Then I seemed to have another inspiration. I had long been troubled about understanding what it meant to believe. I had worked out a theory that if I could for a moment forget everything else in the world and see Jesus on the cross, that would be "exercising saving faith"; and when praying, I would find myself trying to do that. I now asked myself this question: "How do you believe your mother's promise?" The answer was at once, "I believe because I believe in my mother, the promiser." The next moment I realized that believing Mother's promises was not a mental effort and struggle such as I had been going through for years, but a mental rest. I just believed that her promise was true without any effort whatever, not because I felt it, but because Mother made it. Then I cried, "Jesus made this promise, and I believe it."
Then I waited and looked again into my heart for the feeling, but no feeling came. I then saw clearly for the first time that I was trusting partly in Jesus and partly to my feelings. Presently the Spirit showed me that feeling never saves any one, that only Jesus saves. I remember that, standing on the straw stack, I cried out, "O Jesus! I put my all on thy promise, and I will leave all with thee." But alas! again I waited for the feeling as a witness, and was sure it would come, but it did not come. I was still trusting partly in Christ and partly to feeling. At last I turned away from looking for feeling and cried aloud: "My Jesus, I stake my all on John three sixteen. If I never have any feeling and if I am lost, I will quote this promise before thee at the judgment and say, 'I cast my little all upon it and trusted it, but it failed me. It is not my fault; it is thine.'"
I had finally, after years of struggling, come where I trusted wholly "in the word of the Lord." Then suddenly I received a definite assurance and great heart-warming peace and joy. At last the witness of the Spirit was mine. Leaping from the straw stack, I ran to my mother, threw my arms around her neck, and shouted, "Mother, I am fully saved! I am fully saved!"
Up to that time I had not had any teaching concerning an experience of sanctification or holiness and had heard no testimonies concerning such an experience, except the testimony of the life of Christians who were living it and professing it under another name. There was in the congregation where I worshiped a sweet-faced, white-haired saint whom we called Mother Robinson. She had prayed a drunkard husband into the kingdom, and my memory even to this day recalls her high type of Christian experience, and I want to bear my strongest possible testimony to the power there is in the testimony of a pure, sweet, and kind life.
Now after years of study and hearing the testimony of many, it is clear to me that during those years as a boy I prayed myself through to the abiding life and what I now believe to be the experience of Scriptural holiness, which, as I understand it, is such a freedom from sin, self-will, and selfishness, and such a passionate love for Jesus, that the heart longs above all things for his approval, companionship, guidance, and blessing, and that gratefully and joyfully gives Jesus "in all things the preeminence."
Thought He Had Sinned Away His Day of Grace
EXPERIENCE NUMBER 22
The enemy of souls has laid many plans and has many devices to deceive people and harass their minds and thereby cause them to bring unnecessarily heavy burdens upon themselves. One of his common impositions is to make a person think that he has committed the unpardonable sin and that all hope of ever obtaining favor with God again is forever gone. When such persons are told that they are laboring under a delusion, and that there is hope for them; that others have felt the same way and formed the same conclusion, but afterwards learned that it was only a deception of the enemy, and were able to renounce the delusion and obtain a good experience and keep it, the answer in most cases is, "My case is different." "Had I taken advantage of past opportunities when I had a chance to do so, I might have been saved, but now it is too late."