"These all died in faith, not having received the promises, "but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth." — Heb. 11:13.

The expression "these" refers to the patriarchs and the believers in the early ages, when they had no church and no Bible and no Sunday schools and no hymn books and no creeds, when they simply had God and salvation, although He does enumerate a great many of these old disciples that were believers in the Jewish Church.

These all died in faith. They died, but the faith didn't die. They died, but the faith went straight on through the grave and up into Paradise. These all died according to faith, the margin reads. They died in harmony with their faith; they died in agreement with their faith. That is, they believed God, were justified and sanctified, and providentially guided and providentially delivered and wonderfully helped by believing God and His promises. They lived according to faith; they died according to faith. They simply took up the faith measurement and the faith life all the way through. These all died in faith, not having received the promises. That should be, not having received the fulfillment of the promises, because they did receive the promises. They had the promises, but they didn't live long enough to see the fulfillment of the promises. And when it says here that they died not having received the promises, it simply means, not having received the fulfillment, or the end, or the termination, of the promises.

The promises that are here spoken of were the promises that refer to the coming of Jesus and the descent of the Holy Ghost and the revivals of religion and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and the resurrection of the dead and the general judgment and rewards and punishments and a new heaven and a new earth and a glorious everlasting life beyond this world. These promises covered all the territory that the promises cover now; and these men died, these women died, before Christ was born, before the Holy Ghost was poured out in full measure, before the Christian Church was formed, and they did not receive the fulfillment of the promises.

But the next line says they saw them afar off. They saw down the vista of time the days in which we are living. They saw the great things connected with the life of Jesus and the Christian Church. They saw them by faith, and they believed just as really as we who enjoy them to-day.

There are three things in this verse that are mentioned descriptive of the kind of faith that these people had. There are three elements to true, saving faith. The first is, they were persuaded of them; the second is, they embraced them; the third is, they confessed. Persuasion, embracement, and confession: these are the three things mentioned in this verse as descriptive of the faith of the patriarchs and of true faith now. I ask your attention briefly to this threefold type of faith, or faith in its three forms.

Faith has a history to it, a biography to it, a biology. Faith has a natural history, as much as a man has or a tree or anything else. Faith has its incipiency, its beginnings, and then it has its maturings and its results; so that faith has a history in our experience, in our own nature; it has these various forms to it.

Now the first step in faith, the first thing in it, is to be persuaded. There are two words used for faith; one is "faith" and the other is "believing." The difference between faith and believing is this: faith describes the thing itself as it lies in the heart, the principle of faith in the heart; but the word " believing " describes the activity of that faith, the motion, the movement, the working, the activity of it. The word "air" is a name, a noun that designates the atmosphere we breathe. It is in this house. It fills the earth and fills all the heavens; the atmosphere, or the air. Now the word "wind" describes the air in motion. When the atmosphere is perfectly stationary it is called air, but when the same air is in motion it is called wind.

Now that is just an illustration of the difference between faith and believing. Faith is the principle living in the heart, residing in the heart; it is lying there ready for action, just as the atmosphere in this house is ready for movement at any time there should be a concussion. Whereas " believing " is a word that describes the movement of faith; it is activity and energy in going out toward Jesus and toward the promises and toward God and toward any object of faith. So that " believing " is the word that is more applicable to ourselves.

Now the first thing in this faith or this believing is to be persuaded. To be persuaded is to be thoroughly convinced of the truth of the promises. It is an inward conviction; it is a deep, radical conviction in the heart and mind that such and such things are true. And that kind of faith is the basis of all the other steps of faith. A sinner must have this before he repents — before a man repents even. Faith lies, in a certain measure, at the very beginning of repentance, for the man would never repent if he did not believe there was a hell. People talk in a nonsensical, sentimental way about serving God from love and coming to Christ from love. Well, that will do very well after you have learned to love Him and got His love in your heart, but the real sinner knows no more about the love of God than an Icelander knows about an orange grove; not a bit. Men do not serve God from love until after they get over into the zone of love. When a sinner is away out on the frigid zone, where he does not feel any emotions of love, he begins to weep and feel bad and cry and bestir himself and say, " God be merciful to me a sinner." But he would never make that cry unless he was convinced in his soul that there was a hell and he was going to it; and if there were no hell we would never get another man converted in ten thousand years. If hell is not true there is no need of repentance nor salvation. " Let us eat and drink; for to-morrow we die." So there is an inward conviction that I have got to die. A man is convinced right there, — I have got to die. It comes home to A No. 1, — I have got to die and I am not fit to die, and if I die as I am I am lost. And there is a conviction of eternity and of a hell and a heaven and of a God to meet and of a judgment day. He may not know the details, but the great facts are there.

Now that is the beginning of faith; and by being convinced of that, then there comes the movement of that faith, which leads him to repentance; and as he repents and forsakes his sins and confesses his sins and listens to God's words and the promises that are quoted to him either by the Holy Ghost or by some Christian friend, by and by he sees Jesus to be the Sin Bearer and the Atoner for his sins, and he is enabled to lay hold on Jesus as having borne his sins on the tree, and to accept Jesus Christ as a substitute for his own sins and his own penalty. And so there he believes in Jesus, and then comes pardon and regeneration and the witness of God's Spirit.

And it is just so in seeking sanctification. No person ever will begin seeking sanctification until they are thoroughly convinced that the thing is true. No person will seek sanctification until he is convinced absolutely that he has an unclean heart. People who are good enough people, people who can soothe themselves down, people who can live like other people live, people who can measure themselves by themselves and play the fool in that way, — those kind of people never get a clean heart. Nobody gets a clean heart on this earth, no Christian, until he is convinced that he needs it. There is a conviction that this thing is taught in God's Word; he is persuaded that these things are true.

Now you ask, How is it that this first step of faith, this inward conviction, this inward persuasion — how is that formed, how is that generated? Faith has a beginning; faith has a formative state; faith has a birth or a creation; and will you ask me how faith is generated, how the thing ever begins in the heart? I will tell you, and I will tell you just because the Bible told me; I have learned it out of this Book.

Faith cometh by hearing. That is the way it is born. You have in your soul the capacity of believing; God has given you the machinery of believing. You have got the adaptability, you have got the faculty, you have the capacity of trusting and believing in your. soul. You have got that to begin with; that is born in you; God made that. Now when you hear God's Word clearly. preached in an evangelical manner, the pure gospel, — not the mixed gospel, not the trashy gospel or the trashy way of preaching the gospel (there is no trashy gospel); when you hear the pure Word of God, in a book or tract or paper, or when you hear it preached in a pulpit, or in conversation in some way or other; when you hear the pure Word of God preached, that is adapted to your case and suitable to your needs, the preaching of that Word comes in contact with your intelligence and reason and moral nature. And the conjunction of your soul and God's Word gives birth to faith, just exactly as the effect must follow the cause. You take a positive and a negative electric current and keep them separate and there will never be any action. There is a negative current already on hand in every piece of water, in every piece of iron, in every grain of sand. There is a negative current all the time. Now you produce a positive current of electricity, and let the negative and the positive come together, and you will have the electric spark.

Now you have got the negative of faith in you all the time. You have got the brain, mind, conscience, affections, will, — the regular constitution of man's moral nature. That is inside of you. God has made and put it in. That is your negative. Now you hear God's Word preached; and the more you hear it the better, and the more you hear and understand the more you feed upon God's Word; and God's Word is the positive current. And when that comes in contact with the intelligence, reason, memory, conscience, of your moral nature, faith is born by the copulation of God's Word with your heart. Now you hear of infidels and people of free theories and loose theories, people who have not got half the brains they think they have, who go about talking as if faith was an absurd thing, as if faith was some mere will-o'-the-wisp, as if you could believe what you pleased. Faith is no more accidental than a current of electricity is accidental. The men who hear the Word of God preached the plainest and the best are always the strongest believers; the men who sit under the strongest gospel are the strongest believers all the time; and the more you get God's Word united to your moral nature the more belief you have got in you, for faith is always the product of the union of the Word and heart.

That is the way faith is born; it comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God. So it does not matter whether a man is a sinner or a Christian, if he comes in contact with the pure Word of God he will have a phase of faith, he will have faith to produce conviction; and that faith will lead on under God's Word to justification, and under God's Word that faith will go on to sanctification, and it will go on clear through.

So we are to be persuaded. O to be sure! to have a conviction! How I abominate a trifler in religion! I can have compassion on a poor fellow who stumbles and falls down and gets up again, and a man that is a sinner and misguided and makes mistakes, or even goes off into fanaticisms. Anything but a man that jokes and laughs over the deep, sacred things of God!

Now the great foundation facts of these old patriarchs were that they were persuaded that certain things were real. Now that is the thing just born, that is the faith just born. There are lots of Christians who talk like this, and you think they are describing the highest kind of faith. I am describing a little bit of baby faith, just born. That is the first stage.

The next stage is embracement. They not only were persuaded that certain things were verities and realities, but they went and embraced these promises; put their arms around the promises, hugged them to their hearts, identified themselves with the promises, and stood on the promises and got under the blood.

What is it to embrace a promise? Well, the Word itself is very expressive. But to embrace a promise as these patriarchs did means that we are to identify ourselves with it for weal or woe, for life or death, through thick or thin, come what will. We launch out on that ship, we walk out on that bridge, we put ourselves in that box, we stand on that promise. It is to identify our fortunes, our welfare, for time and for eternity, with the promises held out to us, — whether I go to heaven or hell, whether I am saved or lost. It is to put my soul, my case, my happiness, my well being, for both worlds, upon God's Word and God's promise and God's Son, and be willing to venture and risk my all and in all upon God's promises. That is to embrace them. A great many seekers come up to God's promises gingerly and tender-footedly, and kind of handle them with kid gloves, and try to believe, and, "I am hoping and believing," and, "I hope I have a hope," and, "I believe I am believing." They trust they are trusting and they believe they are believing and they are hoping. Now the fact is, such people are trusting in their own trust. Do you know that your brain is awfully subtle, your mind is wonderfully acute, your carnality is awfully deceitful? And you will find there are more gossamer webs woven by the treachery and the guile of your own intellect than you are aware of; and you will find, without knowing it and without intending it, instead of trusting in Jesus and trusting to His promises that people are trusting in their trust. They say, " Well, I am trusting in the Lord," and they put their trust in their own faith. They have got faith in their faith;. they are believing in their own belief.

Now let me say that you cannot trust your own trust. Your own faith will fall from under you like the air; you cannot believe in your own believing. You must not get any disjunctive conjunction between you and the Lord Jesus, — no "if" nor "and" nor "but" nor "suppose" nor "maybe" nor "I think" nor "I hope" nor "I trust." There is to be a coming of the soul down upon God's promises so as to embrace the promises; not even a piece of paper, not even a piece of fine linen, nothing between the naked heart and the naked Word of God, nothing to intervene. You can take two plates of glass, and you need not grease them nor oil them nor put any mucilage between them; if you will just take two plates of glass, and grind them perfectly smooth until every single infinitesimal variation has been rubbed away, and then remove all the rubbish and dust and everything and let there be absolutely nothing between the two plates of glass, put them together, and they will stick. They want no glue, they want no paint, they want no putty, they want no oil; they will stick. You just get the glass close enough together and shut out the air, and they will stick and hold together; but if you introduce a feather or the smallest article of dust, enough to let the air in, right away they wont hold.

There are a great many people who want justification and sanctification, full salvation. They are all the time trying to hold on to Jesus, trying to hold on by the skin of their teeth, holding on tightly, awfully, trying to believe, struggling to hold on, trying to accept the cleansing, trying to let God have all. Let me say, dear friends, when you get where the old patriarchs did, when you take your heart and the promises and rub them together, and keep on rubbing the pumice on your heart until you get your heart and God's Word smoothly together, right close, you will find they will stick fast, and your heart will embrace the promise. It will hug it so tight that you don't want any glue to make it stick either.

And that is what it means to embrace; embrace the promises by having nothing between your soul and the promise. And so people have a kind of faith. They just hang on without hanging, and they just hold without holding, and they find that they can believe without trying, and they find the easiest thing on earth is to trust God and believe. Why? Because if there is nothing between the faith and God's Word it will do its own sticking. That is why it is that you find one person here trying to believe, while another person says, "I am just believing."

And so there is a point where the heart embraces the promises. Now when you get there you are getting pretty well along. You began back by being convinced; you were persuaded; you felt in your heart that that thing was absolutely true. Now you come a step farther and identify your eternity and your present salvation with the promises, and so the promises and you become united, and you cannot tell hardly which is which; you cannot tell which is the soul and which is the promise. They are so married and wedded that you cannot tell the Promise from the Promiser and the belief from the believer.

Bishop Taylor says that years and years ago he used to stop to think, "Now am I believing?" But he found that he was trusting God so constantly, so steadily, his faith was taking hold on the God-Man in such a real sense, that he never saw his faith; he wasn't conscious of his faith, he was simply conscious of the Object of faith. That is it.

Now, if your window glasses are kept as clean as some people keep theirs, you may look through a window a hundred times a day and never once think of the window glass. You will never know it is there. You will see the carriages and the procession of people passing by, and you will look out and see who is there and see who is coming, and you will look a hundred times a day and never say "window glass" once, and never know you have window glass until you come to hoist the window. Why? Because your eye is not on the panes of glass but on the object that lies beyond.

And so the highest style of faith is that faith, not that is all the time retracing and intercepting and analyzing itself, but which sees Jesus and God's Word and promises and the things of heaven, the Object of faith. There is nothing subjunctive in the nature of faith because all the attention is on the Object. Now that is the way to get salvation, my friends. Embrace the promises, identify your moral nature with the promises, unite yourself with them, so that practically your faith and the promises become one.

The third stage of faith is confession. These confessed. They confessed a confession appropriate to their time and their day and generation. They confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims in the earth. In those times nations were young, and they were migrating, setting up new nations and laying the foundations of kingdoms and empires. Every great man like Abraham was off establishing a kingdom for himself. But the patriarchs did not spend any time building up kingdoms and empires. They forewent all those things, and they were strangers and pilgrims in the earth, living for a city out of sight.

Now faith must always have a confession that is adequate to itself in the age in which that faith exists; so that all faith has a confession to it. Faith never can be genuine that is locked up in the heart. Faith always comes out. This kind of faith that saves people always has a sturdy, stalwart expression to it. The expression of it in one age may be one thing and in another another. For instance, in the days of Jesus the expression of faith was, "Thou art the Son of God." That was just as high a testimony as any faith could utter. After Christ rose from the dead the confession of faith was, "I believe God is able to raise the dead. Dost thou not believe God is able to raise the dead? Dost thou think it an impossibility for God to raise the dead?" That was the testimony of faith in Paul's mouth. Later the testimony of faith was in regard to the personality and work of the Holy Ghost. To the age of Abraham and David and Jesus and Paul there has always been some point of faith — some confession in each and every age. There has been some shape or form of confession which has been the test of faith in that day and generation. In the days of Martin Luther it was justification by faith, and a bold confession at that. In the days of John Wesley it went beyond, and it was a clear, ringing testimony that the Holy Ghost could bear witness to our adoption and that He could cleanse the heart from all sin.

Now you will find small minded people talk about the salvation of God, so-called Christian people; and ministers saying, "I believe that that is the thing, provided there isn't much confession to it." "They believe in getting religion and living it without testifying to it. People will talk in that way the wide world over, where they haven't enough spiritual intelligence, — they may have enough political intelligence or they may have enough ecclesiastical intelligence; but at all events, they do not know enough about the Bible to know that any faith that does not grow and that does not mature to the degree of confession is a lie and a cheat and a fraud. God never has, from the days of Abel until this hour, taken the trouble to pay any attention to faith that did not express itself. Dumb faith, say nothing faith, cowardly faith, does not have the respect of God or angels, and the Bible never mentions that kind of faith. There were a lot of conservatives and a lot of people that talked just that way in the Bible times; but they were not worth mentioning, and God has not mentioned them. God mentions only that kind of faith that comes to the point of a grand, stalwart testimony. David says, "I believed, therefore have I spoken." And St. Paul quotes him and says, "We believe and therefore speak." Why, why that "therefore"? Because genuine faith and an expression of that faith are absolutely essential to the existence of each other. There were forty years between the crossing of the Red Sea and the breaking of the walls around Jericho; and yet those forty years were so crowded with these miserable services, and these people who believed in getting salvation and saying nothing about it, — those forty years were so crowded with just such people, — that the Holy Ghost paid no attention to those forty years. And in this chapter, where the Holy Ghost is compiling and gathering together the blazing facts of faith and believers all down the ages, He piles up monument after monument of faith, but He drops out all the unbelievers and unbelief, and says, in one single sentence, " By faith they crossed the Red Sea," and without stopping to take breath He says, " By faith the walls of Jericho fell down "; and in that breath the Holy Ghost does not mention the forty years that lay between those two things. Why? Because God buries unbelief and unbelievers deeper than a thousand seas. God buries unbelief in the desert sand, and He pays no attention except to faith, and to faith that can shout and talk and testify and tell itself.

And you will find God mentions only those men and only those events where faith shines out in a ringing trumpet blast. Faith must confess itself. Any thought in your mind that is not confessed or uttered will soon die. Napoleon Bonaparte had one of the most wonderful minds that this world ever produced. People say who are now reading Abbott's "Life of Napoleon" that it is absolutely marvelous. We get our knowledge of Napoleon Bonaparte mostly from English history. When we come to read it in an unbiased way it is a very different thing. Bonaparte could have a thought in his mind, and write it on a piece of paper and then fling the paper away, and he would never forget it. But he had to express the thought in words first. But if he ever got an idea in his head once and wrote or expressed it, he had it forever.

Now do you know that is a philosophical fact of the human mind? You have a thought in your mind, and you say, " Some day I will write that out," and the some day never comes. Many times I have had things come in my sleep, have got up out of bed and gone and written it down right then and there, and I have it; and if I had not it would have been gone forever. Nothing is ever complete, nothing is ever perfect, until it is expressed. The architect's plan is never perfect until it is expressed. The prayer, the song, the music, the vision, the thought, the idea, the faith, — whatever lies in your soul, — must be expressed; and the confession of faith is the perfecting of faith. That is the idea. Faith is never perfect until expressed.

Why, you have seen this thing a thousand times. People will be seeking a clean heart or justification, and we press and urge; and they put their feet out and believe as if the ice might break and the Lord go away with them. By and by they will say, "Now I will. Live or die, sink or swim, survive or perish, here I go, Lord." And we get them to a point where they say, "I can believe, I do believe, I will believe," and then sing it. I have seen hundreds and hundreds praying to God with great handkerchiefs up to their mouths, and they never amount to a row of pins until they get the handkerchief away and get their mouths open and get what little faith they have exercised toward God into the end of their tongues; and then they will get somewhere. I have seen hundreds and hundreds who didn't have one bit of feeling or emotion stand and say, " Well, I will dare say it; the blood cleanses." And they kept on saying it, and it wasn't five minutes before their faith had brought down from heaven consuming fire.

Why? Because your faith is not perfect until that faith comes out of your mouth., You have got to believe clear up and down and clear through and clear out. As long as you are holding yourself in with bandages around your mouth and watching to see whether God will save you or not, you are not trusting; but when your heart goes and your tongue goes, why then it is all right. As long as you hold your tongue and hold your mouth don't you know you are reserving, and you say, "Well, now, if I should fail and not get the blessing, why, there is one thing, I can slip back because I have not testified to it"? And as long as you fail to testify to your faith you have left an old bridge behind that you can retreat on, you have left a way to " skedaddle " and get back. But when you fling your soul and heart and tongue and voice out and testify, and let the people hear you, why then you are gone; then if you backslide they can say that you professed holiness.

You have got to go far enough to burn every bridge behind you, and stake your reputation, your character, your time and eternity, on God's promises, and God knows that; and these conservative folks that are all the time trying to live here with a dumb tongue are simply endeavoring to steal a march on God and run the blockade of high heaven.

Now, my friends, your faith is not real, perfect faith until it goes out of you. You must confess. You must make a confession that will be adequate to the emergencies of the hour. If you were living with Abraham you might just say, "Well, I do not propose to do like the heathen do, I am a pilgrim and a stranger", that would have been sufficient. If you had lived with John the Baptist you could have said, "I believe that is the Son of God." That would have been sufficient, because the testimony was the test. That testimony was the thing that killed people in those times. In the days of Martin Luther it was, "I believe God justifies my soul by faith without works." That testimony meant excommunication from the Church. And so in any age, in any emergency, you must bear the testimony to your faith which is adequate to the occasion. In your churches that testimony is, " The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth me from all sin." "Nothing less than that will God require. God will make us have a confession that is always adequate to test our obedience. There is no merit in saying the blood cleanseth; there is no virtue in that. But if God requires that and you do not say it, the salvation of your soul depends not on the simple expression but depends on your obedience. It is not saying that the God of peace sanctifies you wholly, but it does depend upon how much of obedience is in it; and let the confession be what it may, we must obey the Lord rather than men.

The only Christians who have peace and joy, the only Christians who march on to victory, are the testifying Christians. You go without testifying and your faith withers and dies.

And so you have these three forms of faith. Faith germinates, as I have said, from having God's Word come in conjunction with your moral nature. The first step is the persuasion; the next is the embracement, — "Here I go, Lord, I am going to identify myself with them "; and the next is the confession that the work has been done.

Now, my friends, if anybody wants salvation., if anybody wants pardon, if anybody wants a clean heart, and you have followed me in this simple' exegesis of these words, I am sure God has helped you so that you see now the privilege of just stepping out on the promises, getting under the blood, and leaving all to God, and resolving you will give your tongue and your testimony and your all.