THE WAY TO FAITH Romans 9:1: 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.

There are states of heart which render faith impossible. An impenitent heart, a willful heart, or an unconsecrated heart, is incapable of believing unto salvation. To say to a soul in the heyday of sin; or to an unawakened heart, or to an enlightened child of God who refuses to give himself wholly to the Lord, Believe, and thou shalt be saved, is to expect him to do what he can not do. His state of heart is obstructive to faith. No man can believe unto salvation when he will, irrespective of his condition of heart. There are essential antecedents to the exercise of faith. There are states of heart which lead to faith. The attainment of these is the way to faith. There are two steps to faith for a soul under gospel illumination.

The first is conviction. Only the soul that is feelingly conscious of its unsaved condition, its spiritual destitution, and its utter moral helplessness is capable of laying hold of the promises of God so as to rest in them alone for salvation. Inwrought conviction makes the soul reach out beyond itself for help, and makes it willing to accept the Divine Word as its sure support against despair. Such conviction, either for the guilt of sin or the presence of inbred sin in the soul, as brings a sense of extreme need of salvation, is the heart-pang by which faith is begotten. When such a crisis of conviction is reached, faith becomes such a necessity to the soul that it must believe. In the distress of such spiritual emergency, it instinctively cries out: Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief. It was in the throes of heart-rending conviction that the jailer at Philippi believed and was saved. Never did Dr.

Adam Clarke believe unto full salvation until his soul became so agonizingly conscious of in bred sin, and so painfully desirous for deliverance from it, as that he felt he must believe and be saved, or superadd to his sin of heart the condemnation and darkness of unbelief.

This first step in the way to faith is a short one; it may be quickly taken. Do you say: I am waiting for conviction? Then, it will never come; it never comes to those who are waiting for it. It only comes to those who want it, who invite it, who seek it. Any one who accepts Gods Word as the voice of the Holy Spirit speaking to him, if he is either an unforgiven sinner or an unsanctified believer, can in a little while be filled with so much conviction as will make him long for salvation more than they who watch for the morning. Let the impenitent soul come face to face with a few of Gods commands and appeals, such as Turn ye, why will ye die? Be ye also ready, The wages of sin is death, He that believeth not shall be damned, and take them to heart as his, and he will very soon have such a sense of lostness as will make him cry out, I must, I will believe. Let a believer who is not fully saved think upon the words of the Lord, Be ye holy, for I am holy, Without holiness no man shall see the Lord, Wash you, make you clean, and there will come to his heart such a sense of unlikeness to God and unfitness for heaven as will make him cry out, O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this body of death? and will bring him where faith must lend its victorious power. We challenge any truly converted person who is walking in the light of the witness of the Holy Spirit to his acceptance with God, but has not the witness of heart-purity, and is skeptical in respect to the existence of inbred sin in the soul and the need of full salvation, to consent to such a divine inspection as David subjected himself to when he laid bare his heart unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do, and said: Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me and know my thoughts, and see if there be in me any wicked way. He will not have waited long in that powerful light until he will begin to plead, Create in me a clean heart, O God, and will be ready to receive entire sanctification by faith.

A few years since I had in one of my Churches a class-leader. He was an excellent man; but in some way he had become pronounced in his skepticism respecting, and his opposition to, the experience of entire sanctification. He thought the doctrine of sin in believers a mere fancy. He was doubtless honest in all his misconceptions and unbelief. It was all the more difficult to bring him to a right way of thinking, for he was useful and consistent in his life. I yearned to see him brought into the fullness of Gods love. We never argued or contended together on the subject. We lived and labored together in love. About a year and a half after I became his pastor we were having an evening meeting at which were present over two hundred of my members. The theme turned on heart-searching. After some remarks to the effect that we are incapable to search our own hearts, that God alone can search the heart and bring to the light of our consciousness what of evil or good may be hidden from our most careful introspection, I proposed that we all bow before God and silently wait for such revelation respecting our hearts as he might give while we should breathe into his ear the prayer: Search me, O God. Every person in the congregation bowed, this beloved leader with the rest. No one led in prayer; each went to God for himself. In a few minutes sobs began to rise, first from one pew, then from another. The whole lecture-room became a Bochim, a valley of weeping.

Having remained about ten minutes upon our knees, we arose. I said: If any one has discovered any thing in your heart that has surprised you and that is painful to yourself, you may speak of it. Instantly this class-leader arose and exclaimed, O, my heart, my heart I never knew that all this was in my heart pray for me, and fell upon his knees in the pew where he was standing. A season of prayer was held at once. A few days after, he found perfect cleansing from the sin which he had seen in his heart. Within six months after, on his dying bed, he constantly repeated: The cleansing stream, I see, I see!

I plunge, and O, it cleanseth me.

He was not too swift in seeking a consciousness of indwelling sin and inward cleansing from it. They who would have a conscious sense of the guilt or the defilement of sin, without which they can not believe unto Salvation, can soon attain it. The preaching, the Christian testimony, and godly admonitions which bring the most immediate and powerful conviction for outward and inward sin, will bring forth the most immediate fruit of faith.

The second step in the way to faith is consecration. To the awakened sinner this means self-surrender to God. He chooses his service, bows to his yoke, and cries: I am thine; take me as I am. When this is accomplished, believing ground is reached where the soul easily and almost imperceptibly believes and is saved; though sometimes there is a struggle to believe after the surrender is complete, because Satan makes a powerful stand at this point against the soul, because one more step is to bring it out of his captivity. But the soul has come to the position that commands faith, and here it can rout the adversary by a desperate act of faith in saying: I can, I will, I do believe.

To the believer that is seeking heart-purity this consecration means complete self-dedication to God. Without this, faith for cleansing is impossible. To attempt to believe unto full Salvation until all is put upon the altar of God, is useless effort and wasted time. When I was seeking a clean heart, the moment I got the consent of my heart to say, I am thine, wholly thine for evermore, believing that the blood cleansed and that the altar sanctified, followed immediately and naturally. And I have never found any difficulty as I have walked in the way of holiness in believing, when I have been conscious of being wholly the Lords.

We are so slow to take the final step of consecration. We hesitate and shrink from letting all go on to the altar which sanctifies the gift. Consecration is the offering of ourselves up to God according to his word. It need not take long it should not. Satan may say, God requires more than you can give or do, your children, your property, your life; reply: God only requires what is best. He only demands a reasonable service.

The adversary will argue: It is hard to give all to God. Joyfully rejoin: His commandments are not grievous, and in keeping of them there is great delight. O soul, convinced of the need of heart cleansing, remember, if it be hard to the natural heart to give all to God, that it will prove harder yet to not make the consecration.

Said a sister to me, as her pastor: I ought to wholly consecrate myself to God, but I cant. I replied: Don’t say you cant, but you wont. Yes, she replied, that is it; but I mean it is so hard. True, said I; but it is harder not to do it. Do it, and God will dwell in your heart, bless your home, and lead your children to salvation; but do it not, darkness will come to your soul, your children will grow up irreligious, and, possibly, you yourself will lie down and die without the hope of heaven. She refused to make the consecration, and my words proved prophetic. All the apprehended evils suggested came, and more; and suddenly one day she dropped out our life.

O, how much harder it proved to her, as it will to any soul, not to consecrate itself to God, than to give all to him. Who then!