Godliness | Page 8

has been made to do quite as much work for the devil as for
God. Let every saint present, ask in faith for the light of the Holy Ghost,
while we try rightly to apply it. Let us enquire:--
1. _Who are to believe_? 2. _When are they to believe_? 3. _How are
they to believe_?
I. Who are to believe? To whom does the Holy Spirit say, "Believe on
the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved?" Now mark, I answer,
not to all sinners indiscriminately. And here is a grand mistake in a
great deal of the teaching of this age--that these words are wrested from
their explanatory connexion, and from numbers of other texts bearing
on the same subject, and held up independently of all the conditions
which must ever, and did ever, in the mind and practice of the Apostles,
accompany them; indeed, it has only been within the last sixty or
seventy years that this new gospel has sprung into existence, preaching
indiscriminately to unawakened, unconverted, unrepentant
sinners--"Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ." It seems to me, that great
injury has been done to the cause of Christ by thus wrongly dividing
the Word of truth, to say nothing of the unphilosophical character of
such a course, for how can an unawakened, unconvicted, unrepentant
sinner, believe? As soon might Satan believe. It is an utter impossibility.
Thousands of these people say, "I do believe." My dear son, only a
little time ago, on the top of an omnibus, was speaking to a man who
was the worse for liquor, and using very improper language; trying to
show him the danger of his evil, wicked course, as a transgressor of the
law of God. "Oh!" said the man, "it is not by works, it is by faith, and I

believe as much as you do." "Yes," said my son, "but what do you
believe?" "Oh," he said, "I believe in Jesus Christ, and of course I shall
be saved." That is a sample of thousands. I am meeting with them daily.
They believe there was such a man as Jesus, and that He died for
sinners, and for them, but as to the exercise of saving faith, they know
no more about it than Agrippa or Felix, as is manifest when they come
to die, for then, these very people are wringing their hands, tearing their
hair, and sending for Christians to come and pray with them. If they
had believed, why all this alarm and concern on the approach of death?
They were only believers of the head, and not of the heart; that is, they
were but theoretical believers in the facts recorded in this book, but not
believers in the Scriptural sense, or their faith would have saved them.
Now, we maintain that it is useless, and as unphilosophical as it is
unscriptural, to preach "only believe" to such characters; and Christians
have not done their duty, and have not discharged their responsibility to
these souls, when they have told them that Jesus died for them, and that
they are to believe in Him! They have a much harder work to do, and
that is, "to open their eyes" to a sense of their danger, and make them,
by the power of the Spirit, realize the dreadful truth that they are
sinners, that they are sick, and then they will run to the Physician.
The eyes of the soul must be opened to such a realization of sin, and
such an apprehension of the consequences of sin, as shall lead to an
earnest desire to be saved from sin. God's great means of doing this is
the law, as the schoolmaster, to drive sinners to receive Christ as their
salvation.
There is not one case in the New Testament in which the apostles urged
souls to believe, or in which a soul is narrated as believing, in which we
have not good grounds to believe that these preparatory steps of
conviction and repentance, had been taken. The only one was that of
Simon the sorcerer. He was, as numbers of people are, in great religious
movements, carried away by the influence of the meeting, and the
example of those around him, and professed to believe. Doubtless, he
did credit the fact that Jesus died on the cross. He received the facts of
Christianity into his mind, and, in that sense, he became a believer--in
the same sense that tens of thousands are in these days--and he was

baptized. But when the testing point came, as to whose interests were
paramount with him, his own or God's, then he manifested the true state
of the case, as the apostle said, "I see thy heart is not right with God."
And nobody is converted whose heart