“I the Lord, the first and with the last” (Isa. xli. 4).
Thousands of people get stranded after they have embarked on the great
voyage of holiness, because they have depended upon the experience rather
than on the Author of it. They had supposed that they were thoroughly and
permanently delivered from all sin, and in the ecstacy of their first
experience they imagine that they shall never again be tried and tempted
as before, and when they step out into the actual facts of Christian life
and find themselves failing and falling, they are astonished and
perplexed, and they conclude that they must have been mistaken in their
experience, and so they make a new attempt at the same thing, and again
fall, until at last, worn out, with the experiment, they conclude that the
experience is a delusion, or, at least, that it was never intended for
them, and so they fall back into the old way, and their last state is
worse than the first.
What men and women need to-day is to know, not sanctification as a state,
but Christ as a living Person.
Lord Jesus, give me Thy heart, Thy faith, Thy life, Thyself.