souls. No man ever trusted in Him and was ashamed. He wills that we
should put Him to the proof.

III. God as claiming our trust.

He is faithful, worthy to be trusted, as His deeds show.

Faith is our attitude corresponding to His faithfulness. Faith is the
germ of all that He requires from us. How much we need it! How firm it
might be! How blessed it would make us!

The thought of God as 'faithful' is, like a precious stone, turned in
many directions in Scripture, and wherever turned it flashes light.
Sometimes it is laid as the foundation for the confidence that even our
weakness will be upheld to the end, as when Paul tells the Corinthians
that they will be confirmed to the end, because 'God is faithful,
through whom ye were called into the fellowship of His Son' (1 Cor. i.
9). Sometimes there is built on it the assurance of complete
sanctification, as when he prays for the Thessalonians that their
'whole spirit and soul and body may be preserved blameless unto the
coming of our Lord' and finds it in his heart to pray thus because
'Faithful is He that calleth you, who will also do it' (1 Thess. v.
24). Sometimes it is presented as the steadfast stay grasping which
faith can expect apparent impossibilities, as when Sara 'judged Him
faithful who had promised' (Heb. xi. 11). Sometimes it is adduced as
bringing strong consolation to souls conscious of their own feeble and
fluctuating faith, as when Paul tells Timothy that 'If we are
faithless, He abideth faithful; for He cannot deny Himself' (2 Tim. ii.
13). Sometimes it is presented as an anodyne to souls disturbed by
experience of men's unreliableness, as when the apostle heartens the