THE BLESSING IS OBTAINABLE NOW

The wisdom of the fathers

THE BLESSING IS OBTAINABLE NOW

IF God can purify the heart and will not, He would be a strange God. There would be room here for the charge of divine indifference and even cruelty, if this was so. If the Divine Being would purify the soul and can not, then we have a weak and helpless Lord to worship. But who will say for a moment that He can not? And who would believe that He will not?

The fact is that God is able and willing to [completely]sanctify the soul. If able and willing to do it, there certainly is no need of postponing the work to the hour of death. To thus remand our expectation to the very brink of the grave is to reflect on the goodness as well as holiness of the Almighty. We can not afford to do this. Certainly if God is willing to do the work, and He alone can do it, why should we not seek it now, and expect and receive it now?

The blessing of [complete] sanctification is taught in one place as a purifying of the heart and an empowering for service. In another place it is described as the entrance of Christ into the soul as an indweller. The same truth is taught under this change of terms, for the Lord will not abide unbrokenly in the heart until inbred sin is cleansed away by the Baptism of the Holy Ghost and fire, and the result of that constant indwelling is bound to be power.

So " purifying" and '' empowering '' is the same thing as Christ's entrance into the soul to abide permanently. It was this He referred to in the fourteenth chapter of John when He said: ''We will come unto him and make our abode with him.'' When this takes place, the man will find that he has purity and power; in a word, [completely] sanctified.

(from "Sanctified Life" by Rev. Carradine)