Relax!
…we humans want all our human proofs of feelings, evidences, results and so forth. On the other side of the gulf, and the bridge over the gulf, is the One who is forever unknowable and invisible to the human; and faith has staked all on Him, indeed the faith itself is really only He in us believing in Himself—there’s nothing human left to it. If I hold a book in my hand and say, “This is a book,” I am only directing your and my own attention to the fact of the book. If I say to you, “I believe this is a book,” I am diverting your and my attention from the fact of the book being a book to my views and beliefs about the book. I have transferred your potential faith from the book to myself and my opinions. That is what we are continually doing, and is the cause of much weakness and wavering in faith.
I think that part of our spiritual education at the hands of God has necessarily to be dry times, times when He appears to have withdrawn His presence, times when the Bible ceases to speak to us, prayer is dull, our heart seems cold, fruit seems to be nil; and such times are most healthy for us till we have thoroughly learned this one lesson—the difference between faith which has gone onto the Other Side because it has merely been His own believing in Himself in us, and we have nothing more to do with it than just to relax in the fact that He is believing in Himself in us; the difference between such a faith of God and our faith which is composed of how I feel about Him, how I know or don’t know Him, how I see or don’t see HIm at work, and so on. When we have learned the difference, we walk as naturally and composedly in dark as in light, in dry as in fruitful times, because it is nothing to do with us; the faith, being God’s faith, is impervious to the storms that blow in the visible world. To a large extent, the variations disappear between dry and fresh, dull and bright, hot and cold, fruitful and fruitless, shewing that they were largely psychological and illusory to a faith that is fixed.
