FAITH AND CONFESSION

The two acts of heart-faith and mouth-confession are so conjoined in the Bible, they are woven together in such multiplied forms of expression, that no ordinary Bible student can doubt that they sustain an inherent and essential relation to each other. An inner faith and an audible confession are the two wings of religious life. God has, in infinite wisdom, ordained them both as conditions of his blessing. Faith in the heart is the condition by which we obtain the fact of God's blessing, and confession with the mouth is the condition by which we obtain the experience or emotion of God's blessing. One is the inner condition for the spirit, the other is the outer condition for the feelings. Faith makes its report to Christ, and the mouth of confession makes its report to the world; so that the work of the Holy Ghost in us gets reported to a divine and human audience. This is every where in the Bible the divine order. Heart- faith and mouth-confession are twin-born of the Holy Ghost, and that which the Spirit has joined together, we dare not put asunder.

It is passing strange that we hear so much Against confessing Christ with the mouth; and we have no other organ of the body to confess Christ with except the mouth. It is a too common thing to hear Christian people (?) and ministers with their mouths cast slurs and innuendoes against the mouth confession of Christ. Preachers and laymen are sometimes exhorted to live holy, but not to profess holiness! What could the Apostle Paul say to such advice; he who professed holiness in all his writings, and urged the churches to do the same? There is not a single line in all the Bible that even insinuates we are to live a piety which we are too fastidious to confess.

It has become Very unfashionable and undignified for ministers to tell their actual experiences, and when the pulpit gets in the dark on any one point, a mass of ignorance will fall on the Church.

What are we going to do with the two hundred texts of Scriptures in which God demands our mouths, tongues, or voices in confession? When Christ tells us to confess him before men, it is as much a command as to keep the Sabbath. If any one lives religious and refuses to confess with the mouth he disobeys Christ, and hence does not truly live religious. All this fine talk about living Christ and not confessing Christ is a perversion of truth; there is not an atom of Bible truth in it. The genuine faith of the heart will rush into confession, and confession will clinch and seal the faith. He who trusts Jesus will want to confess; and on the other hand, he who confesses will want to maintain his faith. Thus faith and confession are mutual conservers of each other. They form the pinions of our soaring experience; they form the feet for heavenly marching; they form the hands for godly work.

If we confess Christ and have not true faith, we are hypocrites; and if we have faith and do not confess, we are cowards.- They are both sins, and we must be cleansed from both in order to live truly righteous. There are very few hypocrites in the Church, and they are easily detected; there is a mean, brassy twang in the throat which indicates that the root of the tongue does not reach the heart. But where there is one hypocrite, there are a thousand cowards who shrink from confessing Christ with their mouths. The universal disease of the Church is dumbness. Let the tongues of the Church twist themselves into the obedience of confession, and then the few little, pinched hypocrites that w& have on hand would be drowned out by a deluge of glorious testimony.