Giving and Receiving in the Act of Faith

A. Paget Wilkes in his book The Dynamic of Life quotes an unknown author of a leaflet "containing words of counsel, worth their weight in gold, to earnest souls who are seeking to understand experimentally the way of faith":

"I am very anxious to guard your minds against those loose ideas of the nature of faith, which represent it as something which gives, as well as takes.

"There is much confounding of what the old divines call 'Legal Repentance,' an exercise which from the nature of things, precedes faith and prepares for it, with that consecration of soul which follows faith. The former is simply the product of self-love, an earnest desire for deliverance from an evil that threatens our destruction, an act to which we are constrained, not by love, but by law, a very different act in its nature, from that which follows a true faith, wherein by the power received from Him we yield ourselves wholly and joyfully to God. Though these two acts are inseparable as the two operations, by which we exhale the fetid breath of our own system and inhale the pure air of God's atmosphere; yet it is a legal gospel which tells you that you can give anything acceptable to God, until you have first received from Him.

"The disposition to give or consecrate oneself to God is no part of the essence of faith, it is the effect of faith.

"The very thing you are seeking, the whole thing you are seeking is the power to yield yourself wholly to God. There never was an expression which more perfectly contains the pith and substance of the Gospel than the famous one of St. Augustine, 'Give what Thou commandest and then command what Thou wilt.' Under the law we are for ever trying to give something to God as a condition of receiving something from Him. To talk of this as being an exercise of faith and thus a condition of life, when it is so evidently the love which is the fruit of faith, shews a zeal for the law which is not according to knowledge.

"I am very earnest on this subject; because this mixing of giving and receiving in the act of faith was my great error for a long period. Nothing is more obstructive to the life of the soul, and nothing that I have ever learned so greatly helps its progress, as to be in this matter so clearly delivered."