The Inward Witness of Faith
E. P. Barrows, D. D. 1 John 5:9-10 If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater: for this is the witness of God which he has testified of his Son.… Testimony and experience constitute two separate and independent grounds of faith. That we may have full confidence in the skill of a physician, it is not necessary that we should have seen him, or have personally witnessed any of the cures ejected by him. Our faith may rest simply on the testimony of competent witnesses. But there is also a faith that grounds itself on our own personal experience. The physician whom we first employed, because he was recommended to us by others, may now receive our confidence from what we have ourselves seen and felt of his skill. Our faith in him began with testimony, but now it has become independent of it. The general order of God's moral government is, first belief, afterwards experience. We must begin by using testimony, not by rejecting it; by cherishing not a proud and sceptical, but a childlike and confiding spirit. The gospel of Christ comes to us in the form of Divine testimony. We may have witnessed its effects upon others. We may have heard them telling with joyful accents what it has done for their souls. But this, too, is testimony; very weighty and valuable when accompanied by such a life as convinces us of its sincerity, but still only human testimony, with its usual alloy of error and imperfection. It cannot convey to us an adequate apprehension of the blessedness and power of faith in Christ, any more than a description of light can be a substitute for seeing the sun shining in his strength. To understand fully how worthy the gospel is of our acceptance, we must feel its efficacy. But this we cannot till we have received it. Our reception of it, then, must rest on God's testimony. After that, we shall have both the outward and the inward witness of its truth. It is reasonable, therefore, when God calls upon men to repent and believe the gospel, that He should furnish them with clear evidence that it is His gospel, and no invention of man. This He has done from the beginning. Our Saviour did not ask His hearers to receive Him as the Son of God, without first furnishing them with many "infallible proofs" of His Divine mission (John 5:31; John 10:37; John 5:36). This outward evidence which Jesus furnished of His Messiahship left all who rejected Him without excuse. But to those who received Him in faith and love there was a higher testimony (Matthew 16:17). The man who has received the gospel in faith and love knows, from his own experience, that it satisfies all the wants of his spiritual nature, and must therefore be true; since it is inconceivable that the soul should be nurtured by error, and kept by it in a vigorous and healthful condition, as that the body should thrive on poison. I. THE GOSPEL QUIETS THE CONSCIENCE, AND THAT ON REASONABLE GROUNDS. The moment the soul apprehends the mighty truth that God has manifested Himself in the flesh; that in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ the true God has taken into union with Himself a true human nature, and in this nature has borne the curse of the law in our stead, it cries out with joy — "This it what I need; a propitiation of infinite worth to meet the immeasurable guilt of my sin." II. THE GOSPEL GIVES THE VICTORY OVER THE INWARD POWER OF SIN. Of the greatness and difficulty of this work the careless and light minded have no conception. But let one who has gained some true knowledge of the Divine law as a spiritual rule for the regulation of the inner man set himself in earnest to the work of obeying it inwardly as well as outwardly, and he will soon make distressing discoveries of his moral impotence; an impotence which lies not in the absence or defect of any of those faculties which are necessary to qualify him to render to God's law perfect obedience, but only in his free guilty preference of earthly above spiritual good. To emancipate him from this bondage to indwelling sin, and raise him to holiness and communion with God, he needs help from above. Here the gospel, in the fulness of its grace, comes to his relief. It offers him the all-sufficient help of the Holy Spirit to illumine his dark mind, cleanse his polluted soul from the defilement of sin, strengthen his weakness, and give him a victory over the world. III. THE GOSPEL RESTORES THE SOUL TO COMMUNION WITH GOD.Lessons: 1. Only they who receive the gospel can fully apprehend the evidence Of its truth. 2. It is possible for a man to put himself in such an attitude that he cannot judge rightly of the evidence by which the gospel is supported. 3. Our assurance of the truth of Christianity is intimately connected with the growth of our piety. (E. P. Barrows, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater: for this is the witness of God which he hath testified of his Son. WEB: If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater; for this is God's testimony which he has testified concerning his Son.