The Pastor's Letter (Dated May 1977)
Dear Friends,
One of the clearest marks of a valid Christian profession that the Bible sets before us is that the person who makes that profession "walks by faith and not by sight." "The justified shall live by faith," says Habakkuk the prophet; and that word is taken up by the apostle Paul himself, for, of course, it is the very essence of the religion of saving grace in whatever age it manifests itself. The degree to which we walk by faith and not by sight is displayed in, and displays, certain traits in our Christian profession. It displays our understanding of and adherence to the Word of Almighty God, and it is displayed in the amount of influence that this present evil world exerts over our individual and church lives in opposition to that Word of God.
Today we live in a tremendously "sight" age; perhaps that fact isn't appreciated by some. “Seeing is believing" is the almost total maxim of our present-day world. The "sights that dazzle" are indeed, "all around," and how easy it is for the churches of Christ and their members to imbibe and be influenced by the world's rules of interpreting things and not by the Bibles. During one of the times of persecution that the church passed through under the hand of the mighty Roman Empire, an old saint was asked, sneeringly, by Julian the Emperor, "And what is your Carpenter doing now?" His reply is the very epitome of the walk of faith, uninfluenced by all the worldly pomp and glory that the aspect of Imperial Rome set before him; "What is my Carpenter doing now?" he echoed, "building a coffin for Julian." The walk of faith is an absolute essential for the church and its members at any time in God's history, but the nurture of that walk of faith is especially essential during those times when it might appear that "The wicked do triumph all virtue confounding." In fact, such days as our own, perhaps.
Now, what is faith? If we are to "walk by faith and not by sight," then it stands to reason that we can only do this when we have some working knowledge of what faith is. And it would appear in our day that the very absence of a basic understanding of what faith is, is the very reason why the "walk" of a great many churches and their members is not by faith but by sight - the self-same sight by which this world walks and arrives at its estimation of things.
Very often faith is presented to us in the light of great deeds of "daring-do." Caleb and Joshua are often held up as examples of men of great faith, as indeed they were; but wherein lay their faith? And the impression in many minds is that because they were willing to go up and face the giants of Canaan and storm the gates of the cities, this was their faith, their great faith. Faith makes men "strong" you see; makes them carry out great exploits that all this world can see and appreciate and applaud. But the very opposite is the case, for the world has no appreciation whatsoever of true faith, when it comes to the crunch. What designated Caleb and Joshua as faithful at that point was that they were believing what God had said. As far as exploits were concerned, the others might have wanted to go up and fight the giants, etc., and Caleb and Joshua might not have wanted to go, and they could still have been exercising faith. How? You say; if God had told them not to go. The fact that believing God involved fighting with giants is not the issue at hand, but simply believing Go, whatever the issue involved. So, our dear old brother Paul is at the very heights of faith when he is being "let down over the wall in a basket" from the city of Damascus, or removing himself from the malice of the Jews in Jerusalem as the Lord directs him - "Make haste, and get thee quickly out of Jerusalem." It was not a very comely sight, of course; but "sight" was not the question on hand, but faith. And faith, my friends, is Believing God's word, and doing God's word, even when the believing and the doing of it sets us up as spectacles of abuse in the estimations of this worlds thinking.
So to walk by faith is to conduct our lives and the lives and the workings of our churches in accordance with the Word of God. "Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God." And as it is impossible to please God without faith, so it is impossible to exercise faith outwith the precepts and the directives of God's word. And herein lies the awful situation of our day: what we see by carnal sight has become the interpreter of God's word to us, instead of God's word absolutely interpreting what we see by carnal sight. In other words, whatever has a good "sight" rating, this cannot be wrong, and the word of God is adapted accordingly. But the more we conduct ourselves like that, the less we are walking by faith, and the more we are walking by sight - as the world which we are aping walks. There are two poles between which we should determine our walk of faith: - (1) Whatever "appears" to be happening for our good, or advancement - if it does not square with the Word of God, we ought to take no comfort in it as an evidence of God's smile of approval upon it. (2) On the other hand, if we substantiate our behaviour and conduct and practise on what God has clearly shown in His truth, then, we may stand unshakable, and know that God - in time or eternity - will perfect that which concerns us.
Was that not the conviction of Mr Bunyan's Valiant-for-truth when he gave his answer as to how and why he had fought with those three enemies of his faith that had set upon him? As he answered Mr Greatheart, he didn't consider that he had done anything that wasn't spiritually natural for him to do. "But here were great odds," says Greatheart, "three against one." "'Tis true," replies Valiant-for-truth, "but little or more are nothing to him that has the truth on his side."
That was Caleb's and Joshua's conviction; giants or not, God had spoken. That was Paul's conviction; willing or not to face the oppositions of the Jews, God had spoken - "Make haste and get thee quickly out of Jerusalem.” Faith is not sight; faith is not determined by sight; sight does not determine faith. Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. And it is only in so far as we live under the word of God that we "walk by faith" and display that mark of a valid Christian profession - whether in our individual and private lives or in the collective life of the Church of Jesus Christ of which we are called to be part.
It would appear to many that one of the great oncoming issues for the churches of Christ in our day will be, once again, the battle for the Bible. The very veracity and validity of the Word of God is coming under increasing fire within the ranks of the modern "evangelicalism" itself. Biblical criticism is no longer the exclusive domain of the "modernist" and "liberal." Be sure of this; such a development is the logical outcome for a people that have for years been declaring their belief in the whole Bible but who have, in fact, only been waving the empty covers of that Bible and ignoring what is in-between those covers as far as their churches and lives are concerned. It was that kind of "biblical belief" (If you could call it that) that was swept away when the floods of biblical criticism burst out in the last century, and there is little reason to believe that the same kind of "biblical belief" so called in our midst today wouldn't suffer a like fate.
"Now the justified shall live by faith." Pray God that we might show ourselves to be such. We are "justified by faith" - by hearing that life-giving word of God to our perishing souls. But it is then a mark and a proof that we are of the "justified" that we continue to live by that self-same faith contained in that self-same living word of God for every step of our lives until he calls or comes.