Faith has two parts to it, belief and trust. The first is the apprehension of a promise or person, and the second, a confidence or dependence on the promise or person. Faith is always first a vision, and then a repose. Our Creator has so constructed everything in us and around us as to render faith a necessity. St. Paul speaks of our being “shut up to the faith,” and the verb signifies being entrapped or hemmed in, as to have no way out of despair and the awful problems of life, except by trusting our way out. And this is true whether applied to our moral or physical life.  

We wake up and find ourselves here, and we know that some eternal power must have been behind us. We find ourselves constantly going forward to some endless future and we know instinctively there must be some power awaiting us in that future. To trust that power or being is one of the essential conditions of our having any peace.  

To trust the Origin of our existence is the fundamental grace of life. Every virtue, every grace possible to the soul, must be the outcome of that fundamental trust. One of the infallible proofs that Scripture is the Word of God, is that its revelation of a life of faith agrees exactly with the constitution of things in relationship to our make-up and our environment. The very men that deny the supernatural in religion, and a life of faith in matters of salvation, are themselves living a life of faith in matters of material, social and financial things.  

Every animal, fish, bird and human being in this world is constantly living by faith, and is taking steps, or moving forward, giving credence either instinctively or rationally to something that lies beyond the five senses, and is reposing on a broad bed of boundless providence, of which each knows neither the beginnings, endings, or the million-fold intricacies.  

The fidelity of God is that adorable perfection in His nature upon which everything in the universe lies down to rest. Our blessed Creator refers to His faithfulness more frequently in His Word than to any other of His attributes because it is His faithfulness that His creatures have to deal with more constantly, and more universally, than any other one attribute of His nature. Look at men in business life, and what is the one virtue that is more constantly and universally brought into play than that of fidelity, being true to their word, their engagements, their promises, their correspondence, their payments. This is the one virtue that stands out forever more conspicuously than friendship, or love, or knowledge, or wisdom, or any other human virtue. God’s fidelity is in Him just what trust is in us.  

Salvation is the marriage of human trust and Divine fidelity. Applying all these principles to a religious life, we find that a boundless confidence in God, as He is revealed in Jesus, is a necessity for the following reasons:  

1. Trusting a Divine Savior is a necessity in view of our sins. Every human being, civilized or savage, has the consciousness of sin, whether confessed or unconfessed, and every soul has an intuitive dread of some awful future calamity in consequence of sin. For thousands of years, men have been inventing numberless methods of dealing with sin, and how to get the monster separated from the soul. But no device has ever brought any sweet assurance of forgiveness and cleansing, except that which is revealed in Scripture, of confessing our sins to God, and leaving them at His disposal.  

Thousands on thousands have tried every possible device—bodily torture, denying the appetites, culture, reason, poetry, meditation, good works, pilgrimages, solitude, heroism, sleeping in coffins, cutting and disfiguring the body, weeping, grieving, in fact everything that the human mind can invent. Nothing in six thousand years has ever brought a satisfactory dealing with sin, except looking in childlike submission to our incarnate, crucified, and risen God, and quietly letting Him take absolute charge of all our sins, and our inward corruption of nature, and dispose of them according to His own plan. We never get honey out of the rock till we leave our sins of every sort and degree for the blood to cover.  

There is no outlet from a life of sin except by quietly confiding ourselves into the hands of Jesus, just as when we go to sleep we confide our breathing for the night to His infinite providence.  

Real, saving faith is to let God manage our sins just as we let Him manage the shining of the light or the flow of the ocean, and repose on God’s spiritual arrangements just as peacefully as our physical life reposes on His arrangement of natural law.  

I rest my soul on the precious blood of Jesus just the same as I rest my eye on the light, or my lungs on the atmosphere, or my feet on the crust of the earth. The moment I break up that boundless trust, I am in a sea of distress; hence the only thing sensible for my soul’s peace, is to trust the atonement of Jesus just as boundlessly as I trust the water I drink, or the air I breathe.  

2. Trusting God is a necessity because of our ignorance and feebleness. We know so little of the past and the future, of the secrets of creation, and so little about ourselves, that of necessity we must lean upon a wisdom we do not see, a love we do not measure, a knowledge we do not comprehend. We must lean upon a secret, incessant, all-pervading government which we do not see, or touch, or taste, or hear, or smell.  

What little knowledge we have of everything in us and about us serves mainly to disclose our littleness and weakness. We find ourselves in contact with great, giant forces that could at any moment destroy our life; wind could blow us down, the water drown us, the fire burn us, the cold freeze us, the gases strangle us, gravitation crush us, the darkness blind us. We can no more manage these elements on a world-wide scale than we could create a world, and yet we walk serenely amid these huge giants like Daniel resting in a den of hungry lions, because we instinctively trust an unseen and omnipotent God to regulate these elements and to take care of our littleness and ignorance.  

Scripture reveals a spirit-world of mighty angels both good and bad, a terrible monster of sin in Satan, and numberless demons who plan and plot our ruin at every turn. But for the protection of God, our lives would be a torment from these wicked spirits, yet see how peacefully we glide along day after day through a thousand potential disasters, because of our instinctive trust in some infinite power that we so often fail to appreciate intelligently and to love tenderly.  

3. It is a necessity that we trust God to take charge of and rule all our infirmities, short comings, and failures of every sort whatsoever. The most thorough salvation does not take from us a humiliating sense of our utter unworthiness. On the other hand, the closer we get to God, the more keenly we see and feel our demerit and unworthiness.  

There are some religious teachers who have an unscriptural and false way of putting this truth, by saying that the more God saves us the more we discover the depths of our sin. Such a statement is false, for both Scripture and experience prove that God can so purify and fill the human soul, that it is conscious of being freed from sin, and possessed with the living presence and holiness of Christ, as a piece of iron in the fire is pervaded with the fire. But the sweetest consciousness of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit does not destroy, at least in this life, that sweetly, sad, pathetic sense of unworthiness, weakness and infirmity before the ever blessed God.  

Now what are we to do with these manifold thoughts, feelings, depressions and weaknesses that in so many are mingled with our everyday lives? Many good people have adopted all sorts of false theories and foolish practices with regard to these manifold imperfections, which are not in themselves sin. There are two extremes in dealing with our imperfections.  

Some are very thoughtless and pay no attention to their daily imperfections, but give them a careless go-by. Others pay them too much attention, and keep themselves in a fever of self-recrimination, denouncing themselves, calling themselves all sorts of abusive terms and wearing long faces as if self-vilification was the path to lofty and beautiful sainthood. No verily, it is only a trick of fine-spun self-righteousness.  

The only true method is in humility to acknowledge every defect, to tell it to Jesus in utter self-surrender, and then to sweetly, lovingly, peacefully and constantly leave every one of them in the hands of our Savior God, just as we leave the exhalation of our breath in the ocean of air that envelops us. If you adopt any other method than trusting them with Jesus, you engender in your soul either religious recklessness or works of self-righteousness. Of course this implies that we are to watchfully avoid every defect and imperfection, without over-straining ourselves or putting ourselves in bondage.  

Some saints over-strain themselves to avoid a supposed imperfection and the over-straining is a great deal more injurious than the very imperfection they are trying to conquer. As truly as you live, there is no way out of this tangled mass of unworthiness, but to trust yourself out in the arms of God.  

4. Trusting ourselves unlimitedly to God is a necessity in view of the known and unending future. We cannot see a single hour ahead of us, and yet we know that we shall go on moving forward, either in this life or in another state of being, for hours, and days, and years, more countless than the drops of water in the sea. As we look out in thought over the endless ages that stretch away before us, and think of what is to become of us in those countless centuries, it is almost enough to take our breath, and make us quiver with questions of possibilities that are to come. The only solution is that of trust. Everything in creation and revelation teaches us to commit ourselves for all future duration to the Omnipotent hand in which we quietly nestle today.