BELIEF
AND UNBELIEF
Since believing is looking, it can be done without special equipment or religious paraphernalia. God has seen to it that the one life-and-death essential can never be subject to the caprice of accident. Equipment can break down or get lost, water can leak away, records can be destroyed by fire, the minister can be delayed or the church burn down. All these are external to the soul and are subject to accident or mechanical failure: but looking is of the heart and can be done successfully by any man standing up or kneeling down or lying in his last agony a thousand miles from any church.
Since believing is looking it can be done any time. No season is superior to another season for this sweetest of all acts.1
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The temptation to make our relation to God judicial instead of personal is very strong. Believing for salvation has these days been reduced to a once-done act that requires no further attention.2
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In our constant struggle to believe we are likely to overlook the simple fact that a bit of healthy disbelief is sometimes as needful as faith to the welfare of our souls.3
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I have met Christians with no more discrimination than the ostrich. Because they must believe certain things, they feel that they must believe everything. Because they are called upon to accept the invisible they go right on to accept the incredible. God can and does work miracles; ergo, everything that passes for a miracle must be of God.4
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In our eagerness to make converts we allow our hearers to absorb the idea that they can deal with their entire responsibility once and for all by an act of believing. This is in some vague way supposed to honor grace and glorify God, whereas actually it is to make Christ the author of a grotesque, unworkable system that has no counterpart in the Scriptures of truth.5
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If we only believe hard enough wes’ll make it somehow. So goes the popular chant. What you believe is not important. Only believe. Jew, Catholic, nature mystic, deist, occultist, swami, Mormon, Sufi, moon-struck poet without religious convictions, political dreamer or aspirant for a cottage on Uranus or Mars—just keep on believing, and peace, it will be wonderful. Soon a disease-free, warless world will emerge from the mists inhabited by a colorless, creedless, classless race where men will brothers be for as’ that and as’ that.6
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True faith requires that we believe everything God has said about Himself, but also that we believe everything He has said about us. Until we believe that we are as bad as God says we are, we can never believe that He will do for us what He says He will do.7
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Every man will have to decide for himself whether or not he can afford the terrible luxury of unbelief.8