Faith Goes Up The Stairs

Spurgeon spent his life trying to make truth easy to carry home. He preached to enormous London congregations, week in and week out, and the lines of his that have lasted longest are usually the small, picturable ones rather than the grand ones. This is one of them. Instead of defining faith, hope and love, he hands each of them a job inside one ordinary house. Love does the building, hope works the windows, and faith does the moving about. I trust the line more for that, not less, because it is the work of a man who wanted a tired listener to leave holding something he could turn over on the walk home. You do not need a theology degree to picture a staircase. You have climbed one this morning. That is the quiet skill of it: he takes the three words Paul names together and lets them act out their relationship rather than merely describing it.

Notice who does what. Love builds. Hope opens. Faith climbs and looks out. The grammar is doing something gentle and deliberate. Faith is given the words of movement, going up and looking through, which is exactly why we tend to cast faith as the hero, the muscle of the Christian life. Yet Spurgeon has quietly slipped two other workers in ahead of it, and faith can do nothing they have not already made possible. You cannot climb stairs no one has laid. You cannot look through a window no one has opened. The order is the whole point. Love and hope are not faith’s reward for climbing well. They are the conditions that let it climb at all. I catch myself treating faith as a foreman I have to drive harder, and this picture corrects me. Faith is more like the workman who turns up to a site already prepared and does the part that is left.

The echo is 1 Corinthians 13:13, the close of a chapter usually read at weddings, though Paul first wrote it into a church that was squabbling over who had the better gifts. He has just said that without love those gifts come to nothing, and then he sets the three side by side and names love the greatest. Spurgeon takes that ranking and turns it into a building. Love is greatest because love is the foundation and the frame, and the other two live inside what love has made. And this is where the picture finds Christ. The love that laid these particular stairs is not warmth we work up in ourselves. It is love that came down first. Paul says as much in Romans 5:8, where God’s love is shown not in our reaching up but in Christ dying for us while we were still in our sin. So when I am asked to believe, I am not asked to start from bare ground. I set my foot on something already built, and built at cost.

Some seasons simply do not have ‘believe harder’ in them. A bad diagnosis. A marriage gone quiet. A prayer that has met months of silence. In those weeks, being told to muster more faith is like being told to run on a sprained leg. What the picture teaches me is to stop staring up the staircase and to crouch down and check the floor it rests on. But I want to push this one step beyond comfort. Going back to the love that built the stairs is not only remembering kind things God has done. It is letting the cross stand under me as the deepest fact of all, steadier than the diagnosis or the silence. The kindnesses I can name this week are real steps, and they matter, yet the staircase itself was finished long before this dark stretch began. My believing did not lay a single board of it. On the worst days, that is not a demand on me. It is the one thing holding my weight.

Of the three workers, hope is the one readers tend to skim. We linger on the stairs because climbing feels like the dramatic part, and the open window slides into the background like scenery. That is a loss, because a window changes what a room is for. A sealed room is somewhere you simply endure. A room with a window left open is somewhere you wait, because the gap in the wall says something is out there and something is coming. Hope is what lets faith see past the present four walls into a better room further on. Paul traces the same movement in Romans 5:1 to 5, where peace with God gives way to an odd, bracing claim: that even suffering does its slow work, producing endurance, and endurance character, and character a hope that does not leave us ashamed. Hebrews 11:1 ties the knot, calling faith the assurance of things hoped for. So faith and hope are not two separate tenants who happen to share a house. Faith reaches for precisely what hope has put in view. Take the window away and faith has nothing to climb towards, and it is left pacing a dark landing. Love builds the structure, hope decides the view, and faith does the moving between them. Remove any one and the whole picture quietly falls in.

It matters, to me, who said this. Spurgeon was not a man for whom hope came cheaply. Alongside the vast crowds and the sermons printed and sold by the thousand, he carried long seasons of depression and a body worn down by illness, and he spoke about that darkness with a frankness that was rare for a Victorian preacher in his pulpit. I cannot tell you the exact week he first said this line, and I will not invent one to sound surer than I am. But knowing the sort of dark he knew changes the weight of the sentence. This is not a comfortable man telling comfortable people to keep their chins up. It is someone who had sat in the unlit room himself, who knew the shut window from the inside, and who still chose to write about a window that hope had opened. When a person well acquainted with despair insists, even so, that hope has opened something real, I find I lean in rather than wave it off. The line is not naive about how heavy a room can become. It does not float above the trouble. It was written by a man who had felt the full weight of the floor under him, and decided the staircase held anyway.

The simplest way to get this line wrong is to hear it as a self-improvement plan: three qualities to build up in the right order, love first, then hope, then a faith that finally climbs. Read like that, it becomes a chart to measure yourself against, and you are back to gritting your teeth. But the picture runs the other way. Faith is the only one of the three actually doing anything in the sentence, and even its small work depends completely on what was finished before it turned up. The building and the opening were never on your list of tasks. They are done by the time you walk through the door. I will be honest about my own version of this. Of the three, hope is the one I find hardest to climb towards. Love I can usually trace, because I can name particular kindnesses and stand on them. Faith I can at least attempt on a given morning. Hope asks me to believe the story is still heading somewhere good when the present chapter shows no sign of it, and on tired days that is the last thing I have the strength for. The kindness in Spurgeon’s picture is that the view is not mine to manufacture. Someone else opened the window. My part is only to go and look out of it.

Spurgeon’s London was thick with a kind of religion that tested your standing with God by sending you back inside your own chest to take readings. Had you felt your sin sharply enough? Wept at the proper moment? Trembled, and then trembled about not having trembled enough? Only after all that were you allowed to think yourself saved. Spurgeon pushed against that piety for as long as he preached, telling anxious people to stop staring at their own faith and look at Christ instead, because a faith that keeps checking itself for proof of sincerity will always turn up fresh grounds to despair. I cannot tell you whether the staircase line came out of that fight. What I can tell you is that the picture makes the introspective question unanswerable, in the best possible way. Ask a man halfway up those stairs whether his climbing is sincere enough and he has nowhere to look for an answer, because the stairs are not his. Somebody else laid them. All he can honestly do is point at the boards under his feet.

Stripping this line of its context is easy, since it is only one sentence, and it survives the operation happily. Put it on a mug. A sympathy card. An order of service, set under a stock photo of a staircase in golden light. It still sounds lovely there. It has also quietly lost the one thing that made it true. Coming from a Baptist preacher in a Victorian pulpit, the love doing the building is God’s love in Christ and nothing softer, and the hope working the windows is hope of what God has actually promised, not a feeling that things will probably turn out all right. The decorative version keeps the furniture and drops the address. Whose love. Hope of what. Once those go, the sentence will serve any occasion at all, which is exactly how “everything happens for a reason” works: warm, unfalsifiable, promising nothing you could hold anyone to afterwards. I am not innocent here. I have reached for a lovely Spurgeon line to warm up a talk and let it do work it was never built for. Take the address away and you have kept the staircase and thrown out the house.

Here is where I find myself arguing with the line. Love builds, hope opens, then faith climbs, as though faith always turns up last, once a view has been laid on ready for it. Scripture does not always run that way. Paul says Abraham in hope believed against hope (Romans 4:18), holding on to the promise of a son at the exact point when every window in the house looked bricked up, his own body a hundred years old and Sarah’s womb dead (Romans 4:19). That is not faith following a hope already opened for it. That is faith gripping on in the dark, with nothing yet to look out at. In Matthew’s telling of the storm the rebuke about little faith lands before the wind drops, not after (Matthew 8:26). Believe now, in the noise, with no window at all. So the tidy architecture describes how faith often feels looking back, not how it always arrives. And that matters for who this line can quietly wound. Say it to someone whose faith came first, in the wreckage, and the beautiful staircase can sound like an accusation: you must be standing in the wrong house, because mine had none of this when I needed it. Spurgeon is not scripture. We are allowed to say the picture does not always fit, and that for some people it never has.

I would like to give you the sermon title, the year, the text he was preaching from that morning. I cannot. This page carries no source line, and a great many Spurgeon sentences in circulation arrive exactly the same way: quoted everywhere, sourced nowhere, smoothed by a century of retelling until nobody upstream can say which sermon, letter or compilation it first appeared in. He preached an enormous amount, and his words were transcribed and republished for decades after his death by people not always careful about exact wording. Some of what travels under his name is a real line, tidied by repetition. Some of it turns out to be nobody’s words at all, just a phrase that feels like something he would have said. I do not know which this is, and I would rather say so than hand you a confident citation I made up to look thorough. What I will stand behind is that the sentiment sits comfortably inside what he preached about faith resting on grace rather than effort. It rings true even where I cannot produce the paperwork.

If you are putting this line in a talk, the temptation is obvious, and I have given in to it. You let the name do the persuading. He was Spurgeon, therefore this is wise, therefore you at the back should feel moved. That is borrowed authority and it settles nothing about whether the sentence is true. The quotation is not scripture. It cannot carry a point on its own weight, however well the Victorian prose reads aloud, and it sounds best precisely when it is doing least. What it can do is illustrate what Paul already said in 1 Corinthians 13:13, and it earns that only if you do the work Spurgeon cannot do for you: show the people in front of you where love has built something in their own lives, name the window hope has cracked open, and only then ask them to trust that faith will climb. Used well, it is a picture hung on a wall you built yourself out of scripture and hard-won testimony. Used lazily it is the whole wall, and everyone walks out having felt something true said beautifully without once being shown why. Love the sentence. Do not let it stand in for the argument.

Here is the misuse that worries me most, and it is gentler than the mug, which is exactly what makes it slippery. The line ends on a window, and faith looks out of it. Hand that sentence to a room of people three days after a funeral and the window quietly becomes a pane of glass with someone standing behind it. Hope’s view turns into a view of them. I understand the pull entirely. I have felt it in a crematorium car park, wanting very badly for the words on the card to mean more than they actually said.

The sentence will not carry it. The hope in this picture is hope of what God has promised, and scripture promises resurrection loudly, and at length, elsewhere. This line does not. Stretching it to say so sets a grieving person up for a second loss months later, when they reread the card in a quiet kitchen and find that the promise they thought it made was never in the words.

Here is the pushback I cannot talk myself out of. The whole picture leans on one assumption: that love, having shown you kindness once, has earned the right to be trusted a step further. You do not trust a stranger. You trust someone who has already been kind.

For most of us that holds. But the line goes quiet for anyone whose most formative love was the thing that hurt them. A parent whose affection arrived with conditions attached. A marriage where tenderness was the run-up to cruelty rather than the proof of safety. Tell that person that trust climbs naturally once love has shown itself kind and you have not handed them a comfort. You have described, almost exactly, the trap they learned at great cost to stop falling into.

Spurgeon’s house assumes a good architect. I will not smooth that over with a quick turn back to “but God’s love is different”. It is different. It is also the very thing the wounded person has to take on trust, having been taught by people who looked loving that love lies. The staircase may well be sound. I am not going to pretend it is obvious, or cheap, for everyone to put their weight on it.

Hebrews 11:1 gets quoted at this line constantly, faith as the assurance of things hoped for, and it is tempting to stop at verse one, as though the chapter were a long list of windows opening on cue. Read to the end. The same chapter names people mocked, scourged, stoned, sawn apart, destitute, wandering in deserts (Hebrews 11:36 to 38), and then says plainly that they did not receive what was promised, because God had provided something better for all of us together (Hebrews 11:39 to 40).

Their hope had no window in their own lifetime. Whatever those stairs led to, they climbed into the dark and were commended for it, not despite the darkness but in it. That unsettles the tidiness of Spurgeon’s house, and I think it should. It means the view hope opens is sometimes only glimpsed from the far side of dying, and that a life of real faith can look, from where the rest of us stand, exactly like a staircase going nowhere. Harder to sit with than the comfortable version. Also truer.

Something I only saw after years of liking this line: nobody gets let in. There are stairs, there are windows, there is faith moving between them, and there is no door anywhere in the sentence. Whoever this is, they are indoors before the first word.

That tells you what the line is for. It is not an appeal to a stranger on the pavement, and it will not explain how a person comes to believe in the first place. It is a picture of the ordinary interior life of somebody already at home with God, and the ordinariness is the tender part. Love did not build a monument. It built stairs, the dullest furniture in any house, the thing you put your whole weight on several times a day without once looking down.

• When my faith feels weak, do I reach first for effort, or go back to the love that has actually carried me?
• Can I name one real kindness of God from this week that I could stand on as a step?
• Where has hope drawn the curtains for me, and what would it cost to open one window again?
• Have I been asking faith to carry weight that was only ever meant to rest on love?

If you would like to keep climbing, you might sit a while longer with some verses about hope, or read more from this author.