THE BELIEVER IN CHRIST

AND

CHRIST IN THE BELIEVER :

AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE

CONFERENCE IN TORONTO, 1878.

1. Living faith in Jesus Christ constitutes A BELIEVER; but an important question is, What is living faith? I need not tell you that there prevails very commonly a vague idea of believing in Jesus Christ, while those thus believing scarcely know who Jesus Christ is, or what He has done. Such people believe in a name which to their mind represents no definite notion of either nature, character or work. On one occasion some years ago, I remember meeting with a young lady, apparently of superior social position, enquiring her way to Christ, and who indeed thought she had perhaps even found Him, on questioning whom, I discovered she really did not know wherein the nature and value of Christ's sacrifice consisted. She could not tell why the death of any good and religious man on her behalf should not be accepted by God as an atonement for her sin; she had no idea that Christ's divinity was essential to the saving virtue of His sacrifice, and the value of

His righteousness. She believed in a name of three syllables. Now, I cannot but think there are a good many people of religious reputation who have never yet thought out an answer to the momentous question, How is it that Jesus Christ's personal sacrifice can take away human sin? while very many others are in the habit of affirming that His sacrifice did not really take away sin at all, but was designed to exert merely a moral influence on the mind.

I remember also the case of a young man in the old country with whom an elderly lady, taking part in a revival meeting, attempted to deal; and, she endeavoring to get his faith in operation, urged upon him to make an effort to see Jesus Christ to behold Him spiritually; and when he stated his inability to understand what she meant, she answered, "Close your eyes now, and imagine that you see a man on a cross." When he had done as directed, she asked him if he could imagine the scene-the agony-the blood, and so forth, "for," said she, "if you can see Christ in this way, you are saved." I need not refer to the common but most erroneous notion that saving faith consists in "feeling you are saved."

There is also a very wide-spread opinion that saving faith consists of a strong mental effort to

believe a striving and struggling of the mind to lay hold on Jesus Christ-a continual and painful clinging and hanging on to Jesus Christ by a desperate mental effort, something resembling the effort of a drowning man clinging to a plank.

All these aspects of faith, I must say, I regard as decidedly wrong and unscriptural; because true saving faith is simply our resting on the testimony-the record of God concerning His Son. Pious feeling or imagination and ignorant superstitious reverence for a mere name have nothing whatever to do with it. Faith consists of our crediting what the God of truth hath said, of trusting quietly and confidently to an historical fact about which we have had sufficient evidence, and which we, therefore, cannot but believe. Indeed, we believe everything we know on sufficient authority to be true, and that spontaneously, without any mental effort. When such truth is presented to us we believe it, and trust to it, because we really can do nothing else. Our faith rests down into quiet recumbency on the solid veracity of God's Word. It is not faith that saves us, but Christ; faith does nothing more than realize, appropriate and enjoy the salvation of Christ; faith, far from being the cause of our salvation, is, strictly speaking,

the immediate result of our knowing on divine authority that He took away our sins by the sacrifice of Himself.

"Faith is not what we see or feel,—

It is a simple trust

In what the God of truth hath said
Of Jesus Christ the Just."

What Christ was and is, what Christ has done and promised is the genuine believer's restingplace and mightiest argument. When, therefore, we "believe with our hearts unto righteousness," we trust to Christ's perfect and divine righteousness, claiming it as our own. In short, the true believer realizes his personal salvation forever perfected in Christ Jesus, and rests there in blessed peace. "The work of (Christ's) righteousness is peace, and the effect of (Christ's) righteousness, quietness and assurance forever." So much for the word, "Believer."

II. What then is meant by "THE BELIEVER'S BEING IN CHRIST ?"

We have not far to seek an inspired epitome of this doctrine, for in the second chapter of his Epistle to the Colossians at the 10th verse Paul tells believers, "Ye are complete in Him.” This remarkable phrase I understand to teach that the believer has become so fully identified with Christ that Christ's completeness, whatever that may amount to, is his completeness-that,

in the sight of God, he is quite as "complete" as Jesus Christ Himself-that what Christ is, believers in Him are, and as He is, so are they. "Ye are complete in Him."

1. If it be now enquired, When did this union between Christ and believers begin, and what is its nature? the Scriptures reply in Ephesians 1st chapter, and 3rd to 5th verses: "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ according as He hath chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy, and without blame before Him in love; having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will." "Before the foundation of the world," that is when the union between Jesus Christ and believers really began, then they were "in Him;" and the cause of this union was the choice of God. This glorious scheme of salvation in Christ and by Christ, you cannot but notice, is no second or afterthought of Almighty God, suggested by any unanticipated events of earth or time-suddenly struck out by the accident of sin, and the consequent extreme exigencies of ruined humanity; but a grand deliberate purpose predestinated in the perfect