HOLINESS AND POWER continued

The wisdom of the fathers

HOLINESS AND POWER continued

Again, the filling of the Spirit takes away that restless ambition, that unseemly desire for place and power and fame, and displaces it by a longing to be useful in service. The disciples had it, and actually quarrelled about the first positions in the kingdom when their Lord and Master was at that very hour on the way to Jerusalem to be crucified. With infinite pitying patience and gentle rebuke he said to them: "He that would be greatest let him be the servant of all. For even the Son of man came not to be ministered unto but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many."

In other words, true greatness consists in GREATNESS OF SERVICE. When the Spirit-baptism came the disciples no longer had that distressing itch for first positions; but in the place of it they had a Christ-like passion for efficiency of service. Rev. J. O. Peck mentions, as the first result of the coming of the sanctifying Spirit to his soul: "I have not had an ambition or plan or purpose that was not formed in the desire to glorify God. Not faultless, nor mistakenless, nor errorless, yet the whole purpose of my life has been to please him."

Dr. Carradine writes: "Sanctification has quenched an un-Christlike ambition. It makes one willing to be overlooked and unknown. The fever for place and prominence is taken out. The eye is not fixed on certain honors and promotions and appointments and high places. A light stealing in has either revealed the unsatisfactoriness of these things, or a life filling the nature gives the soul something better to think of and strive after. All dreamings in this direction are ended. The prayer now and the hope is not for the 'right hand nor the left hand' of power, but to be where Mary sat, at the feet of Jesus"?

(from "Holiness and Power" by Aaron Merritt Hills)