9781644135945

The Light of the World
As newborn babes, yet wise by reason of faith! In the measure in which we acquire a
childlike spirit, our faith becomes proportionately stronger and more perfect. Christianity
is founded on faith. Faith is the beginning of salvation and the basis of all Christian
thought. All Christian reasoning, all Christian values, all Christian undertakings, all
Christian life, spring from the virtue of faith. Faith includes more than the mere conviction
that God, the Supreme Being, exists. Faith requires that we accept and conform our
lives to all those things which God has commanded us to accept. We must accept all His
commands on faith, simply because God has spoken. By faith we make an offering of our
whole being to God and subject ourselves to Him in the spirit of sacrifice. We make a
voluntary renunciation of our own understanding and accept all that God reveals, out of
a deep veneration for His infallibility. It is indeed no small matter to consecrate oneself
to God as a sacrifice, together with all one’s thoughts and desires; yet we do this by our
faith. We do even more. To believe in God means to make Him our highest and greatest
goal, the goal upon which we center all our thought and actions, all of our strivings, our
whole life. We make ourselves and our whole life completely dependent on Him, and strive
with all the strength of our heart and mind to serve Him. To believe in God means that
a man must give himself and all that he is over to God and serve Him with a service that
can be rendered to God alone. Only he can believe in God in this manner who possesses
the Christian faith; and he who possesses this faith must make God the center of all his
thoughts and desires. He must subject himself to God, to His every word and command,
to His inspirations and guidance. Do we have such a faith?
“This is the victory which overcometh the world, our faith.” But our faith in God has various
degrees and stages of perfection. We should strive to attain to perfect faith, that “which overcometh
the world.” We have reached the first degree of faith when we live according to the maxims of
the faith. “Faith . . . if it have not works, is dead in itself ” ( Jas 2:17). He who knows the will of his
master, but fails to carry it out, he who has the name of the Lord on his lips, but dishonors Him
by his deeds, is worthy of greater punishment than he who has learned nothing of the faith. “Not
every one that saith to Me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doth
the will of My Father who is in heaven, he shall enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 7:21).
To be joyful and free in our faith is the second degree of faith. He who lives by faith as the
child in the house of his father, as the free man in his home, feels nothing of the burden of faith
which the slave finds so onerous. The realms of faith become for him a familiar region, and he
moves about in the light of faith with a naturalness and ease which others would find difficult
or impossible. Even the regulations of spirit and heart, which faith imposes, become familiar
and do not become burdensome.
To live by faith is the third and final stage in our growth in faith. Faith lives in us, and we live
by faith. “In the head of the book it is written of me that I should do Thy will; O my God, I have
desired it, and Thy law in the midst of my heart” (Ps 39:8 f.). Those who live according to faith
need make no laborious search to discover the will of God. Without compulsion and, as it were,
by instinct they sense God’s presence and recognize the hand of God in everything that befalls
them, be it sweet or bitter, welcome or unwelcome. They have no need of artificial means for
placing themselves in the presence of God. They feel themselves in the presence of God even
when they are engaged in the most absorbing work, or when they are surrounded on all sides
by men of the world. Their life, both day and night, is a burning flame of love that consumes
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