The Birthday of Faith

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 3, 1874

The Birthday of Faith.

WE have a friend twenty-four years old, who stoutly maintains that he was born on the 21st of October, 1866. On that glorious Sabbath evening he began to live. When the seraphic Summerfield was asked where he was born, he replied, “In Liverpool and Dublin.” May the generation of twice-born men be multiplied.

There are those who can tell the very place, and the very day, hour, and minute of their conversion. There are others who can do no such thing, and such persons are apt to doubt the reality of a Christian experience just because they cannot fix the date of its commencement. You hear others tell “when first they saw the Lord,” when sorrow drove them to the Comforter, when the first prayer trembled on their lips, when they caught the first glimpse of their “Beloved” through the “lattice,” when they first cried, “I yield, by dying love constrained.” The experience was marked, overwhelming—the heart crushed, fears and tears commingling. They remember it well. Then came the rising sun. Pardon slew fear, faith broke the bars of bondage. Forget that supreme hour? Never!

You wish you could speak as confidently; you mourn because you cannot fix the date, and you almost doubt whether you are re-born at all.

Now, it is a good thing for a Christian to know his birthday, and ever after to commemorate it as the anniversary of the soul. But suppose a man should take you into his orchard; the trees are thrifty, and the fruit is plump and ruddy. You ask him, “When was this tree set out?” “Fifteen years ago the first day of May last.” You pronounce the fruit good—fifteen years—now ripe and mellow. Coming to the next tree, you say, “When was this set out?” “I do not know; it was planted before I came on the place.” Would you be so unaccountably foolish as to gravely declare that the fruit on this tree is good for nothing, because no one knows when it was set out? It is not a question of dates, but of products. “By their fruits ye shall know them,” and not by the time when they were planted.

Now and then a person comes forward for church-membership who can tell nothing about the when, or the how, of conversion. Perhaps from forgotten childhood the dear name of Jesus has been spoken with affection, and the heart cannot recall the time when it did not love and trust. It is not half so important to know when you first believed as to know that you now believe. Some pass through tempest to peaceful anchorage; they remember the conflict and victory. Others glide slowly and quietly into new life, and their immortal hope rises as gently as the eastern morning. When and how you came to Christ is one question. Have you come? is another question far more essential. Do not protest that the world was never created because you cannot tell exactly when it was done. If the date of conversion can be fixed, very well. It is vastly more important to be able to say, “My heart, O God, is fixed.” It is not the past experience that makes you a Christian, but the present faith.

And to argue that a man is not a Christian because he cannot tell just the hour when he passed the dividing line and rested in Jesus—why, you might as well say to a man who has forgotten or never knew his birthday, “I do not believe you were ever born at all.” In Heaven they keep the family record, and we shall know all about it by-and-by.—Christian Weekly.