainly that it was true, and explained how it had come about, she believed it — and walked out free.

Nothing in her circumstances had changed. What changed was that she believed the proclamation. From this Hannah drew her famous order: first the fact, then the faith, then the feeling. Human nature reverses it and waits to feel free before believing it. God has proclaimed our freedom; faith is simply taking Him at His word, and acting as though it were true, because it is.

If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed. JOHN 8:36

Trust, worry and the struggling heart

Hannah added a test that is uncomfortably practical. “And remember, trust and worry are more incompatible than oil and water.” If we give our soul to the Lord and then spend our days anxious about it, the anxiety is the proof that we have not handed it over.

It must be said that she can make faith sound easier than many people find it. She calls it the simplest thing in the world, and in one sense it is. But the man who cried out to Jesus for his son did not find it simple.

And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief. MARK 9:24

Jesus did not rebuke him for the tears or the mixture. He healed the boy. There are seasons — of illness, depression, bereavement — when believing is not a simple act of will but a long holding on, and a reader in such a season should not hear Hannah as saying that his struggle proves he does not care. Her real point survives even there: the strength of our grip matters less than the strength of the one we are gripping. A drowning man who clutches the rope feebly is still pulled out by the rope.

Let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering; (for he is faithful that promised;) HEBREWS 10:23

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. What do you secretly fear God would do with you if you gave Him the whole case? Look at it in the light of the mother and her boy.

2. Make a definite surrender, in words, and date it. Then refuse to reopen it tomorrow morning because you feel no different.

3. Ask the Spirit plainly: is anything held back? Yield what He shows you at once.

4. Stop asking whether you have enough faith. Ask instead whether God is trustworthy, and answer from Scripture.

5. Choose one promise and act on it this week as a fact, before you feel it.

6. Use the worry test: what are you still lying awake over that you claim to have given to God?

A PRAYER

Lord, I have feared Your will as though You were waiting to make me miserable. Forgive me for thinking myself more loving than You.

I give You the whole case, without reserves, and I lay myself on Your altar. I will not keep taking myself back because I do not feel different.

Turn my eyes from my believing to You, the one I believe. You have proclaimed my freedom; let me walk out free.

Where my grip is weak, hold me; I believe; help Thou mine unbelief. Amen.