Faith & Spirit Quote by William Ames

Faith here isn’t a mood or a private hunch; it’s a trained posture. Ames, a hard-nosed Reformed scholastic writing in the heat of post-Reformation doctrinal trench warfare, defines faith as a “virtue” precisely to keep it from drifting into mere feeling. Virtue implies habit, discipline, a stable disposition of the will. In other words: faith is something you practice, not something that happens to you.

The key move is the double use of “faith”: our faith “clinging to the faithfulness of God.” Ames anchors the believer’s interior act to an exterior reliability. That’s not just piety; it’s polemic. Against a religious culture that could treat salvation as a system of spiritual transactions (merit, works, sacramental mechanics), Ames insists the load-bearing wall is God’s character, not our performance. “Clinging” is vivid, almost physical, suggesting desperation and dependency; the believer doesn’t stride toward God, they hang on.

“Lean upon him” intensifies the asymmetry. Faith is not an achievement badge but a refusal to self-finance your standing before God. Even the payoff is carefully worded: “obtain what he gives to us.” The “obtaining” sounds active, but the gift remains God’s initiative. Ames is threading a needle: preserving human response without granting human credit.

The subtext is pastoral as much as theological. If assurance rests on God’s faithfulness, then doubt and weakness don’t nullify salvation; they expose the very condition faith was designed for.