How They Entered Canaan J.B. Chapman Part 3

BLJ: We continue to look at the experience of Dr. J.B. Chapman. His story continues to bless me.

Immediately upon being saved, I felt that my great joy would be to be good and to do good and to help others find God. Brother Averill had preached a sermon on restitution in the course of which he had told about a rich man who found it necessary to dispose of all his property that he might return to people what he had taken from them dishonestly. He also told about a judge who was converted late in life, and lived ever afterward to regret that he was not converted early, because all his worldly honor had netted him was a worldly family which he was now powerless to win for Christ. These things had affected me, and I had determined to live my life in such a way that at its end I would have no remorse, even though I might still have regret, for my regret must be free from the sense of guilt in that it was based upon weakness and not on wickedness.

Having been converted in a meeting where the preachers all preached that Christians are sanctified after they are justified, and where the people who had helped me most all testified that they had been sanctified after they were converted, I naturally expected that I would, as some of them said, "cross into Canaan at Kadesh-Barnea," and not wait for the waters of the Jordan to arise before the plains of Moab. I have often said that I got converted so I could get sanctified, and I have held steadfastly to the doctrine that even a sinner can long to be made "every whit whole," and can make holiness his goal from the time he begins to seek God at all.

I gave my brief testimony at the meeting on the next evening after my conversion. Then at the time of the altar service, Bill Cummings, in whose buggy I had come to church, handed me his hat, and made for the mourner's bench. A little later a man came and said, "Now do not allow your new-found love to grow cold. Go on and get that love perfected by getting sanctified. Go right away. Go even tonight." And I did go, and down there by the side of Bill and the others who were seeking to be saved, I went to make my full consecration, and to trust God to sanctify and cleanse me from all sin.
I was not really conscious of holding anything back from God. I did answer yes to every suggestion that God might want to use me in His service or might want to set me aside and leave me without any apparent calling except to wait on Him. After an hour of prayer and searching of the heart, I was able to trust for the sanctifying fullness of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit was His own witness, and I was so definitely aware that He had taken full possession of my heart, and had cleansed it from all sin and made it His home, that I asked for no external token at all.

Candles are useful to point one to the hilltop from which to view the sunrise; but when the sun comes up, candles are of no further consequence -- the sun is his own evidence. And that is the way I found it when I was baptized with the Holy Ghost on that night following my conversion.
I know there are those to whom human conditions are so essential that they have a tendency to doubt one can be so concerned to get sanctified so soon after conversion. But, based upon my own experience, I am inclined toward the other view, and believe that as soon as one is clearly justified, he should set in with all his heart and soul to get sanctified. If there is any time in the Christian life when one needs all the help that is promised in divine grace, it must be in those beginning days when the way is new, and when knowledge is so limited. Also, let us not forget that sanctification is purity, not maturity, and that the time element is not important in it. If we are ever sanctified, it must be the grace of God that does it, and if it is grace at last, it might as well be grace at the first. Sanctification is subsequent to justification, not because there is any limitation in God that would require Him to justify and then sanctify, but because the conditions for sanctification are such that no one can meet them until first he is justified and regenerated.
And now, in this year of 1946, almost forty-seven years after I gave my first testimony to the saving and sanctifying power of God, I feel constrained to affirm once more that He did forgive my sins and make me His child on a certain evening in September, 1899, and that on the very next evening He sanctified me wholly. And, to this I add, that He saves and sanctifies me now.

I cannot gather my story about a few epochal incidents, except that my conversion to Christ was such an epoch-marking incident. And it has been pretty much the habit of my life as accounting that for me, "life begins at conversion." I was not a great sinner, as the world a praises sinners, and I am not a saint, as the world and the church appraise saints. But I was a sinner, lost and undone, and I became a Christian in heart and life. The beginning was a crisis, but that which has followed has been simply a "going on." And I am happy also to say, "The end is not yet, praise the Lord!"
Source: "Spirit-Filled --The Life of J.B. Chapman