By:
Edited By Heyman Wreford
TRUE faith is the work of the Holy Ghost in the soul, revealing the object of faith in divine power; so that the heart receives it on divine testimony, as divine truth, and a divine fact.
It is really identical with the communication of a new life by the power of the Holy Ghost, through the word. Hence, we are said to be the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus; to be born of the Spirit, and to be begotten by the word of truth. Faith is the divinely-given perception of things not seen, wrought through the Word of God by the Spirit.
If the word reveals a divine person in grace, He becomes the object of trust; if a work, its efficacy becomes the ground of confidence. But the trust or the confidence is not the faith. Faith is then the real vivid perception of what cannot be known by sight, God―Christ―anything revealed of God―being the object. If there is merely a mental conclusion, as in the end of John 2, or assent to a proposition, it is worthless. If it is the revelation of the object of faith to the soul by the Holy Ghost, it is real and living; and this only is true faith. Further, though all be rightly preached together, we must not confound faith in the person, and faith in the work of Christ. The latter alone can give peace to the conscience (unless the direct revelation of God as by Nathan to David, or of Christ to the woman that was a sinner); but the former is always held out as the first proper object of faith; while Scripture declares that whosoever believeth on Him is under the benefit of His work. Faith in Him is quickening and saving. Peace of conscience, according to God’s declaration, belongs to those who do believe in virtue of His work. The difference connects itself with the question of repentance. All who know what grace is, believe that faith precedes repentance, and everything else that is good and right in man. Otherwise he would have what is good, before he believed the truth at all; he would have it without God. And as to repentance, substantially, the whole moral change, the essence and substance of his return to God, would have been effected without any truth at all. For if he repents through the truth, he must believe the truth in order to repent.
I judge repentance to be a much deeper thing than is thought. It is the judgment of the new man, in divine light and grace, on all that he who repents has been or done in flesh ... Hence, repentance will in one sense deepen all one’s life, as the knowledge of God grows. J. N. D.