The Ascent of Faith

W. Carl Ketcherside

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     Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" has always intrigued me, was an interesting character. In spite of the fact that he became hopelessly addicted to drugs, being a good friend of Thomas de Quincey who wrote "Confessions of an English Opium Eater," he could never forget the impression made upon his mind by the study of the Bible in his early days at Cambridge. And he repeatedly said that Paul's letter to the Romans was "the most profound work in existence."

     Then there was F. Godet, the eminent French professor of theology in the University of Neuchatel, whose commentary on Luke opened up so many new vistas of thought for me. He referred to Romans as "the cathedral of the Christian faith." Martin Luther, whose name was always spoken in reverence in my childhood home, declared that Romans was "the chief part of the New Testament."

     If the Roman letter is the Alps of the new covenant scriptures, certainly chapter eight is the Matterhorn, looming high above and towering into the clouds. It will be my privilege (I do not count it a task) this year, to lead an expedition in scaling this peak, and to this exciting adventure we invite both you and your friends.

     As one in scaling a mountain must first work his way up gentler slopes, it becomes necessary for us to mention the reasoning of the apostle leading up to this one great chapter. We shall try to avoid the temptation to peer into every nook and crevice on the way, and shall keep in view the snowy peak which is our objective. The background will be painted in bold strokes and not in fine detail.

     However, there are certain words in the Roman letter which cannot be casually brushed aside. Unless we understand their true connotation all other effort will be in vain. If we seem to stop too long in some places, please remember that we are digging in toe-holds for our cleats, and thus preparing for the ascent which beckons us onward and upward. He travels at his own risk who thinks he can understand the word of God while ignoring the words of God.

     Even the casual student of the sacred scriptures realizes that the letter to the Romans is different than any other letter which Paul wrote. Certainly it more nearly approaches a systematic treatise on our relationship with the divine than any other. It does not contain the references to local problems which are found in most of the rest. The reason for this appears to be quite simple.

     Paul did not plant the congregation of saints in Rome, the capital city of the world. He had not visited the city and was dependent upon the report of others for any knowledge of the state of the believers. But he had long wanted to see them for two reasons. First, as an envoy

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of the King, he wanted to bestow upon them an enabling gift, and second, he desired to behold souls from among the gentiles gathered into God's granary. Paul had a passion for gentiles. He was their very own ambassador.

     Something had just occurred which encouraged Paul to hope that his dream might be realized. For a long time he had been planning how he might visit Spain, a great frontier of the Empire. He had been deterred from going into the regions beyond by the need to take up a contribution from congregations of Greeks to relieve the destitution and abject poverty which persisted in Jerusalem and Palestine. The money had been gathered and he was ready to travel with it to Jerusalem and turn it over to the brethren.

     While casting about for something to do after accomplishment of this mission, the thought came to him that it would be an opportune time to visit Spain, and to make a stopover in Rome enroute. There was really no place left in Asia Minor or on the Greek peninsula, which had not heard the Message. He had proclaimed it from Jerusalem round about to Illyricum. He would not consider going where others had labored lest he build upon another man's foundation.

     So he sat down and wrote to those who were "loved of God and called to be Christ's men and women" in Rome. He said, "Since for many years I have had a great desire to see you, I hope to visit you on my way to Spain. I hope also that you will speed me on my journey, after I have had the satisfaction of seeing you all." While he was dictating the letter to Tertius, who took it all down, he decided to set forth for those whom he had never met what the life of faith was all about. And that is how we came to have this remarkable and thrilling personal letter.

     It is important that we grasp what is meant in the expression "righteousness of faith." Our hope for life is involved in it. And do not be disturbed that in one sentence I write justification and in the next righteousness. They are from the same word. Only in our English translation have we made a distinction. In doing so we have created mental confusion. Since it is so important that we lay a proper groundwork let me make a few general statements about these terms, and then, by God's grace and mercy, we can enlarge upon them in subsequent articles.

     Now it is true that faith is the belief of testimony but it is not mere mental assent to the veracity of that testimony. It goes far beyond this. It involves the surrender of self without reservation to him who is the object of faith. Faith in Christ is a pledge of allegiance to Christ. Inherent in it is the idea of trust which leads to commitment, the utter abandonment of one's self to another in the full confidence that what he has promised he will do.

     In recent years certain men within our communion have been critical of the term "commitment to Christ." It is their contention that the words are not found in the Bible. Of course, they refer to the English Version as commissioned by King James. But theirs is a shallow objection, for the very word for believe is rendered commit, or committed, no less than seven times in that version. The faith which justifies in Christ is the faith which declares its utter bankruptcy of any other hope. It throws out no other anchor regardless of how strong the tempest or how rough the sea. It never panics or looks for another refuge. It recognizes there is no other Savior in heaven and none on earth

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besides him. It is not Jesus or someone else; it is Jesus or no one else!

     So when I write about faith in this series I am not dealing with a mere mental concept related to Jesus of Nazareth. Neither am I referring to a verbal statement or confession of belief. I am talking about the reaching out of the inner man to embrace the Son of God so fully and completely as to lose one's own personality in identification with him. As Paul said to the Colossians, "You who were spiritually dead because of your sins and your uncircumcision, God has made to share in the very life of Christ." Surely faith must reside in the heart, and certainly it must be confessed, but it is more than a rational idea among other ideas, and far greater than the stumbling expression of it in words.

     Let us now consider the meaning of justification. Justification is made necessary because of our guilt. To stand justified before God is to be guiltless. It is to be righteous, to sustain a right relationship with God. How can sinful man enter into such a relationship with a sinless God who hates iniquity, and whose very nature impels him to judgment upon every sinful act? Unless we can find a solution to this we will be driven to despair and wallow in the blackness of recurring doubt.

     Man cannot obtain justification by recalling or undoing a single act that he has committed. If one engages in the sin of adultery in an act of blinding passion, he cannot undo it. He may agonize in the burning hell of an accusing conscience and shed rivers of tears. He may rationalize within his disturbed heart and seek for mental comfort in the prevalence of such a deed in the social culture. But the act, once committed, cannot be burnt up, washed out or explained away. The doer is guilty before God. If he lives an exemplary sexual life the remainder of his days upon the earth he still cannot blot out the former act.

     Nor can one be justified by law-keeping. Ideally, if a man could completely fulfill the law and perfectly obey its every jot and tittle, he would be justified (Rom. 2:13). But no earthly being has ever done this. No one ever will. The least infraction of the law, the very first deviation, places one under condemnation. Then he is helpless. Then, too, as Paul writes, "The commandment, which was meant to be a direction to life, I found was a sentence of death." That is why he also says, "No man can justify himself before God by a perfect performance of the Law's demands--indeed it is the straight-edge of the Law that shows how crooked we are" (Romans 3:20).

     It is in the face of our helplessness to undo the tangled skein of life, and our hopelessness of perfect performance of a written code, that God offers us justification as a free gift. This is the fruit of abundant mercy and amazing grace. Justification is a judicial act of offended Majesty. Every sin, like the very first one, is an offense against God. Our only hope is to receive acquittal. We cannot win, merit or deserve it. Nor can God bestow it in such a way as to make it appear that he condones transgression or treats it lightly and as of little consequence. He cannot make himself unrighteous to make us righteous!

     The problem of sin has to be met without equivocation. And it required propitiation which man could not provide. It resolved itself in the death for sin of a sinless person. "God has appointed him as the means of propitiation, a propitiation accomplished by the shedding of his blood, to be received and made effective in ourselves by faith." By this means God preserved his righteousness. He made it possible for justice and mercy to meet and merge without clashing. "Under this divine system a man who has faith is now freely acquitted in the eyes of God by his generous dealing in the redemptive act of Christ" (Romans 3:24).

     Really, it is quite simple. Jesus gave up his estate in heaven to become identified with man in his sin. What he did for all men each man must now do for him. Each must give up his life on earth, the life of sin, to become identified with Jesus in his sinlessness. When a person does this God declares him justified. This does

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not mean that one has not sinned, or is not a sinner. It does not mean that he is worthy or pure. It does mean that he is forgiven because in Christ God counts him righteous, not reckoning sin to him. "If a man, irrespective of his work, has faith in him who justifies the sinful, then that man's faith is counted as righteousness, and that is the gift of God. This is the happy state of the man God accounts righteous apart from his achievements" (Romans 4:5).

     Remember that it is not the sinless man whom God justifies. There is no such man on earth. God justifies sinful men. This is my only hope. It is the ground of my confidence. I am justified by the sinless life of Jesus which I appropriate by faith. When I cut loose all of the ropes in which I have trusted for security and launch out into the deep with nothing but Jesus to bear me up, when I stake all I am or ever hope to be on him, then God bestows his righteousness upon me as a gift. So long as I keep a balancing pole of my own, or have a net below just in case, I can never be justified. I am still trusting in my own wit and achievement. In such a situation my sin must be reckoned unto me because I have not laid it all on him.

     The good news that man can be justified by "the fact of his faith in God's appointed Savior and not by what he has managed to achieve under the Law," is the theme of the Roman letter. This is the gospel, the glad tidings. So Paul writes, "I am not ashamed of the good news about Christ, for it is God's dynamic to restore to a state of wholeness all who believe it, the Jew first, but also the gentile. For in the good news is announced God's program of justification by faith, in order to produce faith, for it was long since recorded that the just will live by faith" (Romans 1:16, 17).

     This last statement does not mean that the just will walk, exercise or continue in faith, although that is certainly true. Nothing is clearer than the fact that "we walk by faith and not by sight." However, the thought of the apostle here is that faith is the source of being, the principle of existence. Without this faith man is dead. I have no life of my own. I am under condemnation. I must either have his life or I am doomed. "But where sin was thus multiplied, grace immeasurably exceeded it, in order that, as sin established its reign by way of death, so God's grace might establish its reign in righteousness, and issue in eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord" (Romans 5:21). I am under the umbrella of God's love. I am living under the reign of grace.

     The apostle deals with the gentile first, in Romans 1:21-32. This is one of the most revealing sections of sacred scripture. It belies the whole theory that man began with polytheism, or a multiplicity of tribal gods, and that Israel elevated a Palestinian baal to the place of a supreme deity and gradually shook off superstitious fear of other deities and came to proclaim that there was no other besides their own.

     Instead, mankind began with a concept of one God, and gradually sunk into idolatry as a gross perversion. Man is not

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so much a creature of evolution as of "devolution." The steps toward degradation are clearly identified. (1) A universal knowledge of God obtained. (2) A refusal to honor or respect him as divine. (3) Lack of thankfulness for the blessings bestowed by nature. (4) Futile thinking resulting from lack of a spiritual foundation. (5) A darkening of intellectual powers. (6) Boasting of wisdom while making fools of themselves. (7) Exchanging the splendor of the immortal God for an image made like mortal man, and even for images of creatures that run, fly or crawl.

     It is axiomatic that man becomes like the object that he worships. The more he worships the more he adopts the traits and characteristics of the revered object. When a man worships animals he becomes bestial. When such worship becomes general the environment which he creates is that of the jungle with "the law of fang and claw." When a society completely eliminates God from its thinking God gives them up. God spreads before us the proofs of his existence and provides the instinctive motivations for our recognition of the divine will in the universe, but he will not intrude himself upon the sovereignty of the human will.

     Three times Paul declares that God gave man up, and tells why. (1) "They gave up God: and therefore God gave them up--to be playthings of their own foul desires in dishonoring their own bodies" (1:24). This is the origin of "the playboy philosophy," and it is not new. Poor deluded Hugh Hefner cannot hold a candle for the ancient Greeks in his attempted revival of the religion of hedonism. (2) "These men deliberately forsook the truth of God and accepted a lie, paying homage and rendering service to the creature instead of the Creator...so God gave them up to shameful passions" (1:25,26).

     (3) "Thus, because they have not seen fit to acknowledge God, he has given them up to their own depraved passion" (1:28). With this we are supplied a catalogue of depravity, characteristic of paganism when it was shaped by those who "became fatuous in their argumentations and plunged their silly minds still further into the dark" (1:21). Noteworthy are the strictures against homosexuality, effeminacy and lesbianism. Instead of these being regarded as exhibitions of liberty of personality they are branded as disgraceful passions, abnormal, unnatural, shameful horrors and sexual perversity.

     The crackpot advocates of unisex, the fanatical shatterpated defenders of homosexuality between consenting adults, are all representatives of Satan's revival of the philosophic delusions of Grecian philosophy. Not a single new element has been added. The pornography in print is a commentary on that which was distributed in the Athenian agora as poetry; the exploitation of sex and nudity on the screen is rivalled by that which was portrayed on the walls of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Men still suffer from "bats in the belfry." Only the belfry has been modernized. The bats are the same! "They know well enough the just decree of God, that those who behave like this deserve to die, and yet they do it; not only so, they actually applaud such practices" (1:32).

     Man can never save himself by his own wisdom. He cannot think himself out of the dilemma of sin. It is sinful man who does the thinking and, regardless of his brilliance he will not free himself from the mire. "Where is your wise man now, your man of learning, or your subtle debater, limited all of them to this passing age? God has made the wisdom of this world look foolish" (1 Cor. 1:20).

     This was literally true in the case of a much older friend of mine. He earnestly tried to live up to the idea of Christianity projected by our little congregation and the itinerant preachers who held our meetings. He heard all of the sermons about the hell that awaited the man who kept the whole law and yet offended in one point. He knew that he fell short in more ways than one, a fact of which his good nagging Christian wife continually reminded him. When he could take what he thought was his own hypocrisy no longer, he took his revolver and walked to the orchard and blew his brains out against the bark of an apple tree. I wish I knew what he was thinking before he pulled the fatal trigger. I wonder if he thought the rest of us were murdering him.

     Law always starts with one who is helpless and leaves him hopeless. I know from experience. I tried for years to be justified by law and the whole time I was living behind a facade. I learned that there is no law in existence that one cannot mentally evade if he wants to do a thing enough to take the risk. The real power of law is fear. Its lash is a threat. But no fear of future judgment will deter from a present act, for every sinner thinks he can "beat the rap." He will do it just this once and then live so good the rest of his life that God will be forced to let down the bars and let him into heaven. He fools only himself!

     Did you ever study carefully the kind of pride bred in the Jews by their boast that they were God's elect? One of the most blistering indictments ever made was pronounced against them. Listen! "You take your stand upon the Law, and are, so to speak, proud of your God. You know his plan, and are able through your knowledge of the Law truly to appreciate moral values. You can, therefore, confidently look upon yourself as a guide to those who do not know the way, and as a light to those who are groping in the dark. You can instruct those who have no spiritual wisdom: you can teach those who, spiritually speaking, are only just out of the cradle. You have a certain grasp of the basis of true knowledge." Does this sound like a description of anyone you know? Then read on in Romans 2:18-24.

     But cheer up! All is not lost! "What happens now to human pride of achievement? There is no room for it. Why, because failure to keep the Law killed it? Not at all, but because the whole matter is now on a different plane--believing instead of achieving. We see now that a man is justified before God by the fact of his faith in God's appointed Savior and not by what he has managed to achieve under the Law."

     Never forget this. Justification is on a different plane than that of legalistic conformity to a written code. If you revert to hope based on your own correctness, your own legal rectitude, you have not restored the life of the primitive Christians. You have simply revived the original Pharisees!

     The apostle uses Abraham as an example. He was declared to be justified before he was circumcised and a long time prior to the advent of the Law. And he provides for us a genuine definition of the faith which justifies. Discounting the weakness of his own vital powers and the deadness of Sarah's womb, he "remained absolutely convinced that God was able to implement his own promise. This was the 'faith' which was counted unto him for righteousness" (4:21,22).

     Let that seep into the pores of your consciousness. The faith which is counted for righteousness, that is, which establishes a proper relationship with the

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eternal life of God is "the unshakable conviction that what God has promised he has power to fulfill." This is important because I am constantly running into young people on the college campus who are shaken up and claim to have trouble with their faith.

     A lot of them do not have trouble with their faith at all. They are trying to operate on a set of values inherited from their grandparents, borrowed from their parents, or saddled on them by the congregation in which they grew up. Like David, when confronted with a giant, they find they cannot fight in another man's armor. But instead of getting a good fit they throw one! One might as well try to eat with a set a dentures borrowed from his father as to tackle the philosophical fare dished up today while trying to operate on a "slightly used faith" brought with him from home.

     Most people do not know what faith is and they use it as one ingredient in a tossed salad of varied concepts flavored with a dressing of intellectual doubt. And some think it is a horrible sin to have such salad dressing in their mental refrigerators. They try to hide it from sight behind the effervescent mental soda pop. There was, for instance, the coed who tearfully confided in me that there had been questions raised in her biology class which she could not answer. When I asked her why she felt obligated to furnish an answer for every problem that arose, she replied, "But can a person have faith and doubts at the same time?" Obviously one can have faith in the power of God and doubts related to the biological realm at the same time. Indeed, if he is normal this will almost certainly be the case.

     I can never forget the dictum of Sir Francis Bacon, "If we begin with certainties, we shall end in doubts; but if we begin with doubts, and are patient in them, we shall end in certainties." It was the philosopher Colton who said, "Doubt is the vestibule through which all must pass before they can enter into the temple of wisdom." My own faith in God is much stronger because of the period of testing through which I struggled. Wrestling with one's self is real exercise. I know that my Redeemer lives. I know he will fulfill his promises. But it is one thing to believe this and to trust in it, and a wholly different thing to know how it will be done. Most of our doubts are related to the how and that is outside our sphere. Abraham did not know how Sarah could conceive, seeing that she had long since passed through the menopause, yet he "remained absolutely convinced that God was able to implement his own promises."

     My faith is that of Abraham. The promise is different but the nature of the faith is not. I do not intend to be shaken in it nor shaken loose from it, by the wisdom of this passing age. There are not enough pseudo-scientists, pettifogging professors or perverted philosophers in this world to make me lose faith in my God. I am sold out to him, lock, stock and barrel. I have crossed the Great Divide and I am not turning back. I have bound myself to the mast of faith so that the siren voices of infidelity cannot lure me to set foot on the shifting sands of the island of unbelief. I have invested all I am and have in the life trust bank. There is nothing left with which to speculate. "I dare not trust the sweetest frame, but wholly lean on Jesus' name."

     Here is life in three dimensions--past, present and future. In the past, the pall of guilt with fear of what was to come. Faith reaches back to the remedy for

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guilt, for faith is based upon fact and fact is grounded in the act of God. God did something about sin! He drew the fangs. He milked death of its venom. "It is sin which gives death its sting, and it is the Law which gives sin its strength. All thanks to God then, who gives us the victory over these things through our Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Cor. 15:56, 57).

     Through faith in our Lord I am acquitted, made free, and given a new life. I am reconciled to God. I have peace with God. What does this mean? In the old covenant scriptures which provide the vocabulary for the new, peace and salvation are the same. To save is to make whole, to restore the proper functioning and relationship of the thing under consideration. To save from sin is to restore one to the state of being with God which man enjoyed before sin came. When the psalmist said, "He restoreth my soul," the Hebrew is literally, "he taketh me back to the place of my beginnings."

     Only grace can build the bridge across what man is, back to what he was, and forward to what he can become. And grace is a gift. It is not a toll bridge. It provides free access to the one who casts himself upon Jesus. It is false pride which causes man to go until he gives out, when he can only really start when he gives in. I am thrilled that love pried open my clenched fingers so I could reach out the hand of faith and grasp the gift of God's grace. What confidence is bred by the peace of God, a peace which is not negative, not merely a cessation of hostilities, but an active, vital, triumphant force!

     And the future is more glorious to contemplate. Peace produces assurances of promises on the morrow. We rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Now that I am justified through surrender to Jesus the future has lost its fear. I am steering into the sunrise and not the sunset. Doubt is gone! Despair has vanished! Listen! "But when the kindness of God our savior and his love towards man appeared, he saved us in his mercy--not by virtue of any moral achievement of ours, but by the cleansing power of a new birth and the moral renewal of the Holy Spirit, which he gave us so generously through Jesus Christ our Savior. The result is that we are acquitted by his grace, and can look forward to inheriting eternal life. This is solid truth. I want you to speak about these matters with absolute certainty" (Titus 3:4-8).

     Absolute certainty about such matters as the kindness of God, the love of God, the mercy of God, the new birth, renewal through the Holy Spirit, acquittal through grace, and eternal life! Unless we can be certain about these we can never be sure of anything. I am certain! This is what peace with God has brought my once trembling soul. I shall meet him over there because I have met him over here.

     Don't get me wrong. I am not postponing my joy until I wade out into the breakers and cross the tide. I do not take the position that the present is a time to fret, complain and look glum. My motto is not "Be morose today and merry tomorrow." I am thrilled to the depths with life as it is. I would not have it one bit different. Whatever happens to me since I am in Jesus is a part of the trip! I am on a package tour to heaven. I am not riding along with an arm or leg sticking out of the window to get knocked off by one of the devil's telephone poles. I am in him with everything that I have. Whatever happens to me will happen in him. Let it happen! It can only work good! Listen:

     "This doesn't mean, of course, that we have only a hope of future joys--we can be full of joy here and now even in our trials and troubles. Taken in the right spirit these very things will give us patient endurance; this in turn will develop a mature character, and a character of this sort produces a steady hope that will never disappoint us, because God's love has been poured out in our heart through the Holy Spirit he has given us" (5:2-5).

     Taken in the right spirit. A steady hope! I know some people whose level of hope goes up and down like the mercury in a thermometer. One day they are topping tall timber and the next day they are crawling through the thicket in a swamp. I am thinking of one man in

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particular. When things are going along smoothly on his ]ob, he is the life of the party. But if by-and-by "hard times come knocking at the door," it is "Old Kentucky home, goodnight!" He gets so little he could sit on the curb and not be able to hit the street with his feet. He exudes gloom so thick that you could slice it and serve it in gloom sandwiches. What's the trouble? That's easy. He has not developed the patience that develops a mature character. He is still selfish. His heart is shriveled up like a prune. He is waiting for others to serve him. The love of God cannot get in through the closed heart.

     If you keep a puckering string on your heart you hurt yourself. It is true that what you have won't get out, but what you need won't get in. Suspicious, tight-fisted, bitterly critical people pollute the atmosphere with their unhappiness, but they also have to breathe it and while they may stifle others they are committing suicide. The love of God can change that. I happen to know.

     I am acquainted with a man and wife who had no children but were blessed with an abundance of this world's goods. Their daily conversation at the table had to do with interest rates, and clipping dividend coupons. They lived for it. They were as tight as the bark on a hickory tree. They complained about having to pay school taxes, griped about the rising cost of food, and grumbled about government welfare programs. They chose as their friends the kind of people who were pessimistic and with whom they could share their prediction of impending disaster. And they looked like an accident going somewhere to happen.

     Then a transformation occurred. The Holy Spirit entered their lives and you never saw such a change as took place. I know when it happened. Against their will they were persuaded to attend a small group session in a home. They consented to go only because they thought that those who were present would sit around and criticize the "institutional church" and its begging for money, and they knew that they could relate to such a sharing of dismals, dumps and doldrums. They craved the fellowship of the funereal and the love of the lugubrious. But it did not turn out that way!

     The brother in whose home the meeting was held opened with the remark that God had been speaking to him through the written word in a remarkable way as he lately read it. He then turned to 2 Corinthians 13, and read these lines: "Then you will have the proof you seek of the Christ who speaks through me, the Christ who, far from being weak with you, makes his power felt among you. True, he died on the cross in weakness, but he lives by the power of God; and we who share his weakness shall by the power of God live in your service. Examine yourselves: are you living the life of faith? Put yourself to the test. Surely you recognize that Jesus Christ is among you?-- unless of course you prove unequal to the test."

     Closing the book, the brother said that he had a confession to make. He had been baptized when he was about thirteen years old, having "gone forward" with a group of others his age during a protracted meeting. In his teen years he had been guilty of every kind of indiscretion, and while going regularly to the gatherings of the church, he had lied to his parents, taken things which did not belong to him, and been guilty of immoral escapades with some of the girls in class. Later, he had been drafted, and in a foreign country had laid his religious convictions aside until he returned to his native land.

     He continued his recital by telling how he married the wonderful wife whom he now had, and how their home had been blessed with three children. They never missed attendance at Sunday school but they went as part of a routine of life. He became successful in business, erected and paid for the luxurious home in which all were now sitting, but all of this time was haunted with an inner emptiness, a feeling that somehow there was something just beyond his grasp which was the real secret of happiness.

     A few months before, driven by a gnawing sense of his own need, he arose

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one morning while it was still dark and going into the den, poured out unto God all of the pent-up feelings in his inner being. He wept freely, and then of a sudden, he felt strangely relieved of anxiety and a peace came stealing into his soul which he had never known before. He declared that he accepted this as peace with God brought about by the lifting of the sense of guilt which had lurked inside and poisoned his whole being for years. He asked all who were present to pray for him that he would always experience that peace which passed human understanding.

     This confession sparked a good deal of serious talk. There were no stale jokes told, and there was not one note of criticism. Mostly it resolved itself into testimonies of heart-searching upon the part of others. The couple I mentioned drove home lost in thought. They hardly exchanged a word. But that night the man could not sleep. After several hours his wife asked him if he was awake and confessed that she had not been able to sleep either. They got up and talked most of the rest of the night. As the streaks of dawn began to break across the eastern sky they had come to the place where they could pray together, something they had never done before in their lives.

     And God took advantage of the open door to come in. The love of God was poured out into their hearts by the Spirit. The selfishness was washed away. The dark corners of suspicion were flushed out by the waters of life. Their whole beings have changed. They are closer to one another than they have ever been before. They like to have young people around them and, for the first time, young people like to be around them. They are hospitable, they visit the sick, they help the needy, and they spend money like it was going out of style. The grace of God is reflected in their very persons. He no longer suffers from an "upset stomach;" she no longer has frightful headaches.

     Really, the years have fallen off their shoulders. They have begun to walk with a sprightlier step. Some who knew them before think they may be getting a little "balmy." They are not! Most members of the church think that real Christians are off in "the upper story" because they are still living on the basement level. The average person isn't hooked on to the power source. He is like a freight train that has come unhooked from the engine. He is all loaded up but is not going anywhere!

     But the love of God is like an ocean tide which flows two ways. It is incoming, drawing us closer to the heart of God. It is outgoing, enabling us to touch the hearts of others. This is the principle of relationship with Jesus. This is the responsibility of discipleship. Think about two verses in Matthew 10. One says, "Then he called his twelve disciples to him." The other says, "These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions." All of us are called and then sent. Discipleship is not "hanging around" with Jesus, but penetrating the world. It is going out with the instructions.

     I have no doubt the twelve would have preferred to stay around where Jesus was, but they were needed where Jesus was not. The love of God is not an escape hatch from responsibility. It does not provide a hiding place. It does not say, "There he is Lord, send him!" It never proposes "Let's you and Satan fight." One who is full of the love of God has no need to hide from anything or anyone, not even from himself. And that is where most of our trouble lies.

     God's undeniable, unquestionable proof of his love for us is that "Christ

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died for us while we were yet sinners" (5:8). We were powerless and we were God's enemies. Paul told Titus that at the time when this took place we were silly, stubborn, and slaves of sensuality. We could not stand ourselves and hated one another. If God had waited to get us out of where we were to love us we would all have been damned. Instead, he loved us to get us out of what we were. And that's the only way any of us will ever get out of our predicament. We have to be pulled out. We cannot extract ourselves. The more frantic our effort the deeper we sink. One does not fight his way out of quicksand!

     But here is a true source of comfort and reassurance. God does not start something and leave it unfinished. He does not abandon the task when it is half done. It is reasonable to assume that if he loved us when we were enemies, he will not forsake us after we have become his friends. And this very thing is affirmed for us by the apostle. "Since we have now been justified by Christ's sacrificial death, we shall all the more certainly be saved through him from final retribution. For if, when we were God's enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, much more, in that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life."

     I am not unaware that in the realm of faith, as in every other, there are grandstand quarterbacks. They are always eager to tell how God should have done it and point out where he made his mistakes. As they feed it to us, God should not have required sacrifices of blood under the Mosaic economy. This makes him appear inept and crude to modern men. It breathes of a slaughterhouse religion and God can be mistaken for a bloody butcher.

     Too, the idea of offering his Son as a ransom for others was wholly unnecessary and useless. It puts the whole scheme of things in a bad light. God seems to be contradictory. He refused to allow Abraham to offer his son, and then turns around and does it himself. I cannot truthfully say that I dismiss all of this with but a passing glance for I do not even entertain it long enough to dismiss it.

     You see, it is not a question of how men think God ought to act, but of how God acted. One who is subject to the judgment of fallible beings and who must allow them to "call the shots" would not be God. Finite men cannot project their ideas upon an infinite God. One quotation puts that thought to sleep! "For who knows the mind of the Lord? who can advise him?" (1 Cor. 2:16).

     I am confidently expecting to be saved from the final retribution through Christ. That God made this possible by the death of his Son provides no mental stumbling-block for me. That he chose to teach mankind the value of substitutionary death of an innocent victim for the guilty through ages past in no sense minimizes my respect for his revelation in the word or through The Word.

     It was through one man that sin entered the world, and death through sin. Death became universal, the penalty becoming as broad as the involvement. If the act of one man who obeyed the urging of sin affected all men, it would not be surprising that the act of one who did not sin would affect all. "For if by the wrongdoing of that one death established its reign, through a single sinner, much more shall those who receive in far greater measure God's grace, and his gift of righteousness, live and reign through the one man, Jesus Christ."

     Please observe that the first order is sin and the reign of death. The next is grace and the gift of justification with the reign of life. It is not that Adam sinned and died while we do not sin and live. We sin as Adam did. But we live, not because of our sinlessness, but because of the sinlessness of Jesus Christ. Grace, which immeasurably exceeds sin and death, established a reign of righteousness, and under it, through faith in the Lord Jesus, we are declared righteous. Our sins are not counted unto us! His righteousness is!

     Having said this much we shall establish camp at this level and dig in for

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another month. If God wills, we shall move out again in four weeks, and work our way upward to the summit. We will begin with what happens when we are "baptized into union with Christ Jesus" (6:3) and work our way forward to an understanding of the power of the indwelling Spirit of God.

     In closing, let me urge upon you to cast yourself upon Jesus. Most of us try too hard. We become frantic and tension-filled. We are frightened and fretful. We are afraid to lean back upon the everlasting arms although we sing about it quite lustily. If there seems to you to be an uncrossable gulf between our faith and that exhibited by the early saints, please read this from the pen of J. B. Phillips:

     "The word of God which stimulates and sustains faith is eternal truth breaking through into this temporary world, so that the certainty of the early Christians which we may regard with a certain wistfulness means, not that they were men of exceptional spiritual calibre, but simply that they recognized the word of God as being quite literally the message, plan and command of God himself. It was a faith more rock-like than any human certainty which gave their lives astonishing quality."