Do You Detest Depravity?

BLJ: Do you hate depravity? Is it loathsome to you? When you get to a place that you hate your carnality you will be ready to do something about it. You need to utterly detest carnality. Or, is there some parts of it that you still desire to cling to? You need to want it dead. Then, you are beginning to head toward the highway of holiness.

DETESTING DEPRAVITY

Mr. David Updegraph, a sainted Friends minister of great spiritual power, in relating his search for a clean heart, says:

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. 

BLJ: What is inside your heart that stands in opposition to God?

In this same connection, Adam Clarke affirmed: "This, indeed, is the sum and substance of the religion of Jesus Christ. We have partaken of an earthly, sensual, and devilish, nature; the design of God, by Christ, is to remove this, and to make us partaker of the Divine Nature, and save us from all the corruption, in principle and fact, which is in the world." 

"Break off the yoke of inbred sin, And fully set my spirit free!
I cannot rest till pure within
Till I am wholly lost in thee."

BLJ: True freedom begins with a sanctified heart.

PAYING THE PRICE

Amanda Smith, the internationally renowned black lady evangelist, tells us that when God shed His light upon her heart for her need of entire sanctification, under the teaching of John Inskip, she recognized that she must make a total and eternal consecration. In looking about, she discovered that all she had was her black self and her washtub and washboard. These she consecrated and God sanctified her. She says: "You must make your consecration complete, and you must make it eternal. I gave everything to God. All I had was my black self and my washtub and washboard; but I gave all, and the Spirit came and sanctified my soul." 

"Rouse up, brother! rouse up, sister! Seek, Oh seek this holy state."

The greatly loved and renowned Amy Carmichael said, "If I refuse to be a corn of wheat that falls into the ground and dies...then I know nothing of Calvary love."

It matters little, if one would call it the "death-route" or the "death-journey" or the "death-march" or the "death-blow." The essential thing is that everyone seeking a deeper experience in holiness, must die, dead! dead! dead! -- dead to self; dead to the world; dead to every carnal trait; dead to sin; dead to everybody and everything; past, present and future, if one would be sanctified, with the love of God shed abroad in the heart by the Holy Ghost (Rom. 5:5). The negative dying must precede the positive purity in order for the purity to be valid.

Some poet, unknown to us, who evidently knew from experience what he was talking about said:
"Oh my life was incomplete; Partly bitter, partly sweet; Until I let the Old Man die."

BLJ: It is a sweet experience to die out to self and be sanctified wholly.