W. B. Godbey - Enter His Rest
W. B. Godbey - Enter His Rest
W. B. Godbey - Enter His Rest
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Church would simply have aroused his carnality in its defense. A similar mistake is made in fighting lodgery.<br />
The thing for us to do is to preach Jesus and tell people how to get saved. You have nothing to do but get them<br />
saved to the uttermost, I. e., sanctified wholly, and lodgery, along with sectarianism, dies a natural death. If you<br />
want to kill, always shoot at the heart. Otherwise you may inflict flesh wounds and make a great show with<br />
flowing blood, and yet your enemy convalesce and soon meet you again in battle array.<br />
11. MATURITY<br />
In the Mosaic dispensation thirty was the majority and fifty maturity. In writing up my biography I have dated<br />
my young manhood from my sanctification in 1868, as it took that experience to bring into availability the gifts<br />
which God had conferred in creation but which still remained latent in my constitution, myself ignorant of their<br />
existence. Man is a trinity consisting of body, soul and spirit.<br />
In this probationary existence the physical first predominates. It was so in my life as well as yours.<br />
It took the new birth to supersede the body in the pre-eminence of the soul. While, in the good providence of<br />
God, and through the hallowed experience of a godly home, a preaching father and a Christian mother, God<br />
fortified me against the seductive vices and bewitching follies universally incident to childhood and youth, so<br />
that I never went into them, and by <strong>His</strong> providence and grace I retained from the cradle an unimpeachable moral<br />
character, my principal transgressions being selfward through sheer ignorance of hygienical laws: yet during my<br />
juvenile life, antecedently to my conversion at the age of sixteen, while the physical predominated over the<br />
intellectual and spiritual, I delighted in and excelled all of my comrades in the innocent recreations of foot<br />
racing, wrestling, ball playing and everything else which did not conflict with a good conscience, illuminated by<br />
the Word and Spirit of God. My conversion forever superseded all of these physical sports, yea, they at once<br />
went into total eclipse and I left them forever. Not that I was convicted that they were sinful, but I had received<br />
something so much better that I no longer had any appreciation of them. Thus in my pilgrimage I traveled on<br />
another long stadium in advance of them, leaving them utterly out of sight.<br />
The glorious experience of regeneration thus having brought the physical into a total eclipse, at the same time it<br />
brought the intellectual into indisputable and irreversible pre-eminence. Then I moved out with all my might<br />
into the prosecution of my collegiate education, not only pursuing but preferring the hardest studies and actually<br />
delighting in the most arduous intellectual labor, I. e., the Latin and Greek languages, the higher mathematics<br />
and the natural sciences. In the providence of God, nineteen years elapsed during my regenerated experience,<br />
and during all of that time I was a most assiduous student.<br />
Graduating from college at the expiration of the tenth year of that period, I at once became president of a college<br />
in which, with my assistant teacher, I taught the whole classical curriculum.<br />
Thus I was given the most athletic intellectual gymnasium possible.<br />
When the Lord sanctified me at the age of thirty-five, He brought the spiritual into decisive pre-eminence, thus<br />
enthroning the spirit, dominant in my being, and throwing the intellectual as well as the physical into eclipse.<br />
Then I became like John Wesley, homo unius libri, a man of one book, and of course that Book was the Bible.<br />
During the preceding nineteen years I had ransacked all the world for books and gathered up a library at the cost<br />
of a thousand dollars. After I passed this great and decisive epoch in my experience, I immediately began to give<br />
away my library, because I no longer had time to utilize those great volumes which I had hitherto so highly<br />
esteemed. Therefore during the last thirty-eight years my time has been occupied in the spiritual realm, sin dying<br />
the deep things of God, profoundly realizing that I know nothing but what God has revealed to me in the realm<br />
of <strong>His</strong> providence, Word, and Spirit. I am infinitely delighted sitting like a little child at the feet of Jesus.<br />
Meanwhile the blessed Holy Spirit, the Author of the precious Word, is revealing to my spirit the deep things of<br />
God and the wonderful things of <strong>His</strong> kingdom, while the constant cry of my heart goes up, “Nearer, my God, to<br />
thee.”<br />
“To Thee and Thee alone<br />
The angels owe their bliss;<br />
They circle round the blazing throne,