W. B. Godbey - Enter His Rest

Adam's ruined race, we are no longer excusable for folding our arms and sitting in the easy chair of carnal
security, while we sing, “I am bound for the Promised Land.” It is high time that we all arise, take our Gospel
trumpet and begin to blow the shrill bugle blasts which hush the seraphim and cherubim to listen to the sweetest
music that ever thrilled immortal ears, while contemplative angels bending over the heavenly battlements stoop
to listen to the welcome notes of Gospel grace d Peter 1:12). And here on earth the old, the young, the great, the
small, the rich and the poor, the cultured and the rustic, stand and tell the lost multitudes about the dying Saviour
and the beautiful home in Heaven He has purchased for the homeless millions. Oh, how they will bless you
through all eternity, while they all the angels that God used you as an humble instrument to “pluck them as
brands from the eternal burning.”
In this greatest soul harvest the ages have ever known, -- is it possible you are going to lie supine? Arise, arise,
oh, sluggard, shake off thy slumbers and awake to an opportunity to which the angels would gladly speed their
flight, vacating Heaven and leaving their golden harps, ethereal paeans and celestial trumpets, to take your place
in the slums and preach this delectable Gospel and rescue the perishing multitudes, whom Jesus has redeemed
with His own precious blood. Will you not hasten to the rescue, and lend a helping hand lest some Oriental
coolie in the Judgment Day shall take your crown?
(7.) Those Commentaries are alone in the fact that they have been written exegetically, experimentally and
practically, whereas their predecessors are all written critically, e. g., Clark, the prince of commentators, starts
off on an exegesis basis, instead of telling you what it means in direct, plain terms, so you will understand it and
can intelligently dispense it to others. He proceeds to tell you what the critics say about it, quoting the
exposition of this one, that one and the other, till he gets you bewildered among the critics and there leaves you
incompetent to settle on any clear exegesis of the passage. You really have no time to spend in learning
criticism, which I could have given you, but I did not feel that the Lord wanted me to perplex your mind in that
way. I felt led by the blessed Holy Spirit, the infallible Author of this precious message of life and godliness, in
a plain, simple way to give you the explanation which you need to feed your own soul and dispense truth to the
perishing millions who throng your pathway through this world of sin, sorrow, wretchedness, disappointment
and wreckage of human hopes and aspirations.
All the commentaries by my predecessors were written for the learned clergy. The Lord told me to write mine
for the rank and file of His dear people, who had never enjoyed the opportunity of a collegiate education, but
who have much to do in winning souls, in view of the inimitable extent of the harvest enveloping the globe with
its crowded fields white for the sickle. There is a paucity of reapers, inadequate to the glorious work of
garnering the golden grain which is wasting by wholesale, the antipodian pagans having but one missionary to
every million souls or more.
Therefore it is actually homicidal longer to depend on the collegiate clergy to evangelize the world.
We just have to use aides from the people, bless them in their labors of love and go off and leave them.
John Wesley's great holiness movement solved the problem of saving the world not through the classical clergy,
but the uncultured laity. For this grand achievement, I. e., the evangelization of the world by the rank and file of
God's faithful people, I wrote those Commentaries which any men and women who have never seen the inside
of a college, but who have an ordinary English education, can read, and thus qualify themselves to preach the
Gospel to the illiterate millions who crowd this Babel world. These lay preachers do better work and we find
their humble labors more fruitful of souls than that of the theologians, from the ostensible fact that their
language is more easily understood by the ignorant denizens of slumdom, whom the learned preachers
habitually overshoot, I.e., make the sad mistake of putting the fodder too high for the sheep, so that they starve
to death with an abundance of food in full view, -- a torture intolerable to contemplate. God is wonderfully using
these books. They are going to the ends of the earth, already being in current use in all of the great mission
fields which envelop the dark Orient.
(8.) Not only do the dear people need plain and intelligent explanations of the precious Word, so that they
can instruct others, but they need fortification against a thousand innocent mistakes, into which they will
certainly drift if they undertake to preach the Gospel without a simple, lucid explanation which they will be
enabled to understand experimentally and practically. This is necessary so that they may realize in their own