THERE was a time when I longed and prayed for the full assurance of faith, the witness of the Holy Spirit that I was truly born again and united to Christ. I was expecting this assurance to be granted by some overpowering feeling, causing the heart to overflow with joy, and putting an end to all doubt once for all. I had heard some speak of a time in which they had been so highly favored that they could never afterward call in question their interest in Jesus Christ, and I was hoping that such a season would be granted to me. One day, while praying that I might be able to say with full confidence, “He loved me, and gave Himself for me,” there was given to me the persuasion that I should be able to say it just as truly as Paul said it. This persuasion led me thus to reason with myself: If you will be able to say it some time, why not say it now? If it will be true in the future, it is true now, since truth is truth at all times and for all time. This reflection brought me relief and showed me my mistake.
I had been looking to feeling instead of looking to fact―to my sense of Christ’s love rather than to that love itself. That Christ loved me, and gave Himself for me, is an eternal fact, whatever be my feeling. My feeling does not alter it in the least, and it is the belief of this fact and the personal appropriation of it that kindles devout feeling. We have “joy and peace in believing.”
Moreover, I had been trying to exercise a future instead of a present faith. A future faith will never bring deliverance or beget peace, and this is the mistake we so often make. It is a present faith that God honors, the faith that takes Him at His word, and receives Jesus Christ as Lord now, whatever be our condition or our frame. We need to believe that Jesus loves us even now, just as we are and where we are, and thus believing, to trust Him to save and keep us every moment.
“Faith is not what we see or feel,
It is a simple trust
In what the blessed God Hath said
Of Jesus as the Just.”
O. T.