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Music For the Soul
Devotional: September 14th

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FAITH’S VISION

Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the proving of things not seen. - Hebrews 11:1

People say, " Seeing is believing." I should be disposed to turn the aphorism right round, and to say, "Believing is seeing," For there is a clearer insight, and a more immediate, direct contact with the thing beheld, and a deeper certitude in the vision of faith than in the poor purblind sight of sense, all full of illusions, and which has no real possession in it of the things which it beholds. The sight that Faith gives is solid, substantial, clear, certain. If I might so say, the true exercise of Faith is to stereoscope the dim, ghostlike realities of the future, and to make them stand out solid in relief there before us. And he who, clasping the hand, and if I might so say, looking through the eyes of God, sees the future, in humble acceptance of His great words of promise, in some measure as God sees it - he has a source of knowledge, clear, immediate, certain, which sense, with its lies and imperfections, is altogether inadequate even to symbolise. The vision of Faith is far deeper, far more real, far more correspondent to the realities, and far more satisfying to the eye that gazes, than is any of the sight of sense. Do not you be deceived or seduced, by talk that assumes to be profound and philosophical, into believing that when you venture your all upon God’s Word, and doing so say, " I know, and behold mine inheritance," you are saying more than calm reason and common sense teaches us. We have the thing, and we see it, if we believe Him that in His Word shows it to us.

This vision of Faith, with all its blessed clearness and certitude and sufficiency, is not a direct perception of the things promised, but only a sight of them in the promise. And does that make it less blessed? Does the astronomer that sits in his chamber, and when he would most carefully observe the heavens, looks downwards on to the mirror of the reflecting telescope that he uses, feel that he sees the starry lights less clearly and less really than when he gazes up into the abyss itself and sees them there? Is not the reflection a better and a more accurate source of knowledge for him than even the observation direct of the sky would be? And so, if we look down into the promise, we shall see, gleaming and glittering there, the starry points which are the true images adapted to our present sense and power of reception of the great invisible lights above. God be thanked that Faith looks to the promises and not to the realities, else it were no more Faith, and would lose some of its blessedness.

Let me remind you that this vision of Faith varies in the measure of our faith. It is not always the same. Refraction brings up sometimes, above the surface of the sea, a spectral likeness of the opposite shore; and men stand now and then upon our Southern coasts, and for an hour or two, in some conditions of the atmosphere, they see the low sand-hills of the French or the Belgian coast, as if they were in arm’s length. So Faith, refracting the rays of light that strike from the Throne of God, brings up the image, and when it is strong the image is clear, and when it flags the image "fades away into the light of common day "; and where there glowed the fair outlines of the far-off land, there is nothing but a weary wash of waters and a solitary stretch of sea.

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