Matthew 8:8-10

THE ONLY TRUE FAITH

‘The centurion answered and said, Lord, I am not worthy.… When Jesus heard it, He marvelled, and said … I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel.’

Matthew 8:8

In Christ Jesus life is one, and there ought to be no division between things secular and things spiritual, things bodily and things heavenly; they must be one, absolutely one.

I. What is true faith?—This incident brings out a very magnificent truth. It teaches us first of all that here is true faith. Faith is not the glib utterance of any form of words or any principle of doctrine, but faith is the submission of the whole being to the will of the Holy One, Who stands before us as the true representative of authority and government. When our souls, our bodies, and our whole being and property are brought into absolute submission to His will, then, and then only, are we men of faith.

II. Rest for the soul.—If we could only get this principle before us it would set at rest all our present troubled condition of soul. You who are exercised about your duties to society, have you ever thought that if Christ were really in authority, and there were no divided life due to the setting up of two principles, all this quibbling about social duties and pleasures would disappear? If you make yourself one with the world on the plea of raising the world to God, you will have to pay for it in the day of the Lord’s settlement. In these days there is much talk about a longing for power. Learn to obey, and you will soon be in command.

—Prebendary H. W. Webb-Peploe.

Illustration

‘Not until we have carefully studied the military history of Rome shall we fully understand the mighty force of the words to which this man gives utterance: “I am a man under authority.” This one idea pervaded his entire existence; this one law—the law of obedience—governed his whole life; for the instant a man was called to join the Roman army he gave himself over to one law of life; henceforth he must not know the possession of property or the possession of relatives, he must not know the possession of a will, or even the possession of hope, in one sense; he was simply a vessel, an instrument, taken possession of by the state, to be absolutely, ceaselessly, under the control of that great power which had called him into its service. The Roman imperium over-shadowed the man and absorbed him and all that he had into itself. But while the imperium took him into its power, at the same time it transmitted its power to him; he therefore became not only an instrument of the state, but he also became possessed of the whole power of that state to carry out its will, so far as that will could be carried out in one individual.’

(SECOND OUTLINE)

THE GREATNESS OF FAITH

Since, then, what Christ saw and honoured in the centurion was greatness of faith, it is our duty to look carefully at what composed its greatness.

I. The greatness of faith.—What are its characteristics?

(a) The perception of the Truth—the love of the Truth, for the Truth’s sake.

(b) Effort—effort of thought, effort of action.

(c) A simple casting—a case told, the rest left to God; the most eloquent of all beseeching, when you tell a fact.

(d) Abasement—deepening as faith gets victories; and yet the more achieved, the more expected.

(e) Grand views of God—of His hand, of His heart, of His universal reign, of His minute care, the imagery of common life sanctified to the soul’s great health.

(f) An implicit reliance upon a single word—making a word in fact, finding space, distance, human reasoning, physical difficulties, unworthiness, past sin, self, all nothing; the mind of God, the character of God, the will of God, the promise of God, supreme, absolute, alone.

II. How did that faith come?—Just as the answer came: by the ways you cannot see; a thing unfathomable, a grace, a creation. All faith is in Christ. What makes faith grow larger? For answer look into the constitution of faith. Faith is—

(a) A clear understanding of truth.

(b) A converting of the abstract truth that you understand, into a thing real and existent to the mind.

(c) An appropriation—a making your own, a personal apprehension of that understood and realised truth. That is faith—first, to comprehend what is invisible, then to picture what is invisible, then to appropriate what is invisible.

III. All do not travel the same road to faith.—It will be just as God pleases to lead you. All faith, and every increment of faith, is a distinct gift of God—a separate act of creative power. But even the actings of God’s free, omnipotent grace are subject to laws.

(a) Faith lies in the affections, and not in the intellect.

(b) Faith will never co-exist with known and allowed sin.

(c) Faith grows by its own actings.

IV. Christ in the heart.—But, far more than anything else, the greatness of faith is the Christ we have in our hearts. Once to have found and felt Christ a Saviour, that gives faith its best impulse. The more you live with Christ, and the more you live on Christ, and the more you live to Christ, the more and the faster will your faith grow. And there is no limit. The last meltings into sight are faith; and the Christ you love becomes gradually the Christ you see.

—The Rev. James Vaughan.

Illustration

‘Whether it be in sorrow, or whether it be in joy, he who would enlarge his faith must feed upon promises. To dwell on a promise—to take that promise to God—to pray over it—to wait, and then to see an answer—to do this again and again—sometimes do it about temporal things, and sometimes about spiritual—to go about all the day long picking up the returns of your own petitions everywhere—such promises become histories, and desires become facts. And that makes faith rock-like. If the centurion’s faith was strong when he came to Jesus, how much stronger, think you, was it, when he went home, and found his servant quite well?’

(THIRD OUTLINE)

FAITH AND RIGHTEOUSNESS

Faith is a superior property bestowed by God whereby the truth is apprehended without the evidence of experience or argument proved; it belongs partly to the understanding, and partly to the will.

I. Distrust brought sin.—What was it that induced our first parents to eat of that which was forbidden? It was distrust of God, and in that one thought of distrust there lay all the future disobedience of the world.

II. Trust brings righteousness.—Just as in the one thought of distrust there lies every possible sin, so also in the one thought of trust there lies every possible good. Thus we see why the faith of the centurion was accounted unto him for righteousness, because in that one thought of trust there lay all the activity of his service—‘Speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed.’ We are not to be saved so much for the accuracy of our theology, or for the correctness by which we take in our dogmas; but we are to be saved by a simple trust which can be common alike to the ignorant and the learned; to the man and to the child.

III. It is the foundation of all spiritual life.—We see in the centurion the great example of this virtue, that simple faith and child-like trust in God is the foundation of all true spiritual life. He had probably never seen Christ before, but he was ready to accept Him as the Son of God. It is quite true that faith is the gift of God, but it is a gift which we can in a large measure increase by our own co-operation.

IV. It needs the discipline of the will.—What is the principal disposing cause of faith? We can learn a lesson from the centurion. In his reply to our Lord there was just one thing brought out, and that is the wonderful state of discipline in which everything connected with him seemed to be. Are we not all in the same position? Are we not so much so that we may say ‘I am a man under authority’—under the authority of God—‘and just in proportion as I have learned to recognise His authority, and to obey His laws, so shall I be able to command my will’?

V. The world to conquer and heaven to win.—We have the world to conquer, and we have heaven to win. St. John tells us the victory which overcometh the world—even our faith. We must lay this foundation first, and then we can go on to learn those other things of hope and love.

—The Rev. L. Verey.

Illustration

‘True piety is found in very unlikely places, and bears fruit in very unfavourable soil. As in the interior of a desert you may find an oasis of date-palms and verdant herbage, so in the heart of degraded man, long hard and barren, Divine grace produces large clusters of heavenly fruit. At midnight, and amid the stony hills of Luz, a ladder of communication joined earth and heaven; and there is no situation so desolate that man’s mightiest Friend cannot be found. Obadiah kept the flame of his piety aglow in the poisoned atmosphere of Ahab’s house. Amid the depravities of the antediluvian age, “Enoch walked with God.” On the festering dunghill of Egyptian vice, Joseph’s piety was fragrant as a violet. Surrounded by luxury and idolatry in Babylon’s great palace, Daniel’s faith shone out like Arcturus at midnight. And in the Roman camp, where we expect to find the coarse nature of a soldier made coarser by the foul rites of paganism, lo! there blossoms and bears fruit a godly faith, which puts to shame the unbelief of favoured Jews. It was a plant of grace, which has borne fruit from that day to this.’