À CHRISTIAN son’s capacity to arouse it. It is like admiration: I can’t just will to admire someone, but if he or she is admirable, neither can I withhold my admiration. It is just so with faith. It is my belief that nobody can stay around our Lord Jesus Christ very long without coming to believe in Him. The faith is mine, but it is provoked by Him. Faith is my response to Him. We must make a distinction between “faith” and “the faith,” “The faith” is the whole of that body of revealed truth that has come to us in the Christian revelation. Don’t try to start with this—if you do, you will get spiritual indigestion. Start with faith in Christ; and through Christ your mind will be led and widened out into the vast, rich truths that He taught and the Church has taught in His Name. Don’t try at first to understand all the intricacies of the doc trine of the Holy Trinity, or some of the other things in the creed that trouble you.
begin with what you do believe. You believe Jesus was the best man that ever lived. Then you are perfectly safe in trying to live as nearly as possible the way He lived. You hear Him say, “Be ye there fore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.” You find that is easy to say, and very hard to do. You hear Jesus say, “Love your enemies,” and “Do good to them that hate you,” and the more you try to do these things, the more impossible do they become. Then one day you run across a verse that throws light on all this. Jesus says, “Without me, ye can do nothing.” Your own moral strength is not enough: you need help from Him, help from on high. You need to pray. His help in prayer, His grace through the Bible and the Church, give you a strength you never had before. You find that the heart of the Christian experience is not trying to imitate Christ, but rather it is calling on Him for help. It is not something you do for Him, it is something He does for you. That takes a lot of the self-effort out of it. You see, if we try to do this Christian business in our own strength, one of two things happens: when we succeed, we get puffed up; and when we fail, we get “sunk.” Whereas when we let Christ help us with it, when we succeed, we become grateful; and when we fail, we become penitent. Faith in Christ means that we turn our selves over to Him so that all this can happen. How does anyone turn himself over to Christ? It is not an emotional upheaval, it is a decision of will. We consider our whole selves: sins, talents, hopes, fears, aspirations, potentialities—and we bring them to Christ for forgiveness or redirection. When a man asks a woman to marry him and she accepts him, it is a decision, a life-decision of the most tre mendous importance. It is so with the decision about Christ. We surrender as much of ourselves as we can to as much of Christ as we understand. The chief ele ment here is that of decision and commitment. I am shocked to find how many people in our churches have never anywhere made a decisive Christian com mitment. They oozed into church membership on a conventional kind of basis, but no one has ever ef fectively dealt with them spiritually, or helped them make a Christian decision. Such work cannot be CONTINUED
Begin with faith in Christ Himself. Once you get clear on Him, the rest will come along in its order. The whole faith is important. Many people have one or two doctrines they like and enjoy, but they do not take the whole faith. They are living in a one or two-room cabin when they might be living in a many-roomed palace. By the time some of these people who call themselves “liberal” have got through watering down the faith, there isn’t much left but a vague belief in a deity and a little bundle of moral principles. That is not the Christian religion. The faith of the Christian religion is embodied in the creeds. But you may have to work at those points one at a time, and not be able to take them all at once. You begin with “faith” and move to under standing and accepting “the faith.” We said a moment ago “begin with faith in Christ.” What do we believe about Christ? Well, I for one believe that He was and is God come in the flesh. I believe that everything in God that can mean anything to us human beings was revealed in Him. But I did not always believe that much. Many another Christian that I know could not have begun there—he had to begin where he could. He might only be able to say that he thought Jesus was the best man that ever lived, and he admired his character more than anyone else’s he ever knew and thought He had done more good for the world. All right, start there. Don’t begin with what you don’t believe;
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The King's Business
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