August Francke on faith

George Müller, the famous 19th century saint who founded orphanages in Bristol, and who lived by faith, praying that God would give him everything he and his many orphans and their staff needed each day, mentions another man in his biography who had worked in the same way. This was August Hermann Francke (1663-1727). He wrote prolifically, and the following is an extract from his writing on faith. 

“But, while faith,” he says, “is the ground of our justification, it is also the means of happiness; for righteousness and peace cannot be separated from one another. But when we say that our happiness is secured, it must be remembered that something more is intended, than that we shall hereafter be admitted into heaven. 

This happiness begins from the moment of our justification. For we are then delivered from the wrath and curse of God, from the power of sin and death. We are brought out of darkness into light, from death unto life. God the Father brings us into the kingdom of his Son, and gives us the pledge of an inheritance, even the spirit of Jesus Christ; renews us in his image, day by day; awakens a holy fear, and love in our hearts, so that we run with alacrity in the way of his commandments, and think it our meat and drink to do his will. 

Thus does the believer’s happiness commence. He now knows that this heavenly Father loves him, and that he will help him to overcome every adversary to his peace. He is now united to Christ and knows that He is his riches, his glory, his all. He knows that his prayers will be heard through the merits of Christ; and that all needful things will be given him. He has the spirit of God dwelling in his heart, filling him with all knowledge, and enabling him to grow daily in faith and love. He finds happiness, too, in the service of God, is doing good to all men as he has opportunity and in the exercise of true benevolence and compassion. 

He is, by his union with the Redeemer, changed into the heavenly image, and although he dwells on earth, and mingles in the affairs of men, his conversation is in heaven; and he joins in spirit with its blessed inhabitants in prayer and praise to God. His heart is in heaven, for there he has laid up his treasure; and through the Spirit he holds perpetual intercourse with God. Oh! what blessedness is this thus to be united, in the closest ties, with the adorable Trinity; to have the Great God dwelling in our hearts, and holding his court there; to have angels for our ministers, and to know that as Christ overcame, and is seated on his throne, so shall we triumph over our foes, and sit down with him in the kingdom of Heaven. This blessedness is begun below; but it is completed in that other world, where sin and sorrow can never enter to mar his peace; and where the ransomed sinner shall be conformed to the image of his God, and see his face, and praise him for ever and ever.”

Jesus intercedes for us

How encouraging is the thought of the Redeemer's never-ceasing intercession for us. When we pray, he pleads for us; and when we are not praying, he is advocating our cause, and by his supplications shielding us from unseen dangers.

Notice the word of comfort addressed to Peter - "Simon, Simon, Satan hath desired to have you that he may sift you as wheat; but" - what? "But go and pray for yourself." That would be good advice, but it is not so written. Neither does he say, "But I will keep you watchful, and so you shall be preserved." That were a great blessing. No, it is, "But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not."

We little know what we owe to our Saviour's prayers. When we reach the hill-tops of heaven, and look back upon all the way whereby the Lord our God hath led us, how we shall praise him who, before the eternal throne, undid the mischief which Satan was doing upon earth. How shall we thank him because he never held his peace, but day and night pointed to the wounds upon his hands, and carried our names upon his breastplate!

Even before Satan had begun to tempt, Jesus had forestalled him and entered a plea in heaven. Mercy outruns malice. Mark, he does not say, "Satan hath desired to have you." He checks Satan even in his very desire, and nips it in the bud. He does not say, "But I have desired to pray for you." No, but "I have prayed for you: I have done it already; I have gone to court and entered a counterplea even before an accusation is made." O Jesus, what a comfort it is that thou hast pleaded our cause against our unseen enemies; countermined their mines, and unmasked their ambushes. Here is a matter for joy, gratitude, hope, and confidence.

Charles Spurgeon...Devotional Classics of C H Spurgeon: Reading for evening, January 11th. 

Delivered

We begin and end with a faith, not in Jesus simply but in His world work, not simply in His person but in His person’s office, in Him as God’s Son Christ and Redeemer, for good and all, the Conqueror and of a world worse even than we now see, the slow Regenerator of the administration of his purchased property. We begin with the faith in which our own soul calls Him its Saviour from what seems an infinite and hopeless evil. He delivers us from a sin whose guilt lies on our small soul with a pressure from the reservoir of all the high wickedness of the world. It is not from our moral lapses nor from our individual taint that we are delivered, but from world sin, sin in dominion, sin solidary* if not hereditary, yea, from sin which integrates us into a Satanic Kingdom.

 

From The Justification of God, pages 30-1, by P T Forsyth

 

* solidary: characterized by or manifesting community of interests and responsibilities [A word often used by Forsyth, though not in general use elsewhere that I know of.]

Moral and not official

The sixth of six summings-up that P T Forsyth gives in the sixth chapter of his book, The Work of Christ (pages 151/2). There is a seventh, much longer, point, which I won't include here. 

Another thing may perhaps be taken as recognised in some form by the main line of judicious advance in our subject. The work of Christ was moral and not official.  It was the energy and victory of his own moral personality, and not simply the filling of a position, the discharge of an office he held. His victory was not due to his rank, but to his will and conscience. It lay in his faithfulness to the uttermost amid temptations morally real and psychologically relevant to what he was. It was a work that drew on his whole personality as a moral necessity of it. What he did he did not simply in the room and stead of others. He did it as a necessity of his own person also - though its effect for them was not what it was for him. He fulfilled an obligation under which his own personality lay; he did not simply pay the debts of other people. He fulfilled a personal vocation. 
And his faithfulness was not only to a vocation. It was to a special vocation, that of redeemer, not merely a saint. The immediate source of his suffering was not the sight of human sin, and it was not a general holiness in him. It was not the quivering of the saint's purity at the touch of evil. But it was the suffering of one who touched sin as the redeemer. He would not have suffered for sin as he did, had he not faced it as its destroyer. Not only was this his vocation as a moral hero, but his special vocation as Saviour. It was the work of a moral personality at the heart of the race, of one who concentrated on a special yet universal task - that of redemption. 
His perfection was not that of a paragon, one who could do better what every soul and genius of the race could do well. He was not all the powers and excellencies of mankind rolled into one superman. But his perfection was that of the race's redeemer. It was inferior to all other powers and achievements.It was central both for God and man. He made man's centre and God's coincide. He took mankind at its centre and laid it on the centre of God. His identification with man was not extensive but intensive, it was not discursive and parallel, so to say. It was morally central and creative. He was not humanity on its divine side; he was its new life from the inside. The problem he had to solve was the supreme and central moral problem of guilt; and the work could only be done by the native action of a personality moral in its nature and methods, moral to the pitch of the Holy.
It is an immense gain thus to construe Christs' work as that of a moral personality instead of a heavenly functionary. It brings it into line with the modern mind and into organic union with the moral problem of the race. It enables us to realise that every step of the moral victory in his life was a step also in the redemption of the whole human conscience. And we grasp with a new power the idea that his crowning victory of the Cross was the victory in principle of the whole race in him - that justification is really one with reconciliation, and what he did before God contained all he was to do on man. It makes possible for us what my last lecture will attempt to indicate - a unitary view of his whole work and person. 

Graphic courtesy of Jeanie Rhoades/Thought Collage.

True wisdom

From the additional notes to Charles Spurgeon's The Treasury of David, Psalm 107

Verse 43. Will observe these things, etc. Will carefully note and remark what is here said of the fall and recovery of mankind, of our state by nature and by grace. True wisdom consists in observing these two things, what we are in ourselves, and what we are in Christ; in a deep sense of our misery by sin, stirring us up to seek our remedy in the Redeemer. This is wisdom. And whosoever is thus wise unto salvation shall understand the lovingkindness of the Lord; shall be able to apply what he understands of it to his own private use and benefit.

The verb in the original rendered "shall understand", is in the conjugation called Hithpael, which signifies to act upon itself. Whosoever observes those things properly finds his own interest in them. He makes the understanding of them useful to himself. He does not study them as a science or theory, but as interesting points in which he is nearly concerned, and which he therefore tries to bring home for his own private advantage. When he hears of the mercies of the Lord Jesus recorded in this psalm he desires to partake of them. When he hears of the great deliverances vouchsafed to sinful ruined man, he studies to have his own share in them. What is said of these persons who wandered out of the way in the wilderness, and fell into the bondage of sin, and were afflicted with its diseases, and troubled like a stormy sea, with its continual tempests; all this he knows was his own case, and therefore what follows of their flourishing state after Christ delivered them may be his also if he cry unto the Lord, as they did, for help.

And he never ceases praying and seeking, until the blessed Jesus brings him to the haven of the church, where he would be. And if he find the church diminished and brought low, he is not discouraged; but relies on the promises of his God, who will set him on high out of the reach of public calamity, when he comes to destroy an infidel church. He observes what is said on this psalm concerning those things; and he knows it to be true, by his own experience. And therefore the lovingkindness of the Lord here recorded is to him a subject of exceeding great joy, because he has tasted of it. Whoso is wise will bring his knowledge of this psalm home to his own heart, and he shall understand the lovingkindness of the Lord, he shall be able to apply what he understands to his own benefit, and shall therefore be continually praising the Lord for his goodness, and declaring the wonders which he hath done for the salvation of men.—William Romaine.