SERMON VIII.

THE EXERCISE OF FAITH.

HEBREWS XI. 8.

BY FAITH, ABRAHAM, WHEN HE WAS CALLED TO GO OUT INTO A PLACE WHICH HE SHOULD AFTER RECEIVE FOR AN INHERITANCE, OBEYED; AND HE WENT OUT, NOT KNOWING WHITHER HE WENT.

THE Most High invariably deals with man as a reasonable creature, and never demands his belief in any revelation, without communicating abundant evidences of its truth, and divine original. When Moses was sent to deliver Israel from captivity, the wonder-working rod was put into his hands, and the miracles wrought by it, were to attest and authorize his high commission. In like manner, those amazing communications of the Holy Ghost, contained in the Scriptures, bear upon every part of them the broad seal of divine veracity, and demand our entire reception of them, upon an extent

of evidence, which only the perversity of infidelity, loving darkness rather than light, can adventure to deny. But as the pole supports the vine, yet gives no life to its root; so reason, when it has directed the faith of man to the Scriptures of God, as its rule and warrant, must there end its labour, and leave faith in the mysteries of the book of salvation, to draw its being from the Spirit of light and truth, as He does his sovereign work of love upon the heart. And hence, the meanest, as well as the mightiest understanding, is equally capable of salvation beneath that omnipotent influence. Such a faith is no speculative frame of mind, the too frequent result of intellectual pride, which, after all its presumptuous searchings into the hidden things of God, is only dazzled and confounded by them; as one might be, who should climb the summit of a perilous steep with much giddiness of brain, to look upon the sun, when it might be equally well, and much more safely regarded, from the level ground which he had left. Such a belief, I repeat, the act of God within the heart, is an operative principle, and works by love, under the influence of the same eternal Spirit who called it into being.

Having therefore already seen THE NATURE, ORIGIN, OBJECTS, and WARRANT of faith, we proceed to notice

V. THE EXERCISE OF FAITH, In Abram, it was no cold assent of the understanding to the reasonableness of a proposition, while the will remained unmoved, and the affections uninfluenced. It was no body without the soul, no form and mockery of a living principle, as the dead man in his shroud, and coffin, and grave, is a poor semblance of him who breathes, and thinks and labours; but the work of God's own hand. It was life, testified by the acts of life. It led him to go forth at Jehovah's bidding, from all that was dear and tempting to his heart; not knowing whither he went. led him to sojourn in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles, with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise in testimony that he looked for a "city which hath foundations, whose Builder and Maker is God." It led him to offer up Isaac, his son, the Son of God's own promise; accounting that God was able to raise the miraculously given child from the dead. Faith is

1 Heb. xi. 8-10.

It

no idle grace; for then, indeed, were it not a grace, but a counterfeit, the delusive work of Satan, who changes himself into an angel of light, that he may deceive and ruin. As it hath an eye to see Christ, all and in all for salvation, all in grace, and all in glory; so hath it a heart to love Him, and a hand to labour in his cause. It hath not merely a willingness to believe the promises of the everlasting Gospel, which are the wine and milk, the marrow and fatness of spiritual life; but a holy readiness to obey the precepts of that glorious revelation of the blessed God. The title of the land was given to Abram, in the sure promise of the Most High; but the Amorite was in possession: and he must have in his own person no inheritance; no, not so much as whereupon to set his foot, save that, which he borrows as a habitation, and buys as a burial place. Yet does he persist in the obedience of faith, and honours the God of his mercies, by patient continuance in well doing.

Faith chafes and warms the benumbed spirit into love, by contemplating the truth, grace, and compassion of the Saviour; and then works by that love, to do the will of God. Faith, looking upon blessedness to come, in the glass

of the Gospel, longs for that promised glory, and treads the way of God's appointment towards it; like as Israel saw the fruits of Canaan, and desired to possess the land from whence they came. O for a principle thus buoyant, and bearing our hearts upwards, to have their conversation in heaven, and so to dwell with Jesus there, above the world; and to be the impulse, whereby we may tread the wilderness without fainting, and fight the good fight of faith, under the great Captain of our salvation, without shrinking from the conflict!

While we remain in

(1.) Faith hath a proper exercise in matters of temporal concernment. our earthly house of this tabernacle, our heavenly Father knoweth that the body must be regarded, and that its wants must be supplied, What an awful measure of atheism, do those wants of our perishing frame produce in the mind of men, who live by sight and sense alone! They are up early, and late take rest, and eat the bread of carefulness, and dwell in a feverish anxiety after this world's abundance, which has its sad reaction in the listlessness, the palsy, and the death of all spiritual mindedness. We throw the clay and dust, which we thus labour to collect, into those wells of thought and feel