Luke 18:8

RELIGIOUS UNSETTLEMENT

‘When the Son of Man cometh, shall He find faith on the earth?’

Luke 18:8

The significance of this question is best seen in the Revised Version, where it is given, ‘When the Son of Man cometh, shall He find the faith on the earth?’—‘the faith once delivered to the saints.’

Now whenever our Lord may come He surely will find faith; that will not have died out. But the faith once delivered to the saints, those truths that we hold to be essential to our salvation, saving truths as we rightly call them, the great facts and verities of our Christian creed, will they be non-existent?

It is worth our while to spend a little time considering, as far as we may, some of the direct and some of the indirect influences which are slowly and surely doing their work of disintegration and unsettlement, as frost and rain, wind and storm, disintegrate cliffs, and as the roots of ivy find their way through the strongest masonry.

I. Impatience of creeds.—What are you to say in connection with this, and upon the very threshold of it, of the extraordinary and the growing impatience in our days of creeds? The cry is everywhere for undenominational teaching, and the cry is against dogmatic teaching. It is constantly urged that the creeds are the difficulties. The Athanasian Creed, it is urged, is out of date, but if people would only carefully read the history of that marvellous creed, they would see it is the most wonderful composition of argument against the heresies that prevailed in the early Church, and which are being revived in our own. Do not easily part with your creeds. They are of great historic value. They are a protest against what somebody has called fancy religions, against partial views, against a bundle of notions instead of profound convictions.

II. Objection to mysteries.—There is a common objection against, or at any rate a sort of hesitancy on account of, the mysteries of religion. There is so much known, but there is so much concealed. And are there not greater mysteries than these? There is less to try your faith in our mysterious creed than in the godless systems which some men would invent.

III. Other disintegrating causes.—Let us take one or two more of these disintegrating causes—

(a) Our apparent divisions. It is the heart-burnings; it is the bitter controversies and bitter spirit between those who love the Lord Jesus Christ in their hearts, and are always quarrelling with those that differ from them, which cannot do good. Is there no harm being done to the Christian laity by some utterances in our pulpits? In the midst of this confusion of thought the humanitarian steps into the arena, and he tells us that doctrines have done their work.

(b) The departure from old traditions. The simple Gospel of Jesus Christ is not preached nowadays as we remember it when we were children. One hears Christless sermons, sermon after sermon in which there is no mention of the Holy Ghost, and no teaching people that they can only believe by His enlightenment and by His inspiration. No wonder that when these things are put together you find a defection from the faith.

IV. But the Master is with His Church.—Missionary work is extending all over the face of the globe, and the Bible is being translated into every known language. There is a faith for you to keep. You have power in your generation, your own personal steadfastness—a tremendous parental responsibility of teaching your little ones in their childhood. Higher religious education supplies an intellectual antidote to what is going on, but there is, at all time, for you—prayer. It was the Master’s remedy. You can have no better.

—Dean Pigou.

Illustration

‘If these things are so, if it be a fact that “faith” is getting rarer and rarer, is not it very important to each one of us to determine how it stands with our faith? Let me just throw out one or two suggestions to you about faith. “Faith” is a moral grace, and not an intellectual gift. It lives among the affections; its seat is the heart. A soft and tender conscience is the cradle of faith; and it will live and die according to the life you lead. If you would have “faith” you must settle with yourself the authority, the supremacy, and the sufficiency of the Bible. All truth must be an uncertainty if you have no standing-ground. Therefore, establish to your own mind the Divine origin, the universal application, and the ultimate appeal of the Scriptures. Then, when you have done that, you will be able to deal with promises. Feed upon promises. Take care that you are a man of meditative habit. There cannot be faith without daily, calm, quiet seasons of thought. But, above all, have the eye upward. All faith, and every stage of it, is a direct answer to prayer.’

(SECOND OUTLINE)

THE DECAY OF FAITH

These words of our Lord are becoming every day something more than prophecy. We are probably living almost, if not quite, in their fulfilment. Let us look at facts. I believe that I am speaking the opinion of all who are the most conversant with the state of Christendom, when I state that faith is greatly on the decrease. And the result of all is an awful breadth of spiritual wilderness.

If I venture for a moment to look into the reasons of these things, perhaps I might particularise the following:—

I. Preference for the visible.—It is always in the indolent and grosser nature of man to prefer the present and the visible to the future and the unseen. The heart gravitates to practical materialism as a stone gravitates to the ground. It is always a special act to make a man feel the invisible, live in the invisible. For in fact, all faith is miracle.

II. The advance of science.—And days of great science, such as these, are always likely to be days of proportionate unbelief, because the power of the habit of finding out more and more natural causes is calculated, unless a man be a religious man, to make him rest in the cause he sees, and not to go on to that higher cause of which all the causes in this world are, after all, only effects.

III. Familiarity with Divine things.—And familiarity, too, with Divine things, which is a particular characteristic of our age, has in itself a tendency to sap the reverence which is at the root of all faith.

IV. The selfishness of the age.—But still more, the character of the age we live in is a rushing selfishness. The race for money is tremendous; men are grown intensely secular; the facilities are increased, and with them the covetousness. You are living under higher and higher pressure, and everything goes into extremes; all live fast. And the competition of business is overwhelming, and the excitement of fashion intoxicating. How can ‘faith,’ which breathes in the shade of prayer and meditation, live in such an atmosphere as this?

Illustration

‘We hear people speaking of the coming of the Son of God as something of which they were exceeding glad. But stay and think, ask your own hearts the question, Would the coming of Jesus be a happy and joyful thing for me? What would the advent of the All-righteous Judge mean to the man whose religion is merely outside, who is covering with the ample cloak of respectability the threads and patches of an indifferent life? What would the advent mean to the man of business whose religion begins and ends with one formal attendance at church on Sunday, and whose character is utterly unleavened by the teachings of the Gospel? What to the man or woman who never used self-denial, never gave up anything for Christ’s sake, in a word, what would the advent of Jesus be to a majority of those who “profess and call themselves Christians”?’