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.

• 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.