BLJ: I have enjoyed over the years reading Rev. Godbey's writings. His testimony of sanctification is powerful. Enjoy.
W. B. GODBEY
(Methodist)
I was born in 1833. My father, an old-style Methodist preacher, full of the old-time power, preached hell and damnation with such an awful force that he got the hell-scare on me in my infancy, amply fortifying me against all the allurements of those follies and vices so fatal to childhood and youth. Consequently the terrible Sinai gospel, preached by my father and his contemporaries, proved the vehicle of my successful transportation through the precarious period of minority uncontaminated by those seductive vices and follies which, as a rule, utterly capture and debauch the rising generation. Having become a good reader at the early age of six years, I would work hard all day and read till midnight. Having an exceedingly retentive memory, I would make up big speeches out of what I had read, and deliver them on Saturday night in the weekly meeting of a rural polemical club of which I became a member when a stripling weighing about sixty pounds. I started to school at the age of five and graduated at Georgetown College, Ky., when at twenty-six. My father, being unable to educate me beyond the common schools, my collegiate course cost me one thousand dollars, which the Lord by His wonderful Providence enabled me to pay by my own earnings aside from my current living. Though convicted and a chronic penitent from the cradle, I never reached a clear conversion till at the age of sixteen while attending a glorious Baptist revival, and receiving a thunderbolt conviction, which knocked me down, disqualifying me to eat or sleep, till eighteen hours of unutterable agony, accompanied by awful visions of hell and damnation, the devil standing by me, my preaching father and shouting mother and the good church members, retreating away and leaving me for the devil and hell; I saw for the first time the utter futility of my irreproachable moral character, church membership, godly home, and all other human agencies to deliver me from the awful vengeance of the violated law, meanwhile all my good works on which I had been banking turned to a huge pile of old filthy rags, smoking with hell-fire, demons adding the brimstone and flame to wrap me in the unquenchable conflagration of the bottomless pit. In my irretrievable dilemma, I unequivocally and eternally confessed judgment against myself, confessing the unimpeachable justice of my damnation, conceding the incontrovertible fact that with all my moral goodness, water baptism, church membership, and irreproachable character, I was literally chuck full of sin, hypocrisy and meanness, and never had deserved anything but a place in hell. The grand salient point with me now supervened, when the light broke in, revealing the sinner's Friend and the sinner's Saviour, the light of His presence and the splendor of His glory filling and flooding my soul with raptures unutterable, the mountain of guilt having rolled away, the buoyancy of my spirit leaping and shouting for joy. This occurred
forty-nine years ago. [in 1849] Its memory this day (November 23, 1898, as here in New York City, I dictate these pages) is brighter far than the events of yesterday.
"O hallowed spot, O sacred hour,
When love divine first found me!
Wherever falls my distant lot,
My soul shall linger round thee.
"And when I rise from this vile world,
Up to my home in heaven;
Down will I cast my eyes once more,
When I was first forgiven."
MY SANCTIFICATION
Like Saul of Tarsus, who, when powerfully converted at Damascus, went to preaching with great enthusiasm, till God convicted him so powerfully for a second work of grace, culminating in the revelation of His Son in him, that he fled away into Arabia, apparently giving up preaching for the time being, spending three years in fasting and prayer amid the wild beasts and savages of the howling wilderness, till God wonderfully sanctified him, revealing Jesus sitting on the throne of his heart; I immediately after my conversion became a very bright and efficient Christian worker, becoming a preacher in four years. Meanwhile my outward life being irreproachable, I realized a terrible inward conflict, not the predilections for the vulgar vices, of which I had never been a participant, but my inordinate ambition, vanity, pride and covetousness kept up an indomitable civil war in my heart, to me most real and the source of a thousand soul agonies and sad defeats in spiritual conflict, but to my brethren who fanned the carnal flame by their eulogies and encouragements evidently unseen.
Nineteen years had rolled away, when in addition to my ministerial work, I was promoted to the Presidency of the largest Methodist College in the State. I was a prominent Free Mason and Odd Fellow, blindly thinking that these worldly aggrandizements were auxiliaries to my usefulness. During those times the pulpit was silent on the great doctrine of entire sanctification by a second and distinct work of grace. However, guided by the Holy Scriptures and the Methodistic fathers, I was all these years an humble and earnest seeker after full redemption. Of course a single holiness camp meeting would have swept me into Beulah Land; but unfortunately it was not my privilege to enjoy any such facilities. Finally, during December, 1868, while conducting a glorious revival in which God was signally blessing my labors in the conversion of sinners, I apparently inadvertently, while in my blind way really seeking with all the power of soul, mind and body, with no living human help, blundered into the experience, receiving the baptism of the Holy Ghost and fire, coming on me like a Niagara from the Heavenly ocean, and sweeping through me like a fiery cyclone, in sin-consuming flames, burning up all the debris of the carnal mind, and abiding with me, turning the collegiate President into a flaming holiness evangelist, though I had never seen one nor heard a sermon on entire sanctification till I heard myself preach it after receiving the experience. This experience, which to me was not only an unutterable astonishment, but an inexplicable paradox, radically revolutionized my ministerial and Christian character, transforming me from the cultured preacher and collegiate president into a red-hot revivalist. I have a considerable graveyard in the Land of Moab. There I buried the collegiate president, the candidate for the episcopacy, the Free Mason, and the Odd Fellow. I was so expeditious about that time that I tarried not to rear a stone, carve a line, nor plant a tree to mark the final resting-place of my carnal brotherhood. Leaving them alone in their glory, I sped for the Jordan ford with race-horse velocity, crossed over, shouted down the walls of Jericho, defeated the giant killers on thirty-one battle fields, my Joshua ever and anon halting the sun in his course that I might consummate the victory. For some time I have been in the mining business, finding inexhaustible supplies of gold, silver, and diamonds in the great Palestinian ranges, running from Dan to Beersheba. From the hour when I received the baptism of the Holy Ghost and fire, wherever I preached, the Spirit fell on the people. I have frequently preached six times a day. As I am now somewhat in life's evening, the Lord is using me mainly as a teacher, writing the Gospel in the morning, reading from the inspired original and expounding in the afternoon, and preaching at night.
When I entered the experience in 1868, long before the holiness movement had reached Kentucky, I was currently believed to be crazy as all truly sanctified people at that day, when the experience was so little known. In 1871 I was actually hauled away by my church officers and delivered to my presiding elder as a "crazy man whom they could not manage." The reports of my craziness, oddities and eccentricities brought thousands of curiosity seekers to my meetings, crowding and packing every house and filling the premises. I made it a rule by the help of God to effect the coupling of curiosity and conviction, so that hundreds who came to mock stayed to pray.
During the period of my vigorous manhood, I witnessed much of the old-style, knock-down power, my revivals soon running into an unadjournable meeting, at the conclusion of every service so many people being prostrate and unable to stand on their feet or walk away, that the meeting was necessarily prolonged to the next hour, thus running night and day without adjournment. At the first session of my Conference after my sanctification, pursuant to the custom of the times I retired from the room on the calling of my name by the bishop, while my presiding elder gave a report of my work during the year; meanwhile from the lobby I heard him certify to the Conference that "a great and unaccountable change had come over Brother Godbey during the year, radically revolutionizing his entire ministerial character, even changing the intonation of his voice, his gesticulation, entire deportment and the character of his preaching, so that he would not be identified with his former self."
Source: "Pentecostal Messengers" by M. W. Knapp
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