Heart Hunger for Holiness

“One of the very most important Scriptural prerequisites to obtaining a truly sanctified heart is soul hunger.... In a camp meeting service preached about 1960, Dr. L.B. Hicks told his audience:
‘If you get hungry enough you’ll die out...and if you don’t get hungry enough for it, you’re not going to die out....If you get hungry enough you’re going to set your will to get it....You’ll get sanctified if you get your mind made up...drape over a mourner’s bench like an owl over a tomb stone on a wet night at midnight. Stay there till the last nail’s driven and the epitaph’s cut on the tomb of the Old Man!’”

Sheridan Baker when seeking a pure heart stated: “My hungering and thirsting after righteousness now became so intense that I could do nothing but pray for a clean heart....There can be no true trust or soul rest while there is anything in the heart contrary to love, or any sense of impurity.” Records show that many of John Wesley’s preachers in the early days of the Holiness Movement, followed Mr. Wesley’s advice to “groan after holiness.” It seems that the modern holiness movement has ceased to groan after the experience, and in my opinion this has resulted in a shallow copy of the real experience of entire sanctification.

Mr. David Uptegraph, a Friend’s minister in describing his search for a clean heart, said the following:
“I hated pride, ambition, evil tempers, and vain thoughts, but I had them, for all that, and they were a part of me. Not as acts to be repented of and forgiven, but as dispositions lying behind the acts, and promptings thereto, natural to the ‘Old Man’ and inseparable from his presence in my being. I began to ask God, with a measure of faith, to ‘cast him out.’ Along with this desire there came a great hunger and thirst to be ‘filled with all the fullness of God.’ I longed for a clean heart and constant spirit.”

This Sunday morning, what are you hungry for? Do you truly seek a holy heart? If you have one, testify to what God has done for you. If you don’t have a holy heart, commit yourself to earnestly seek until you know the work has been done.