12. What I Believe Holiness and Bearing the Cross

HOLINESS AND BEARING THE CROSS James says: “My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations.” And Wesley says, in Christian Perfection: “The best helps to growth in grace are the ill usage, the affronts and the losses which befall us. One of the greatest evidences of God’s love to those that love Him is to send them afflictions with grace to bear them.” If we hunger and thirst for God’s best, we cannot escape “bearing the cross.” That is the price which has to be paid for Pentecostal blessing. The daily bearing f our cross means the daily yielding up of our own wills to the will of our Heavenly Father, and this involves the patient endurance of any painful experience which we may have to suffer as a result of our obedience to His will. This is the way the Master trod. We are to “follow his steps.” Of course we do not all have just the same experience in “bearing the cross.” Each Christian is called to bear his own particular cross, which varies according to the age, place, and circumstances in which our Heavenly Father has called him to live. Very frequently it is the confession of Christ which involves experiences which may be unpleasant and painful to us naturally, but they form part of our “bearing the cross.” To confess Christ or some special blessing of God which has come to us but is not understood or is even disbelieved in, by the circle to which we belong, often brings misunderstanding, reproach, and opposition. We may avoid this by keeping silent, but, oh, at what a loss to ourselves and our growth in grace! But the acceptance of the cross in the power of the Spirit is the way to abundance of life. In my case, I found that testimony to the truth and I experience of entire sanctification by faith called forth opposition on the part of certain Christians. I do not overlook the fact that there may have been faults on my part. As to that the Lord alone must be the Judge. But a simple explanation of the trouble is this: The Lord had blessed me along the lines of certain truths of holiness; the Christians who opposed me did not, for various reasons, accept those truths; hence the opposition. Any account of my experiences in relation to the truth of entire sanctification by faith which omitted this aspect of the matter would be seriously incomplete. In stating a few instances in this chapter, however, I am not writing in a complaining or condemning spirit, but in order to encourage those believers who may be called upon to face similar opposition, to stand fast in the faith and to warn others who do not yet realize the full truth, so that they may pause before they oppose that which is of God.

There have been two distinct periods in which I have experienced in a special manner the showers of the Spirit’s blessing. The first period was from 1916 to 1918, when I experienced the first shower, after entering the blessing of sanctification by faith. The second period of the Spirit’s shower of blessing commenced about fourteen years later, about 1932. My experience, particularly since 1931, has been that, as the Lord has enriched my soul inwardly, so various trials have come upon me outwardly.

Whenever I experienced a rich inward spiritual blessing, it was not long before a trial or affliction followed. Every inch of spiritual advancement seems to have been contested by the powers of darkness. I have related the great influx of spiritual blessing which came to my soul after I had taken the steps of faith for entire sanctification in 1916. It must not be thought, however, that my spiritual life after that was all easy, plain sailing. It was the very opposite. My faith was very soon tested, and I have had to fight the fight of faith ever since. I soon found that in testifying to this blessing of God was brought into reproach and provoked opposition. It was somewhat surprising to me to find the prejudice which exists in some Christians against any teaching or testimony to a second definite work of grace after conversion. This prejudice seems to warp the judgment and cause a loss of sense of proportion. The gift of God in the cleansing and filling of the Spirit was so real to me that I felt bound to testify of the blessing I had received, and so I wrote to various Christians in England in 1916 and told them how God had blessed me. Instead, however, of rejoicing in the grace of God granted to me while I was in France, facing the awful realities of the Great War, I am sorry to say that some of these Christians quite misunderstood me. hey refused to accept my testimony; they told me I was eluded by the devil and leading others astray, and that I was narrow-minded and bigoted. How very unkind such criticisms can be! After I had been in France twenty-one months and had been sent to a base camp for a few weeks, the day came when I had to leave the camp and return to the trenches. It was just on that day however that I received from England a letter of harsh criticism for my testimony to entire sanctification. Christians who unfairly criticize their fellow believers little realize that they may be doing the devil’s own work of discouragement. On another occasion in France I met a group of Christians connected with the NonCombatant Corps. I was able to meet with them a few times for prayer and Bible study. At one meeting the leader of the group announced that the Lord’s Supper would be observed the following Sunday. I was delighted to hear this and anticipated with pleasure being able to join with them in remembering the Lord in His death, as I had not been able to participate in the Lord’s Supper for some time. After the meeting, however, the leader came up to me and said, “I am sorry, but we should not be happy in allowing you to join with us in the Lord’s Supper on Sunday.” “Why not?” I exclaimed. I wondered what offense I had committed or in what respect I was not fit to join with them in remembering the Lord in His death. The leader then explained. My offense was that I had I distributed a few holiness journals among them, and he said, “We regard your holiness views as dishonoring to the Lord.” And so for testifying to the truth of sanctification by faith as a definite gift and experience from God, I was cut off from joining in the Lord’s Supper with these believers. I met with the same spirit of opposition after the war. I had an interesting experience at a village convention where I gave the closing message on Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 3:14-21. I urged believers to seek to enter into the blessedness of that wonderful prayer of the apostle. There was present at the convention a Christian who had a strong aversion to any teaching that was on “second blessing” lines. He told me that he was determined to oppose “second blessing” teaching whenever he came across it. This brother was annoyed with me, and came up to me afterwards and severely criticized me. A few days afterwards, on a Sunday evening, at the conclusion of a gospel service which I was conducting, an old Christian came up to me with a smiling face and shook me warmly by the hand. He had been present at the convention. “Thank you, brother, for that message you gave at the convention,” he said; “it did me good.” A minute or two afterwards, an elderly Christian lady came up to me and likewise thanked me for my convention address. Thus I learned from this experience never to tone down or hide the truth for fear of offending somebody, particularly the truth of entire sanctification by faith. Some may oppose and be very annoyed; but if we stand fast and are not moved away from our hope and faith, God will honor His Word and make the truth a blessing to souls. THE MARK OF PENIEL After Jacob’s wonderful experience of God’s blessing at Peniel he “halted upon his thigh.” For the rest of his life he bore in his body a mark which ever reminded him of that glorious experience at Peniel. I, too, have a “mark” in my body which will always remind me of my “Peniel” experience in 1916 in France. It is on a finger on my right hand. It is because this finger was badly poisoned in September, 1916, that I was sent away to Staples to the very place where God met me and sanctified me. The nail of my finger had to be cut right out and it has never grown properly since. The broken nail on this finger always reminds me, therefore, of the wonderful preserving mercy of God to me during the Great War, and, above all, that it was during that dark and terrible time that God gave me the greatest spiritual blessing of my life. And so, when I am accused of teaching error when I teach and testify to the specific blessing of holiness by faith, I just quietly look down at my finger and smile and then I look up to the Lord with adoring gratitude and worship. In 1932 the Lord wonderfully deepened and confirmed me still further in the light and truth which I first saw in 1931. But during this latter period of inward spiritual blessing, one trial after another came into my life. The key to my experience I find in Paul’s second epistle to the Corinthians. His testimony can be I written in two parallel columns. In one column would appear his rich inward spiritual blessings, and side by side, in the other column, his various trials and afflictions. In 2 Corinthians 1:1-24, he says, “We were pressed out of measure, above strength, insomuch that we despaired even of life,” but in 2 Corinthians 2:1-17 he says, “Thanks be unto God, which always causeth us to triumph in Christ.” What a mysterious but glorious paradox is the Christian life! During the three years 1932-34, while I was experiencing the showers of the Spirit’s blessings in my inner life, the opposition of the evil one was manifested in a series of attacks upon me in the form of false accusations from various quarters. I seemed to be in the center of a cloud of misunderstanding. These attacks all came from within the circle of the professing church. Peter misunderstood the Lord’s mission and actually rebuked the Lord when He revealed the truth of the Cross, but the Lord recognized that at the back of Peter’s words I was the unseen enemy, Satan. We ought not to be ignorant of Satan’s devices. He is a false accuser; and if in the pathway of testimony to God’s truth we have to suffer false accusations, even though they come from professing Christians, we may be sure that in the background are the unseen powers of darkness. I now relate briefly the two sides of my spiritual experience during the four years from 1931. In 1931 and 1932 in my village mission work, I saw several souls saved under the ministry of an evangelist. The evangelist himself was greatly blessed by the truth of entire sanctification, and a few Christians also saw the truth and were deeply stirred and blessed. But it was just while I was rejoicing to see this blessing of the Lord in the work that a series of false accusations was raised against me by professing Christians. And during this period my father-in-law lay very seriously ill at home for sixteen months and eventually died. At Easter, 1934, I had a very blessed spiritual uplift at the Holiness Convention, at Battersea, of the International Holiness Mission. But about a month afterwards, T was strongly attacked by certain Christians for teaching entire sanctification by faith. In the summer of that year I was again greatly blessed at Newquay on holiday, and returned home with a glowing heart to declare the truth of “full salvation.” Three weeks after my return, however, I was accused by the leaders of a company of Christians of teaching “glaring error,” and, as a result, certain “doors of service” for the Lord were closed against me.

AFFLICTIONS In 1935, I passed through seasons of testing of a different nature. My wife’s health was indifferent, and at the end of 1934 we had to close up our home and go away I for a change for four months. We returned home in April, 1935, just after I had experienced another time of spiritual blessing at the Battersea Easter Holiness Convention. My wife was much improved in health, and we were looking forward to a resumption of our normal home life. Two days after our return home, being a Sunday, I had a preaching engagement to fulfill at a gospel hall in the evening. My wife, son, and I and my sister accordingly set out together to go to the gospel hall. We were a happy little company, and I was quietly meditating on my message as we walked along together. Then all of a sudden our outward peace was broken up, and we were plunged into consternation. We were walking along a grass verge by a fence; but just as we reached some crossroads, a motorcycle collided with a car; the car swerved and came crashing into the fence by which we were walking. It avoided three of us by a few feet only; but I heard a painful cry, and when I looked around, I saw my wife lying on the ground with her left leg badly broken. The car had just caught her leg before she could get clear. None of the occupants of the car or motorcycle were seriously hurt. Only one suffered serious injury, and that was my wife. She was taken away by ambulance to hospital; and when my sister, son, and I returned home, we all knelt together and thanked the Lord for our preservation, and specially sought the Lord’s mercy for my wife with her badly fractured leg. It was compound fracture with bad laceration. This sudden, low was a shock to us, but it was a great comfort to us who feel that when this totally unexpected event occurred we were definitely in the will of the Lord, in the Lord’s service, and on the Lord’s day. Grace was given to us to enable us patiently to wait on the Lord, that we might learn the lesson He had to teach us in this sudden affliction, believing all the time that Romans 8:28 was true. While we were passing through this period of affliction, the Book of Job was a great comfort, and all those Scriptures that speak of the trial of faith, and the chastening of the Lord, etc., were applied with healing power by the Holy Spirit. How cheered, too, we were, by the many letters and tokens of sympathy received from the Lord’s own dear people! A few weeks after my wife’s return from hospital, I myself fell ill for about six weeks with nervous exhaustion and gastritis, caused largely through the shock of her accident. I experienced great bodily weakness, and could do very little reading, writing, or even praying. It was just then, however, that I found what a rich blessing it was to prove by actual experience the truth of those precious words of the Lord which have brought comfort thousands of the Lord’s suffering saints, “My grace is sufficient for thee, for my strength is made perfect in weakness.” It was exceedingly precious, too, in those days of great weakness, to prove by faith the infinite value of the cleansing blood of the Lamb, and the presence of the Lord tabernacling over me, in accordance with 2 Corinthians 12:1-21.

Thus, in those four years, I passed through a season of varied trials — clouds of misunderstanding from several directions, the shock of a sudden accident severely injuring my wife, and great bodily weakness. At times I felt in heaviness, but, praise the Lord, though these trials are painful to the flesh at the time, yet the Lord’s grace is sufficient to enable one even to glory in tribulation, knowing that all these painful experiences work for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, while we look not at the things seen, but at the things unseen, and trust the Lord to make the “all things” in our lives to work together for our eternal blessing. “Thou broughtest us into the net …. but thou broughtest us out into a wealthy place” (Psalms 66:11-12). Twelve years have passed since my account of the foregoing experiences appeared in the first edition of The Riches of Holiness. I am now able to look back upon those experiences in the light of the time that has elapsed. And as I look back I exclaim with a full heart, Praise the Lord!” The lines quoted above from Psalms 66:11-12 express what I feel to be the spiritual meaning of my experiences. For a time I seemed to be caught in the “net” of trying circumstances, from which I was unable to extricate myself. But in the Lord’s own time He brought me out into “a wealthy place.” He brought me closer to himself, my faith became more deeply rooted in Him, and I saw more clearly and felt more deeply the reality of he truth of entire sanctification by faith. This is indeed a “wealthy place,” yes, a place in which one can appreciate more and more the riches of holiness. As a result of this inward enrichment I was enabled to bear witness to the Lord in an entirely new way which I had never before contemplated and so, in due course, The Riches of Holiness and Scriptural Freedom from Sin were published. But I doubt very much whether they ever would have seen the light if I had not first passed through those experiences in “the net.” How very true is the scripture, “Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby”! (Hebrews 12:11.) Praise God for the “afterward”! If the reader is for the present in the “net” of some peculiar trial or affliction, take courage. Be patient and look to the Lord in faith that in His time He may bring you out “into a wealthy place,” where the peaceable fruit of righteousness abounds to His glory and your eternal blessing.