 Chapter 9 of Godliness This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Beth Thomas. Godliness. By Catherine Booth. Chapter 9. How to work for God with success. Son, go work today in my vineyard. Matthew 21 verse 28. Compel them to come in, that my house may be filled. Luke 14 verse 23. I am to speak of some needful qualifications for successful labour, and I say, first, that there are certain laws which govern success in the Kingdom of Grace as well as in the Kingdom of Nature, and you must study these laws and adapt yourself to them. It would be vain for the husbandman to scatter his seed over the unbroken ground or on preoccupied soil. You must plow and harrow and put your seed in carefully and in proper proportion and at the right time, and then you must water and weed and wait for the harvest. Just so in divine things. Oh, we shall find out by and by that the laws of the spiritual Kingdom are quite as certain and unerring in their operation as the laws of the natural Kingdom, and perhaps a great deal more so. But through the blindness and obtuseness and unbelief of our hearts we could not or would not find them out. People get up and fluster about and expect to be able to work for God without any thought or care or trouble. For the learning of earthly professions they will give years of labour and thought, but in work for God they do not seem to think it worthwhile to take the trouble to think and ponder, to plan an experiment, to try means, to pray and wrestle with God for wisdom. Oh no, they will not be at the trouble. Then they fail, grow discouraged and give up. Now my friends, this is not the way to begin work for God. Begin as soon as you like, begin at once, but begin in the right way. Begin by praying much for him to show you how and to equip you for the work, and begin in a submissive, humble, teachable spirit. Study the New Testament with special reference to this, and you'll be surprised how every page of it will give you increased light. You will see that God holds you absolutely responsible for every iota of capacity and influence he has given you, that he expects you to improve every moment of your time, every faculty of your being, every particle of your influence, and every penny of your money for him. When you once get this light, it will be a marvellous guide in all the other particulars and ramifications of your life. Study your plans, how men in earthly warfare study plans of stratagem and adopt all manner of measures in order that they may take the enemy by surprise, but alas, how little care and attention God's people give to taking souls, and yet it is far harder work to take souls than it is to take cities. How surprised I have often been at the assumption of people who perhaps never gave one hour's consecutive thought in their lives to the best means of doing certain work, and yet they will pronounce an opinion right off as to certain modes and measures which have been tried and proved successful in the lives of some of the most successful labourers for God. They will say, oh I don't believe in it, oh it is all nonsense, ridiculous, wrong, while perhaps those people whom they condemn have been pleading and weeping and studying and experimenting and almost sacrificing their heart's blood to try to find out the best means of winning souls for Christ. I shall never forget the shock that came over me once in a large gathering of Christian people when a gentleman who occupied a somewhat prominent position was giving out a hymn which contained a verse something about spending one hour in watching with Jesus. He stopped in the middle of this hymn and said words to this effect. I am afraid we are verily guilty here. I do not know that I dare say I ever watched one consecutive hour with Jesus in my life. I shall never forget it. My cheeks burned with shame. I said, oh my God, if these are the leaders we need not wonder at the people. A man occupying such a position to dare to say it. The Lord have mercy on him. No wonder the Lord's work is done in such a bungling way. I say those who want to be successful in winning souls require to watch not only days but nights. They want much of the Holy Ghost, for it is true still. This kind can come forth by nothing but by prayer and fasting. We have grown wiser than our Lord nowadays, but I tell you it is the same old-fashioned way, and if you want to pour out living waters upon souls, either publicly or privately, you will have to drink largely at the fountain yourself and have them very ready to let out. If you have not, your talk will be a sounding brass or tinkling symbol. Oh, it makes my soul weep tears of blood to think of the misdirected effort that will be put forth this very Christian Sabbath. Plenty of labour, but how little comes of it, all because it is cramped and ruined and misdirected for want of thought and prayer and a single eye for the salvation of souls. May God rouse us up to this and make us willing to think and labour and learn and wrestle and sacrifice in order that we may do it. Then further, the second qualification for successful labour is power to get the truth home to the heart. Not to deliver it. I wish the word had never been coined in connection with Christian work. Deliver it indeed. That is not in the Bible. No, no. Not deliver it. But drive it home. Send it in. Make it felt. That is your work. Not merely to say it. Not quietly and gently to put it before the people. Here is just the difference between a self-consuming, soul-burdened Holy Ghost, successful ministry, and a careless, happy-go-lucky, easy sort of thing that just rolls it out like a lesson and goes home, holding itself in no way responsible for the consequences. Here is all the difference, either in public or individual labour. God has made you responsible, not for delivering the truth, but for getting it in, getting it home, fixing it in the conscience as a red-hot iron, as a bolt straight from his throne. And he has placed at your disposal the power to do it. And if you do not do it, blood will be on your skirts. Oh, this gentile way of putting the truth. How God hates it. If you please, dear friends, will you listen? If you please, will you be converted? Will you come to Jesus? Or shall we read just this, that, and the other? No more like apostolic preaching than darkness is like light. God says, Go and do it. Compel them to come in. That is your work. I have nothing to do with the measures by which you do it, providing they are lawful. Use just the same diligence, earnestness and determination that you would if you were resolutely set on any human project, and always be sure that I will be with you to the end of the world. Never doubt my presence when you are set on my business. I will be with you and I will succeed you. Do it. The Lord help us to get the truth home. This was the way with Paul, and this was the way with Jesus. Paul says, Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade men. Oh, what a beautiful insight this gives us into the ministry. Why do you persuade men, Paul? Because I know the terror of the Lord that is coming on, and because we thus judge that if one died for all, then all were dead. Therefore I persuade men. He did not give up when he had put it before them. He carried them on in his heart, and he says, That by the space of three years I ceased not to warn everyone night and day with tears. He wept it in, as well as drove it in, with his logic and his eloquence, and with the power of the Holy Ghost in him. Make it go in. Make your words felt. Don't talk to them in that sickly-language way that makes no impression. Make them know it. If you have not enough of the Holy Ghost for this, go to your closet till you have, and then come and drive the word home to their conscience as a two-edged sword dividing a sander, soul, and spirit. The second thing indispensable to success is simplicity, naturalness in putting the truth. You have not only to get it home, but in order to do this, give it them simply and naturally. If I were asked to put into one word what I consider the greatest obstacle to the success of divine truth, even when uttered by sincere and real people, I should say, stiffness. It seems if people, the moment they come to religion, assume a different tone, a different look and manner, in short, become unnatural. People sometimes come to me and say, oh, I would give the world to be natural, but I have got into this way of talking to people. It seems as though I cannot be natural. Can you help me? I say, yes, I can help you by this advice, determined by the help of God that you will break the neck of this bondage. I will tell you how to begin. Begin with your family, break right off in the middle of conversational earthly matters, and begin to talk about their souls or your own experience, or drop down on your knees and begin to pray. Oh, but it would be such a break. It should not be a break to talk of your father. If you are in the spirit of it, there will be no break. This will help you more than anything else. Determine that you will overcome this sanctimoniousness, which is the curse of a great deal of the religion of this day. We want sanctified humanity, not sanctimoniousness. You want to talk to your friends in the same way about religion as you talk about earthly things. If a friend is in difficulties and he comes to you, you should not begin talking in a circumlocutary manner about the general principles on which men can secure prosperity and the sad mistakes of those who have not secured it. You come straight to the point. And if you feel for him, you take him by the buttonhole or put your hand in his and say, My dear fellow, I am very sorry for you. Is there any way in which I can help you? If you have a friend afflicted with a fatal malady and you see it and he does not, you don't begin to descant on the power of disease and the way people may secure health. But you say, My dear fellow, I am afraid this hacking cough is more serious than you think, and that flush on your cheek is a bad sign. I am afraid you are ill. Let me counsel you to seek advice. That is the way people talk about earthly things. Now do exactly so about spiritual things. If your friend is a spiritual bankrupt, tell him so. Tell him where he is going, and that the reckoning day is coming, and that he will be in God's prison house very soon, and that if the creditor once gets hold of him and shuts him up, he will never get out till he has paid the uttermost farthing. If your friend has a spiritual disease, tell him so, and deal just as straight and earnestly with him as you would about his body. Tell him you are praying for him, and the very concern that he reads in your eyes will wake him up, and he will begin to think at his time he was concerned about himself. Try to attain this simple, easy, natural way of appealing to people about their souls. I believe if all real Christians would attain this and act upon it, this country would be shaken from end to end. Thirdly, you must be in earnest, desperate I would like to say, and indeed friends, settle this as a truth that you will never make any other soul realise the verities of eternal things any further than you realise them yourself. You will beget in the soul of your hearer exactly the degree of realisation which the Spirit of God gives to you and no more. Therefore, if you are in a dreamy, cosy, half-asleep condition, you will only forget the same kind of realisation in the souls who hear you. You must be wide awake, quick, alive, feeling deeply in sympathy with the truth you utter, or it will produce no result. Here is the reason why we have such a host of stillborn, sinulous, rickety, powerless spiritual children. They are born of half-dead parents, a sort of sentimental religion which does not take hold of the soul, which has no depth of earth, no grasp, no power in it, and the result is a sickly crop of sentimental converts. Oh, the Lord give us a real, robust, living, hardy Christianity, full of zeal and faith, which shall bring into the kingdom of God lively, well-developed children, full of life and energy, instead of these poor, sentimental ghosts that are hopping around us. Oh, friends, we want this vivid realisation ourselves. If we have it, we shall beget it in others. Oh, get hold of God. Ask him to baptise you with his spirit till the zeal of his house eats you up. This spirit will burn his way through all obstacles of flesh and blood, of forms, proprieties and respectabilities, of death and rottenness of all descriptions. He will burn his way through and produce living and telling results in the hearts of those to whom you speak. Ernestness, such earnestness that it comes to desperation, like that of Paul, who counted all things but dross, yea, in who counted not his life dear unto him. That was the secret. He counted not his life, nor anything that constitutes life, liberty, pleasure, enjoyment, friends, reputation, ease, etc., all on the altar, all was in the scale. He counted none of those things dear unto him, so that he might win the perfection, the fullness of Christ in his own soul, and the salvation of the souls around him. Oh, what a laughing stock to hell is the light, frivolous, easy, lukewarm professor. Oh, what a shame and puzzle to the angels in heaven, and what a supreme disgust to God. I would, thou word, hot or cold, so then, because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth. Oh, what will that be? Talk about shame. Think of that. Shame. Some of you feel it going into the streets for God. You feel it when a few people see you kneel down here. Think of being spewed out of the mouth of God before an assembled universe. What will that be? God helping me. I will avoid that. I will sooner hang with Jesus on the cross between two thieves than I will bear that shame. I would, thou word, hot or cold. Some of you say in your letters that you will have this whole heartedness. You say that you have given up all, and that you are consecrating yourself to a life of labour. Now, be hot. I know you will burn the fingers of the Pharisees. Never mind that. I know you will fire their consciences, like Samson's foxes did the corn. Never mind that. Be hot. God likes hot saints. Be determined that you will be hot. They will call you a fool, they did Paul. They will call you a fanatic, and say, this fellow is a troubler of Israel. But you must reply, it is not I, but ye in your father's house, in that ye have forsaken the commandments of the Lord. Turn the charge upon them. Hot people are never a trouble to hot people. The hotter we are, the nearer we get, and the more we love one another. It is the cold people that are troubled by the hot ones. The Lord help you to be hot. Then another indispensable condition is the surrendering of all our powers. There must be no holding back. Cursed be he that holdeth back his sword from blood. That curse is resting on Christendom today. Oh, they will thrust the sword a little way in, but they will not go into the core. They dare not draw blood, the soldiers of this age, for their lives. They dare not touch a man to the quick, because alas, they are looking to themselves and thinking what people will say of them, instead of what God will say of them. You must not be afraid of blood if you are to be a true warrior of the Lord Jesus Christ. You must not be afraid to say if need be, Oh, generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come. You must not be afraid to say if need be, you have made my father's house a den of thieves, if you save some of them by doing it. Oh, this accursed sycophancy. I was going to say, this accursed fear to brave the censure of the world. This accursed making good evil and evil good. As if God were altogether such a one as ourselves. Don't you think he sees through the vile sham? Oh, my friends, if we don't mend in this respect, he will come in judgment before long, and we shall find out then the difference between the precious and the vile, if we do not find out before. If you want to be a successful worker, you must make up your minds to begin with, that you will be crucified. As a dear minister once said to somebody when he was arguing with him about being so hard in the pulpit, I don't care. Oh, said the other. Don't you know what became of don't care? Yes, he said, he was crucified, and I am ready to be crucified alongside of him. When you are in the right, don't care. You can but be crucified, and soon it will be over. And then the book says, they that suffer with him will also reign with him, and they shall be glorified together. It would be a wonderful thing to be glorified alone, but I'll think of being glorified together. A gentleman said lately, I have been thinking a great deal about the glory. It is a wonderful thing, that glory that is to follow. This would be worth a man sitting on the dung hill all his life to obtain. And I looked at him and thought, perhaps you are nearer to it than you think, and perhaps I am too. Oh, it is a wonderful thing, that glory that is to follow. Then let us be willing to suffer with him and for him. Make up your mind to be crucified at the start, and then it will be easy. Further, complete abandonment is a condition of successful labour. It is so in anything. What would you think of a soldier who was always reckoning how much it was to cost, and when he should get back, or whether it was worth the sacrifice? You would say, he is of no use to the British army. We want men who will go in to win at all costs. Now God wants men and women who will go in to win, who believe in winning, who know they have the power to win, and who count all things lost in comparison to winning. Do you want success? If you do not come to that first, you will never get it. Fourthly, you must give up, kick out of the way, trample under foot all that hinders. Reputation. Perhaps there are some ministers here. There were some last Sunday, and there were some the Sunday before. Some of you have written, and others have talked to me. You say, it would be such an entire breaking from one circle. Exactly. Some say, you see, the inevitable consequences of setting up this high standard would be a constant running of the sword into some of your best hearers and your best friends. Exactly. That is giving your sword to blood. You would not think much of drawing the blood of an enemy. It is the blood of your friends that is the test. I know all about it. I have been there. I was there a long while once. It was my own sore spot. The devil said, if you begin preaching, they will call you an impudent woman, and I felt it would be better almost to go to hell than to have that said about me. He said, they will put you in the newspapers, and say all manner of coarse and vulgar things about you. And God only knows what that was to my soul. But I battled and struggled with it for a long while, until I said at last, Lord, I do not care what they call me. I give myself to thee to win souls. Have I ever regretted it? Shall I ever regret it? No. He will take care of your reputation. Give it up to him, my brother. The scribes and the Pharisees never had anything good to say of Jesus coming in the flesh. Give up your reputation. Follow him. If it must be, decide to go after him to Gethsemane, to Golgotha and the cross. Never mind. Follow him. Give up your reputation. Then your habits. How ashamed some of you will be who have made the mere Paris-born frivolities of society stand in the way of your consecration to Christ. And yet people who do this say they are Christians. I don't know. I cannot believe it. There is drinking. They will have a glass of wine. Very well, you can have it, but you shall not have the wine of the kingdom. Professors will dress like the prostitute of Paris. Very well, but they shall not be the bride of the Lamb. He will not walk in the streets with them nor sit at the same table. You can go to parties where it is said there are only religious people, but where you know all manner of gossip and Christless chit-chat is going on, which you would be awfully ashamed the Master should hear, and from which you retire with no appetite for prayer. You can go to all this, but I defy you to have the Holy Ghost at the same time. I won't stop to argue it. I only know you cannot do it. All that will have to be put aside and given up. You say, that is a sore point. Yes, I know that is driving the sword to blood. Fifthly, you must consecrate your money to be used for God. I once heard an old veteran saint say, and I thought it was extravagant at the time, I consider the use of money the surest test of a man's character. I thought, no, surely his use of his wife and children is a sure test than that. But I have lived to believe his sentiment. Hence you see how human experience justifies divine wisdom. The love of money is the root of all evil. So it is, in one form or other. God never uses anybody largely until they have given up their money. I simply state a fact, we know it is so, by experience in the history of God's people. You must give up your money as an end, saving it for its own sake, or the gratification of your selfish purposes or those of your children. It must be all given to God to whom it belongs, being entirely used in his service. If you want to be a successful laborer for souls, you will have to do that at the threshold. Give up your money to the Lord. If you think it right to keep some of it, keep it to use it for him as you go, be as strict with yourself to your Heavenly Father as you would be with your secretary or clerk to yourself, and then you will be all right. It is a narrow and difficult path. I tremble for you who have got it, and I am glad I have not. But as you have got it, I give you the best advice I know. It is an awful thing to have it, but the next best thing is to consecrate it and use it for his glory, and if you do not, it will eat into your soul as doth it canker. To your spiritual nature it will be as a cancer is to your physical nature. They are Paul's words, not mine. I must say a word about the reward. You think I am always driving you to do? Yes, because you need it. The Lord knows I do not find you do any too much. Some of you I am heartily ashamed of. Some of you need driving so that you ought to thank God for the rod. Paul says, Shall I come unto you with the rod? He was obliged to do it with some people. It is not an enviable thing to have to do, but we dare not, when God sets us work to do, shirk it. But there is a bright side. There is the reward. What? You say, Does he pay you? Yes, good wages, pressed down and heaped together. He says, The man who remembereth the poor, do you think he means only their bodies? I will remember him. I will make his bed, what a tender illusion, in his sickness. He will shake it up, spread his feathers on the pillows as no earthly nurse, not even the tenderest wife can do. I will make his bed in his sickness. You will want him then, brother. You are very independent, some of you now, but you will want him then. I will make his bed in sickness. I will put underneath him my everlasting arms. He will cause you to triumph in the swellings of Jordan. That will be grand, will it not? He will give you a triumph and entrance into his kingdom, those of you who have gone out in loving solicitude and anxious sympathy to labor for the souls of your fellow men. He will administer unto you an abundant entrance, and then what? He will give you children, and the barren woman shall have more children than she that had the husband. Oh, the whole world is akin here. Every man and woman wants children. They are especially a heritage from the Lord. Nothing can make up for the want of children. The poorest parents living in the humblest hut would not sell you their children, and the rich man who has twenty thousand a year would give it for a son or daughter when he cannot have one. All human beings want children. Now then, the Lord will give you children. A mother, even a sanctified mother, I suppose, cannot help feeling proud or rather glad and thankful when she shows good, obedient and godly children to her friends. I do not believe that God wants to grind this out of us. I believe he delights in it himself, just as he delighted to show his servant Job to the devil. Has thou considered my servant Job? Ah, was he not proud of him? And he has been proud of him ever since. God has put this feeling in us, and it is a right feeling when it is sanctified. We cannot help but be proud of godly and obedient children. But what will it be to show your spiritual children to the angels? How shall you feel when you gather the spiritual family which God has given you round the throne of your Saviour, and say, Here am I, and the children whom thou hast given me. The children one through conflict and trial and strife, such as only God knew. Children begotten in bonds, as Paul says, chains. Children born in the midst of the hurricane of spiritual conflict, travail and suffering. And cradled, rocked, fed, nurtured and brought up at infinite cost and rack of brain and heart and soul. But now here we are, Lord, we are here through it all. Here am I, and the children whom thou hast given me. How shall you feel? Shall you be sorry for the trouble? Shall you regret the sacrifice? Shall you murmur at the way he has led you? Shall you think he might have made it a little easier, as you are sometimes tempted to do now? Oh no, no, the children, the children, you shall have children. Won't that be reward enough? Oh, sometimes when I am passing through conflict and trial, in connection with the work which brings plenty of it behind the scenes, I encourage myself and the Lord, and remember those who have gone home sending me their salutations from the verge of the river, telling me they will wait and look out for me, and be the first to hand me to the Saviour when I get there. Will not this be reward enough? Even so, Lord. Amen. An address delivered in Executor Hall. Why should we be enthusiastic in everything but religion? Can you give me any reason for that? If there is any subject calculated to move our souls to their very centers, and to call out the enthusiasm of our nature, surely it is religion, if it be the real thing. Why should we not be enthusiastic? I have never seen a good reason yet. Why should we not shout and sing the praises of our King, as we expect to do it in glory? Why should not a man cry out and groan and be in anguish of soul, as the psalmist says, as if he were crying out of the belly of hell, when he is convinced of sin and realizes his danger, and is expecting, unless God have mercy, to be damned? Why should he not roar for the disquietude of his spirit as much as David did? Is there anything unphilosophical in it? Is there anything contrary to the laws of mind in it? Is there anything that you would not allow under any great pressure of calamity, or realization of danger, or grief? Why should we not have this demonstration in soul matters? They had it under the old dispensation. We read again and again that when the people came together after a time of relapse, and backsliding, and infidelity, when God sent some flaming, burning prophet amongst them, and they were gathered on the sides of Carmel or elsewhere, that on some occasions the weeping and on other occasions the rejoicing was so great that they made the very ground tremble, and almost rent the heavens with the sound of their crying and rejoicing. We are told, on one occasion, that the noise was heard afar off, and on another, that it was as the sound of many waters. Would to God we could get men, nowadays, so concerned about their sins and their souls, that they should thus cry out? It would be a happy day for religion, and for the world if it were so. If these things are realities, I contend that this is the most sane, rational, and philosophical way of dealing with them. And I say that the ordinary, cold, heartless, formal way, and if it is not so, it has that appearance, is unscriptural. Somebody was talking to me about having so much feeling in religion. I said, my dear friend, what do you think God gave you feeling for? Some people seem to think it a mistake that we have feelings. Our feelings play a very important part in all our social relations. Why would you exclude them from religion? David expressed his feelings and was so carried away by them that he called on all creation to praise the Lord, the hills, and the trees, to clap their hands and be glad. Get the right kind of religion and it will make you glad. If you have not the right kind of feeling, I am afraid you have not the right kind of religion. We have some enthusiasm, and when our enthusiasm dies, I am afraid we shall die too. Nevertheless, our power is not in our enthusiasm. Neither does it consist in certain views of truth or in certain feelings about truth. But it consists in wholehearted, thorough, out and out surrender to God. And that with or without feeling is the right thing, and that is the secret of our power. We have glorious feelings as the outcome, but the feeling is not the religion. The feeling is not the holiness. Holiness is the spring and source of the enthusiasm, hence our power with the masses of the people. How is it that wherever we go, as an organization, these signs and wonders are wrought? Somebody said, it is a strange thing. See what has been done at so and so, and so and so, and so and so. They had all tried, and you send a couple of lads or lasses, and you have the town in an uproar at once. What is it? What is the secret? Will you answer the question? Well, it is the wholehearted, determined abandonment of everything for king's sake. That is it. It is going in as the apostles went in, determined to win souls, determined to set up the kingdom of Jesus Christ at all costs. That is the source of our power, and if you get that, you will have power. And if you don't get that, it matters not what else you have. I want you reasonably and calmly to see that this holiness is a real, definite blessing, that it is a level unto which the great mass of the professing Christians of this generation have not come, or even scarcely looked up. It is a high level, but it is a level unto which every one of you can come, if you will. You have heard enough about it. You are convinced you may have it. Will you have it? The Lord is sitting there. He is looking at you, and he is saying, What is all this stir about? What is all this talk, this singing and this praying about? Here I am. What do you want me to do? I am ready to do it. And you say, Lord, I want thee to cleanse my heart from sin and to fill me with the Holy Ghost, and to enable me to be wholehearted and thorough in thy service, and to go and win souls for thee. Very well, the Lord says, I am ready to come into the temple, if you will clear out the rubbish. Are you willing for me to come in? I am waiting to come in as a refiner, but you must make a straight way from my feet. You must pick out the stones and throw out the rubbish and make me a straight path. Will you make him a straight path? Will you trample underfoot that accursed thing, which has so long kept the fullness of the blessing from you? Will you give up arguing about it and trying to make out that it is not a stumbling block when you know it is? How many will? I wish we had room to have a form. I am sorry we have not. With all the light you have on the subject, with what I am sure the Holy Ghost has revealed and is revealing to your souls, with all the glory that he is putting before you, and the power for usefulness and happiness, will you make this full consecration? The light of the Spirit is on you. Will you act? Will you act? Every spark of light you get without obeying it leaves your soul darker. Every time you come up to the verge of the kingdom and don't go over, the less the probability that you ever will. I know people who have been going up and down for more than 40 years, like the Israelites, and it is a question if they ever go in. You have come near again. Will you go over? You can tell the Lord without telling us, though we would like to know and see you put your foot over the border into this canine of peace and power. Will you put your foot over? Who will? Who will? Will you stand up and raise your voices to the Lord and ask him? This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Mary Patterson. Godliness by Catherine Booth. Chapter 11. Hindrances to Holiness. I shall try, in the short time I may occupy, to go straight to the point, to some of the difficulties and hindrances which I know are keeping not a few here today out of the enjoyment of the blessing. I know there are some here who are satisfied that this blessing is attainable, who are satisfied that God can thus keep them, as we have been singing. If they were to lean the whole weight of their need, their soul, and body and spirit upon him and trust him, they believe he could and they believe he would. They have come to perceive that it is not at all a question of human strength or human weakness or human knowledge, but that it is simply a matter of divine strength, fully recognized and fully trusted by human weakness. Therefore, there is no more a stumbling block in their way about reckoning themselves holier than other people or stronger than other people, for they recognize themselves as the very weakest and most sinful of all people. But they have come to understand this blessing to be human weakness, leaning with all its weight upon divine power, and they believe God does, thus save, and keep those people who do thus lean. Then what hinders? There they stand, just where the Israelites stood, when they might have gone in and possessed the good land. They entered not in because of unbelief, and for that unbelief there is a reason, a cause. They dare not venture their souls on this divine power because there is back in their consciousness some difficulty, some obstacle, something which is only known to themselves and to the Holy Ghost, which prevents them from doing this. When they try to jump onto the divine strength, there is something that holds them back, and they cannot make the spring. They try to forget it. They sing and pray and seek. To make themselves believe there is nothing, and they come up again and again right to the entrance of the goodly land, and then they try to spring in. Some of you will today, but you will not be able to spring because there is something holding you back, and you are conscious of it, but will not allow yourselves to realize it. Now this is the point. When my dear husband read that passage, when they had prayed, the place was shaken. I thought, oh, what was involved in that prayer? What does that mean? Why did the glory come? Why did the Holy Ghost overshadow them? Why were they filled with God so filled that they had to go down and could not help themselves, but went into the streets and poured it out upon the godless multitudes around them? Why? Why did it come? Why do hundreds of assemblies of gods, people, meet and pray but nothing comes? They hold long meetings and make long prayers and sing. We are waiting for the fire, but nothing comes. Why did it come on that particular occasion? Because in that prayer was thorough, entire, everlasting self-abandonment. They came up caring for nothing but pleasing God and doing as He bade them, and the Holy Ghost alone knows when a soul arrives at that point. He will never come till the soul does arrive at that point. This is the deficiency. I am satisfied with hundreds. There they stand, right on the borders of the glory land, but there is some wedge of gold or Babylonian garment they buried years ago. They won't think about it. They say, oh, it is not, not. That little thing wouldn't hinder. It is so long ago. They would not. When they knew they ought, dig it up and burn it before the Lord. If this is so with any here, you must dig it up, or the Holy Ghost will never come. A lady a short time ago was brought up to the very edge of this blessing, but there was something she felt she ought to do. She had a sum of money which she felt ought to be given to a certain object. She prayed and struggled, and attended prayer meetings, and prayed long into the night. But no, she would not face the difficulty. She said, oh, no. I am not satisfied in my own mind. How do I know God wants it for that purpose? She might have struggled till now if she had not made up her mind to obey, but the moment she did, alone, up in her bedroom, the blessing came. A gentleman came up to the penitent form after one of my West End services last season, and told me, I am a preacher. I have been laboring in the Gospel for eight years, but I know I am utterly destitute of this power. Do you want it? Oh, he said, I do. And he looked as though he were sincere. Then I said, what is it? There is a hindrance. It is not God's fault. He wants you to have it. He is as willing to give you the Spirit as he was Peter or Paul, and you want to have it. Now, will you have it? Have you understood the conditions? Ah, he said, that is the point. Now you know I should be a false comforter if I were to try to make you believe you were right when you had not yielded that point. Well, he said, you see, it would be cutting loose from one's entire circle. Ah, he was led, you see, by Christian friends. I said, did not the Lord Jesus cut loose from his circle to save you? And if your Christian friends are such that to live a holy life, you must cut loose from them, what are you going to do? Stop in that circle, ruin your own soul and help to ruin them or cut loose and help to save them? Oh, there is no profounder philosophy in any text in the Bible than that. How can you believe who receive honor one of another and seek not the honor that cometh from God only? You will have to come to God not caring what anybody thinks. As a dear lady who is going through floods of persecution for Jesus said, I don't care if they turn their backs on me and never speak to me anymore and cast me out and my children too. I don't care if I can only have his presence and follow him. When you come to that, you will get this pearl. I know a father and mother who want this blessing, especially the mother. They have a family of beautiful little children. But the father says, what are we going to do for our children? It is a very serious matter cutting loose from our circle. A gentleman said to me, I have to do something for my sons. What am I to do? No, I said, you have got to do nothing for your sons. You have to train them for God and leave God to do for them. And he is well able to look after his own. That is your business. Train them for God and leave God to find a niche for them. And if he can't on earth, I warrant you, he will in heaven. People have things wrong way up nowadays. They have the notion that they have to do this, that and the other for themselves and their children, instead of accepting it as their great commission, that they have to propagate and push along and extend the kingdom of Jesus Christ to seek his kingdom and his righteousness and leave him to look after their interest. When you come to this, it will soon be done. A fragment, love him, trust him, him alone, father, keeper, three in one, savior, master, leader two, lover, brother, all to you, fear not, care not, only follow his way this day and tomorrow, waiting, working for his sake, watching, hoping, till daybreak, peaceful, joyful, in his peace, filled full, kept full, by his grace. by Elaine Conway, England, Godliness, by Catherine Booth. Chapter 12, Addresses on Holiness, First Address. I think it must be self-evident to everyone present that it is the most important question that can possibly occupy the mind of man, how much like God we can be, how near to God we can come on earth, proprietary to our perfectly being like him, and living as it were in his very heart, forever and ever in heaven. Anyone who has any measure of the Spirit of God must perceive that this is the most important question on which we can concentrate our thoughts, and the mystery of mysteries to me is how anyone with any measure of the Spirit of God can help looking at this blessing of holiness and saying, well, even if it does seem too great for attainment on earth, it is very beautiful and very blessed. I wish I could attain it. That, it seems to me, must be the attitude of every person who has the Spirit of God, that he should hunger and thirst after it, and feel that he shall never be satisfied till he wakes up in the lovely likeness of his saviour. And yet, alas, we do not find it so. In a great many instances, the very first thing professing Christians do is to resist and reject the doctrine of holiness, as if it were the most foul thing on earth. I heard a gentleman saying a few days ago, a leader in one circle of religion, that for anybody to talk about being holy, showed that they knew nothing of themselves, and nothing of Jesus Christ. I said, oh my God, it has come to something if holiness and Jesus Christ are actually antipodes of each other. I thought he was the centre and franching of holiness. I thought it was in him only we could get any holiness, and through him that holiness could be wrought in us. But this poor man thought this idea to be observed. May God speak for himself. Ever since I heard that sentiment, I've been crying from the depths of my soul. Lord, speak for thyself. Powerfully work on the hearts of thy people, and awake them. Take the veil from their eyes, and show them what thy purpose in Jesus Christ, and Christ Jesus concerning them is. Do not let them be bewildered, and miss the mark. Do not leave them, but Lord, reveal it in their hearts. There is no other way by which it can be revealed, and if you will let him, he will reveal it in your heart. It occurred to me that I might say a word or two on what my husband said about infirmities, because I am so continually meeting people who will make infirmities sins. They insist upon it that the requirements of the Adamic law have never been abated, that we are not under the evangelical law of love, or the law of Christ as the apostle puts it, but that we are still under the Adamic law, and that these imperfections and infirmities to which my husband has referred are sins. I wonder that such people do not think of a certain passage, which must forever explode such a theory, where the apostle says, most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities that the power of Christ may rest upon me. If these infirmities have been sins, you should have the outrageous anomaly of an apostle of Jesus Christ glowing in his sins. You see, his infirmities were only those defects of mind and body which were capable of being overcome and overruled by grace to the glory of Christ and to the furtherance of his kingdom. I glory in my infirmities that the power of Christ may rest upon me, that in consequence of these very infirmities the power of Christ shall so rest upon me as to lift me above them, make me independent of them, master of them, so that through these very infirmities I shall more glorify his strength and grace than if I were a perfect man in mind and body. In another place he says, and lest I should be exalted up of measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me. Some people think this was sin, but surely the words messenger of Satan show that this thorn was no act or disposition of Paul's, but some external temptation or affliction inflicted by Satan. Besides the divine assurance by grace is sufficient for thee ought to forbid the idea of sin. Paul sought the Lord thrice to have this thorn removed, surely if it had been sin the Lord would have been as anxious to have it removed as his servant was. This thorn was doubtless some physical trial, as the words in the flesh indicate some tribulation or sorrow through the patient endurance of which the strength of Christ could be magnified in Paul's weakness, one of those things which he could bear through Christ who strengthened him. But Mark this was a divinely permitted discipline to prevent Paul from falling into sin. Quite a different thing to sin itself, God tempted no man with evil. The Lord sent this to Paul for the purpose not of making him humble, for he was humbled before, but of keeping him humble. And does he not send something to us all? Do we not need trials and tribulations in the flesh in order to keep us humble? But is this evidence that because we require these things to keep us humble, therefore pride is dwelling in us and reigning over us? It is an evidence, just to the contrary. Oh that people in their inquiries about this blessing of holiness would keep this one thing before their minds, that it is being saved from sin, sin in act, in purpose, in thought. I have a beautiful letter received a short time ago from a young lady who wrote me, soon after my former services in the West End, she told me that she had been the bond slave, I think, for four or five years of a certain besetting sin. And her first letter was the very utterance of despair, she had struggled and wrestled and prayed and tried to overcome the sin that had been reigning over her. Now and then she would get the victory, and then down she went again, and she said, it is such a subtle thing connected with my thoughts and imagination, so that I do not think I ever can be saved. I answered the letter and tried to encourage her faith and hoping Jesus Christ. I showed her how dishonouring this unbelief was, and that if she would only trust him to come in and reign in her heart, he could purify and cleanse the very thoughts and imagination. She made a little advance and wrote me another letter, I wrote her again and encouraged her to trust her. She said she could not come so far as to think that he could purify her thoughts, she had got as far as to believe that he could save her from putting them into practice, but she could not believe that he would purify them. I wrote her back once more and tried. The Lord helping me to show her how Jesus, by the inspiration of his Holy Spirit, could purify the very thoughts of our hearts. And thank God, he did go another step. I have had two letters from her sins. She said in the first of them, I rejoice with trembling, for fear it should be only temporary, but I have trusted him to purify the source and I must say he has done it. And instead of thinking these thoughts, I have holy thoughts, and if Satan presents anything to my mind, it is so repulsive to me that I cannot tell you the grief and horror with which it fills me. I wrote her again, encouraging her, and I got another letter in which she said, it is a fact that he has cleansed the thoughts of my heart, and now I am conscious that my thoughts are pleasing to him, that he has saved me from this sin, which has been the trouble and torment of my life for all these years gone by. Now what I want to say to you is that what he can do for one, he can do for another. If I am wrong here, I give up the whole question. I am perfectly mistaken in the purpose and aim and command of the gospel dispensation, if God does not want his people to be pure, not to count themselves pure when they are not. Oh no, we are told over and over again that God wants his people to be pure and that purity in their hearts is the very central idea and end and purpose of the gospel of Jesus Christ. If it is not so, I give up the whole question, I am utterly deceived. In justification of this, I have selected two or three texts, which seem to put it all in one. Summing up texts, so to speak, I will take first as a specimen, what my husband has been trying to enforce, the will of God is your sanctification. There is however a sense and an important sense in which sanctification must be the will of man. It must be my will too, and if it is not my will, the divine will can never be accomplished in me. I must will to be sanctified, as God is willing that I should be sanctified. There are as many and more exhortations in the Bible to sanctify yourselves than there are promises of God to sanctify you. The next text is James 4, 8. Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners, and purify your hearts, ye double-minded. This was to backsliders to people who had been professing to believe, but who had gone back unto the dominion of their fleshly appetites and passions. There were two or three other texts where we seem to get the whole matter summed up as, for instance, he gave himself for us, that is, for us Christians, the whole Church of God, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people, the zealous of good works, that is, purify us. And then one Timothy, one, five, shows God's purpose and aim in the whole method of redemption. Now the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience and a faith unfaithful, cleansed and kept clean, for if it had been cleaned and become dirty again, it would not be a good but bad conscience. And again in one John 3, and every man that hath this hope in him purifyeth himself, even as he is pure. Now I say these are summing up texts, and there are numbers of others to the same effect, to show that the whole end and purpose of redemption is this, that he will restore us to purity, that he will bring us back to righteousness, that he will purge your consciences. From dead works to serve the living God, not only purge you from the past, but to keep you purged to serve the living God, that it shall be done by the application of the blood to the conscience, and then it shall be maintained by the power of the Holy Ghost, keeping us in a state of purity and obedience to righteousness. Now I say if this be not the central idea of Christianity, I do not understand it. If God cannot do this for me, if Jesus Christ cannot do this for me, what is my advantage at all by his coming? There is a great deal more in these epistles directed to the individual Christian to be this, that and the other, and to do this, that and the other. Then there is about what God will do for him after all. This is not an objective Christianity, this is not sitting down and sentimentalising and thinking of Christ in the heavens in these epistles, which brings him down to all intents and purposes into our hearts and lives here, and it is one of the continual exhortations, be ye this and do ye this and the other. These epistles represent a real practical transformation to be accomplished in us, and this is the only thing that will do to die with. If it is not accomplished in you, I tell you, you will not be able to die in peace, you will want to be cleansed, as my dear husband told you, before you can venture into the presence of the King of Kings. You will want to sense a beautiful moral, rectitude and righteousness spreading over your whole nature, which will enable you to look up into the face of God and say, Yes, I love thee, I know thee, and thou knowest me, and lovest me, and we are one. I love the things thou lovest, and desire the things thou desirest. We are of one spirit, joined in one spirit, unto the Lord. You will want that, and nothing less will do to die with. And why not have it? Will you have it? Why not let God work it in us? Will you try it? People are constantly saying, they long for it, and they wish they could get it. Will you let God do it? Will you put away the depths of unbelief which are at the bottoms of all your difficulty? People really do not believe that God can do it for them, and that is at the bottom of their difficulties, but He can do it, and He promises to do it. Will you go down and say, Be it unto me according to thy word? Born a Saviour, Luke 2, Jesus a Saviour born without the inn, refused with scorn, cast out, cast out for me my Saviour King, cast out to bring this lost one in, Jesus a Saviour born, a man, a man of sorrows, smitten, torn by stripes, by stripes, O Lord, my soul is healed, by stripes, thy stripes, my cotton-sealed, Jesus a Saviour born, the Lamb, the Lamb of God, have bled and born, my sins, my sins the sacrifice did slay, my sins the Lamb doth take away, Jesus a Saviour born, to save, to save at night at noon at dawn, to keep, to keep from sin, from doubt, from fear, to keep for low the keepers here, Jesus a Saviour born, a king, a king, exult his glorious horn and sing, O sing ye heavens, he burst his grave and sing, O earth, he lives to save. End of chapter 12. Chapter 12 addresses on holiness, second address. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recorded by Christine Coleman. Godliness. By Catherine Booth. Chapter 12. I beseech ya on, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service, and be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind. That ye may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. Romans chapter 12 verses 1 and 2. I have been thinking about the word in the text, that, that ye may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. This advance in the divine life, as well as every other, right to the end, till we advance into glory, has its conditions. The condition of the advance from an absolutely unawakened worldly condition to that of a convinced sinner is the reception of the light. God awakens and enlightens tens of thousands and thousands reject the light, instantly put it away, shut their eyes, will not have the light. These go back into greater darkness and sin with more alacrity than ever they did before. Those who receive the light advance into the condition of awakened, enlightened souls. The next condition of advance from the state of a struggling sinner, willing to part with his sins and to follow Christ, is faith, to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, that he may receive the forgiveness of sins. And at every advance onwards, if the believer is ever to get beyond the first principles, if he is ever to grow a single inch, so to speak, there is a condition involved in that advance. For instance, if, after conversion, the Holy Spirit reveals to him something which is inconsistent, which he did not before see, the condition of his advance another step is the renunciation of that thing, the reception of the light and obedience to it, and if he shrinks from and does not receive and obey the light, he will never advance any more until he does. There are thousands of Christians who, instead of advancing, have gone back since their conversion because they would not comply with the condition that they may prove the good and acceptable and perfect will of God. There was a condition. They would have proved the will of God if there had been no condition, but there was a condition they would not comply with. So there they stick, just where they were, or rather they have gone backward. Well, now then, here is a condition to this grand and glorious advance from the state of justification where, while the believer is given power over sin so that it does not roll over him, yet he sometimes, through his inward workings, falls under his power. The advance from the comparatively sinning and repenting condition on to that platform where the believer so abides in Christ that he sins not, that he loves God with all his heart and soul and mind and strength, so united to Christ that, walking in the power of the Holy Ghost, he fulfills the law of love under which he is placed. The advance, I say, from that up and down, in and out, falling and rising state to this higher platform also has its conditions. You would go up to it today if it were not for the conditions. Most of you would go up in a body as the Israelites would have gone into Canaan if there had been no condition. I never knew anyone so foolish as not to want to be in the good land. They want to be in, of course, and they would go in and get the honey and the milk, but there are the conditions. Now then, here you have it plain, and you have it in numbers of other passages equally plain. There is nothing upon which the Holy Ghost has been more particular than in laying down the conditions. And what are they? I beseech you, therefore, brother, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies as a living sacrifice. The living man, you, all of you, not it, not something in you. The latter term is never used by the Holy Ghost when speaking to Christians, but always you, ye, your bodies, your souls, your mind, the whole man, you, a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And is it not? Is it too much? Is it more than he bargained when he bought you? Is it more than he paid for you? It is your reasonable service. And now then comes the conditions. And be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind. That ye may prove. Oh, if you could be transformed to him and conformed to this world at the same time, all the difficulty would be over. I know plenty of people who would be transformed directly. But to be not conformed to this world, how they stand and wins at that, they cannot have it at that price. As dear Finney once said, my brother, if you want to find God, you will not find him up there amongst all the starch and flattery of hell. You will have to come down for him. That is, be not conformed to this world. Nothing wounds me more after being at meetings for dealing with souls, where I've tried to speak in a most pointed and thorough way to make everyone know what I meant. When I go to the dinner or supper table, people have not known a bit, or if they have, they won't accept it. Oh, this is the secret. They will not come down from their pride and high mightiness. But God will not be revealed to such souls, though they cry and pray themselves to skeletons and go mourning all their days. They will not fulfill the condition. Be not conformed to this world. They will not forgo their conformity, even to the extent of a dinner party. A great many that I know will not forgo their conformity to the shape of their headdress. They won't forgo their conformity to the extent of giving up visiting and receiving visits from ungodly, worldly, hollow, and superficial people. They will not forgo their conformity to the tune of having their domestic arrangements upset. No, not if the salvation of their children and servants and friends depend upon it. The sign qua non is their comfort. And then take what you can get on God's side. We must have this and we must have the other. And then at the Lord Jesus Christ will come in at the tail end and sanctify it all. We shall be very obliged to him, but we cannot forgo these things. Oh friends, I tell you, this will never do. God helping me, I will. I must tell you, because it is driven in upon my soul by what I am seeing and hearing every day. People come to these meetings and they groan and cry and come to us for help. And we exhaust our poor brains and bodies and talking to them and giving them advice, telling them what to do. And when it comes to the point we find, oh no, don't you be mistaken, we are not going to sacrifice these things. We cannot have the Lord if he will not come into our temples and take them as he finds them. We cannot forgo these things. You remember the text that was read at the opening of the meeting and the world hath hated them because they are not of the world. It means something and there are a hundred other texts teaching the same truth. Now, what does it mean? The Lord help us to see it. Does it not mean that we are not to be like the rest of the world? That we are not to be guided by the same maxims or act upon the same principles as the world? That we are not to attach the same importance to mere earthly and worldly things that worldly people do? Have you ever thought of those awful words in the parable of the sower and the cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches and the lusts of other things entering in choke the word and it become unfruitful? Not abominable things, not immoral things, not shameful things, but the desire of other things and in another text, who mind earthly things? They attach more importance to worldly things and other things than they do to the things of his kingdom. They practically make these things first, though they sing about his kingdom and profess to make him first. They make the earthly things first and therefore they will not have their earthly things upset for his things. And do you suppose he is cheated? Do you suppose he is deceived? Do you think it is likely that the great God of heaven, who has millions of angels and archangels to worship and serve him, is going to pour his glory on such people and reveal himself to them and use them? Not likely. I will be first in your love, he says. You woman here, if you knew that you were not the first and only one in the affections of your husband, what would you say? And you husbands, would you dwell with the wife if you knew you were not the only one in her affections but that they were divided between you and someone else? Not likely. You would say, I'm not going to lavish my affections and my society and my gifts and everything I possess on one whose heart is divided with another. If she will have her heart divided, then she must go to that other. Now you know God is a jealous God and he knows who do mock him and he knows who will not sacrifice this conformity to the world that they may walk with him in white. He knows also who do not care what anyone thinks of them or what people say of them who are willing to be counted fools and fanatics that they may walk with him and promote the interests of his kingdom and who only regard their bodies as his instruments and their homes as his temples, who are willing that their breakfast hours or dinner hours or lunch on hours or any other hours may be upset and in fact everything made subservient to the interests of his kingdom. We must place everything at his service, our children, business, homes and everything. If I understand it, this is nonconformity to the world. Before I close, let me say a word to those who are desiring to attain this blessing. There is no other way. It is of no use beating about. Be not conformed, but be ye transformed. These two are in juxtaposition. If you will be conformed, then you cannot be transformed. If you will not be transformed, then you must be conformed. Now, will you give up conformity to the world? If so, you may, every one of you, be transformed this morning. Go up into the land. You may all be saved today and make your abiding place in Christ and have all the power and glory which comes to those who possess him. You may advance from the miserable condition of a poor up and down in and out wretched man onto the glorious vantage ground of a saved man, a saved woman, a triumphant saint, a god, faith. My faith looks up to thee. My faith so small, so slow. It lifts its stripping eyes to see and claim the blessing now. Thy wondrous gift, it seems afar. Thy perfect love, it claims to share and doth not, cannot fear. My faith takes hold on thee. My faith so weak, so faint. It lifts its trembling hands to thee, trembling but violent. The kingdom now, it takes by force, and waits till thou, its last resource, shall seal and sanctify. My faith holds fast on thee. My faith still small, but sure. Its anchor holds alone to thee. His presence keeps me pure, and thou always to see and hear, by night, by day, art very near, art very near to me. End of Addresses on Holiness, Second Address Chapter 12 Third Address of Godliness This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Godliness by Catherine Booth, Chapter 14 Addresses on Holiness, Third Address What a deal there is of going to meetings and getting blessed, and then going away and living just the same, until sometimes we, who are constantly engaged in trying to bring people nearer to God, go away so discouraged that our hearts are almost broken. We feel that people go back again from the place where we have led them, instead of stepping up to the place to which God is calling them. They come and come, and we are, as the Prophet says unto them, a very pleasant instrument, or a very unpleasant one, as the case may be, and so they go away and do not get anything. They do not make any definite advance. We have not communicated unto them any spiritual gift. They merely have their feelings stirred, and consequently they live the next week exactly as they lived the last, and go down under the temptation, just as they did before. Would you dream, for a moment, from reading the New Testament, that this is the kind of thing God intended in His provisions of grace and salvation? Is there not a definite end in every promise, exhortation, and command? God is most definite in His requirements and promises, and in the provision which He has made, and yet many of the Lord's people are perpetually and persistently indefinite. They go to and fro like a door on its hinges and never get anything from the Lord. We want you absolutely to get something from the Lord, and we are quite sure you may, and will, if you comply with the condition. The Lord is ready to give you that particular measure of grace, strength, and salvation which you need. Now that you have come up to the threshold of the goodly land, there is only one thing that can keep you out, provided you have made the consecration. Of course, if you are holding anything back, then you can never come in until you give that up. If you are cleaving to some doubtful thing, and don't give God the benefit of the doubt, you can never come in. But if you see this, and make the necessary consecration, if you really desire this blessing, there is only one thing which can possibly keep you out of its enjoyment, and that is unbelief. It will be said of you in years to come, as it was said of some in olden times. They entered not in because of unbelief. You have come right up to the threshold, and some of you have been there many a time. Oh, what gracious influences you have been the subject of. You have seen through the veil. You have felt his hand. You have had your feet on the threshold. You have been almost in, and then you have drawn back through unbelief. Shall it be so again tonight? God forbid. Will you step over? Will you venture? Will you trust? Will you leap onto his faithfulness? Will you spring into the arms of omnipotent love, and trust him with the consequences? Never mind if you do die, or something happens to you that never happened to anyone else in the world's history. God will take care of you. Never mind if the devil does come round, and consider you, as he did Job, and afflict you with boils, and put you on the dung hill. You will be happier there with Jesus than in a palace without him. Oh, this caring for consequences. The devil knows the grand possibilities open to many of you. He knows not only what you might receive and enjoy in yourselves, but what you might accomplish for God if you would only come in and possess this blessing. And so he frightens you with the consequences. He knows what you might do, and whom you might be instrumental in saving. Who knows how many of these precious ones that cluster round you. You might be instrumental in leading on to this higher platform, this glorious vantage ground of Christian experience, and through them how many more, and how in this way the glorious blessing would spread. Remember also that every time you come near and go back, there is less probability that you will ever come in at all. And the nearer you come and go back, the less probability there is that you will ever come as near again. You are grieving the spirit. There are some people who have been coming near for years, and now they have gone back all together, and I am afraid they will never come up again. What will you do? The law of the kingdom from beginning to end is, according to your faith, be it unto you. And what things so ever you desire when you pray, believe that you receive them, and ye shall have them. Eternal truth has uttered it, ye shall have them. Now then, will you? Have you let go all? Are your skirts free? Are you leaving all behind you? Are you resolved from tonight to cut from the past, and no more make any provision for the flesh to fulfill its lusts, but that you will bid the things that are behind a final adieu. Close your eyes on them, and fix your eyes on the mark of the prize of your high calling, and press on every succeeding hour of your life until you reach it. Will you? If you will, God will give you this blessing. He waits for you to do it. He is here. The Holy Ghost is here. He is leading many of you up. He is beseeching you. He is seconding what I am saying in your hearts. He is saying, come, beloved, come into the banqueting house. He wants to bless you and fill you with his spirit. Now then, will you come? Oh Lord, help you not to draw back, but to press on, press on, press on, never minding the consequences. End of Chapter 12 Third Address Chapter 12 Of Godliness This is a Leap of Oaks recording, or Leap of Oaks recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit leapofoaks.org. Recording by Elaine Conway, England. Godliness by Catherine Boo. Chapter 12 Addresses on Holiness Fourth Address I think, dear friends, that I have only a few words to say to you now. I am, as it were, holding on to God for power. I wish to say them, so that they shall sink into your hearts and produce some immediate and permanent results in your lives. I believe the Lord is not only grieved and disappointed, but I believe he is angry when his people meet and talk and sing and pray, and then go away without any definite result, having been reached, without ever having given anything to him, or received anything from him. I believe he fills with respect to us, just as he felt with respect to his people of old, when he said, Why come ye uncover my altar with tears? As though he said, You know what I want you to do, come and do it, and when you do it, I will open the windows of heaven, and pour out a blessing. My heart ate at what a lady told me this morning. Before I came into this hall, she said, A friend of mine remarked, You don't mean to say that you are going to call four thousand people together, to cry for the Holy Ghost? She said, Yes, I do. Well, it makes me frightened. What if anything should happen, if something should be done? Would to God something that happened? Would to God something might be done? That should frighten somebody. But oh, what did that reveal? Depths of infidelity and unbelief. And yet people wonder that infidelity is increasing. Is it any wonder that infidelity is laughing us to school? Is it any wonder that at Christian evidence societies, men get up and say that the Christian system has become a fact? No wonder when that is the state of heart of the Lord's people. People meet together and pray and talk and sing, bite them snow, and then don't believe it any more than do the heathen. They pray for the Holy Ghost, and do not so much as believe there is a Holy Ghost. They ask God to do something when they never knew him to do anything, and don't expect he ever will. The world is dying because of this unreality, and being damned by it. Joseph Butler says about France. France is waiting for a reality, and so is England, and so is the world waiting for a reality. God help us to make some real people. You believe some of you that nothing is going to happen. You don't believe that God is going to do anything, so he won't in your experience. If you have lived at Nazareth, do you think Jesus Christ would have done anything for you? If you had been deaf and dumb, you would have remained so. If he could not have done any mighty works in you because of your unbelief, he is the same now, and if you don't expect him to do anything, brother, he will not. But some of us do expect him to do something. Some of us believe he is going to do something, and that by this little stone cut out of a mountain without hands. He intends to raise a great kingdom. Jesus Christ is not going to be disappointed, and allow the devil to chuckle in his face forever, and I say, I have cheated you out of your inheritance. We will do something or die in attempting it. After all, what does God want with us? He wants us just to be and to do. He wants us to be like his son, and then to do as his son did. And when we come to that, he will shake the world through us. People say, you can't be like your son. Very well then. You will never get any more than you believe for. If I did not think Jesus Christ strong enough to destroy the words of the devil, and bring us back to God's original pattern, I would throw the whole thing up forever. What he has given as a religion we cannot practice? I say no. He has not come to mock us. What he has given as a savior who cannot save? Then I decline to have anything to do with him. What does he profess to do for me what he cannot? No, no. He is not a man that he should lie. Neither the son of man that he should repent. And I tell you that his scheme of salvation is two-sided. It is God's word and man's word. It contemplates me as well as it contemplates the great God. It is not a scheme of salvation. Me, Lee, it is a scheme of restoration. If he cannot restore me, he must damn me. If he cannot heal me and make me over again, and restore me and restore me to the pattern, he intended me to be. He has left himself no choice. I challenge anybody to just prove that the Bible that he proposes to restore me, brain, heart, soul, spirit, body, every fiber of my nature, to restore me perfectly, to conform me wholly to the image of his son. If he could have saved me without restoring me, then he could have saved me without a saviour at all. How do you read your Bibles? How do you read the history of the miracles? The stories of his opening the eyes and stopping the ears, cleansing the lapar and raising the dirt. He will heal you if you will let him. These are the sorts of words the world wants. The living words, living embodiments of Christianity, walking embodiments of the Spirit, and life and power of Jesus Christ. You may scatter Bibles as you have done, all over the world. You may preach and sing and talk and do what you will, but if you don't exhibit to the people living epistles, show them the transformation of character and life in yourself, which is brought about by the power and grace of God. If you don't go to them and do the words of Jesus Christ, you may go on preaching, and the world will get worse and worse, and the church too. We want a living embodiment of Christianity. We want Jesus to come in the flesh again. Did you ever notice the tense in that passage? He that believeth that Jesus is come in the flesh, not that he did come or was come, but that he is come now. Oh, how people hate Jesus Christ in the flesh. You may be ever so devout, ever so far as the ache, till you come to Jesus in the flesh, and then they will gnash on you with their teeth, as they gnashed on Christ. They can't resist such people. That is what the world wants. Holy people, and nothing else will do. We have tried everything else. You Christian people from other divisions of the Lord's forces, you have tried Bibles, and preaching, and singing, and services, and Sunday schools. I have been lately to a part of the country, where they told me that nearly every member of the population had passed through their Sunday schools, and yet there are men there who will drag a young girl down a flight of stone stairs, and kick her till she is black and blue. The great mass of the people who took part in the Lancashire riots have passed through your Sunday schools. Now I say God is speaking to you in these things, if only you will hear him, and he is saying that the letter killeth. That circumcision, and baptism, and forms, and ceremonies, and going to chapel, and Bible reading, is all nothing, when there is no Holy Ghost in it. You want a real living embodiment of Christianity over again. And if the Salvation Army is not going to do that, may God put it out. I would be willing to pronounce the funeral oration of the army, who I did not believe it was going to be that. The world is dying for this. I was so touched yesterday by hearing a story from Harris, told by a young woman who has just returned, and was telling me about my precious child. The story was this. A woman came one morning and asked for the lady. They tried to put her off and asked, will not someone else do? No, said the woman. I do want to see the lady herself. They said, you can't see her today. She is too ill. Then she said, when can I see her? They appointed a time the next afternoon. And then this poor woman came, and she told this story. I did hear six years ago, that there was somebody who could take the devil out. Now see, I've got a devil in, and he do make me wicked and miserable. And I do want him taken out. And I have been running about these six years to find somebody who could pull him out. I've been to lots of priests, but they could not pull him out because they had a devil in them. And you see, when there's a devil in me and a devil in them, we got to fighting, and they could not pull him out. What a comment on Jesus I know and Paul I know. But who are ye? Of course, nobody can put a devil out who has a devil in them. The poor old woman's sense told her this. And she continued, a gentleman told me that this lady who has come here is able to pull him out. And I have come to her to do it. For I want him pulled out. Oh yes, I thought. That is what poor humanity wants all the world over. They want people who can cast the devil out. People who have in them Holy Ghost power to do it. Oh, will you be such and one? Where is God? Someone said to me the other day in agony. Where is God? Where indeed? Why does he not show himself? Why does he not do something? That lady was afraid something would happen when four thousand met together. To beseech the Holy Ghost. Why not? You say he has not tamed. You creed say so. You say he is the same yesterday, today and forever. You say the needs of the world are as great. You say his great, benevolent heart beats for his fallen, sinful, erring human family. He says he loves us. You're always telling about his love. What is the reason he does not do something for us? And come down in the same planetude of spiritual power as he did at the Pentecost? Why? Only because he was not as given up to him and is willing to do it as the people were in former times. You have not counted all things dung and dross. You have not thrown everything into the scale. And therefore he will not thus baptize you with the Holy Ghost. These are the people that the world wants. People of one idea. Christ and him crucified. For Christ's sake give up quibbling. I said to a lady who had got this blessing when somebody got a term began with his verse and that verse. And this translation and that translation. Mind you don't begin to reason you will lose your blessing. And you did lose it. You can't know it by understanding. Oh, if the world could have known it by understanding what a deal they would have known. But he despises all your philosophy. It is not by understanding, but by faith. If ever you know God it will be by faith. Becoming as a little child, opening your mouth and saying Lord, pour in. And then your quibbles and difficulties will be gone. And you will see holiness, sanctification, purity, perfect love burning out on every page of God's word. I weep before God. I feel almost more than I can bear over this awful knack. Some people seem to have a plug in the bread out of the children's mouths. They are just getting an appetite for it. The Lord have mercy upon them. If you don't come in yourselves for Christ's sake, don't keep other people out. A minister, a devoted good man, was trying to show me that this sanctification was too big to be got and kept. I said, my dear sir, how do you know if another man has faith to march up to Jesus Christ and say, here I see this in your book. You have promised this to me. Now then Lord have faith to take it. Mind you don't measure his privilege by your faith. Do you think the church has come up to his standard of privilege and obligation? I don't. It has many marches to make yet. Mind you don't hinder anybody. The law of the kingdom all the way through will be according to your faith. If you want this blessing, put down your quibbles, put your feet on your arguments, march up to the throne and ask for it, and kill and crucify and cast from you the accursed thing which hinders it. And then you shall have it, and the Lord will fill you with his power and glory now, and something will happen. The Lord grant it.