words that illuminate their confusions and clear the whole matter,
'This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him whom He hath sent.'

I. Faith, then, is a work.

You know that the commonplace of evangelical teaching opposes faith to
works; and the opposition is perfectly correct, if it be rightly
understood. But I have a strong impression that a great deal of our
preaching goes clean over the heads of our hearers, because we take
for granted, and they fancy that they understand, the meaning of terms
because the terms themselves are so familiar. And I believe that many
people go to churches and chapels all their lives long, and hear this
doctrine dinned into them, that they are to be saved by faith, and not
by works, and never approach a definite understanding of what it
means.

So let me just for a moment try to clear up the terms of this
apparently paradoxical statement that faith is a work. What do we mean
by faith? What do you mean by saying that you have faith in your
friend, in your wife, in your husband, in your guide? You simply mean,
and we mean, that you trust the person, grasping him by the act of
trust. On trust the whole fabric of human society depends, as well as
in another aspect of the same expression does the whole fabric of
Manchester commerce. Faith, confidence, the leaning of myself on one
discerned to be true, trusty, strong, sufficient for the purpose in
hand, whatever it may be--that, and nothing more mysterious, nothing
further away from daily life and the common emotions which knit us to
one another, is, as I take it, what the New Testament means when it
insists upon faith.