W. B. Godbey - Enter His Rest
W. B. Godbey - Enter His Rest
W. B. Godbey - Enter His Rest
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When love Divine first found me;<br />
Wherever falls my distant lot,<br />
My soul shall linger round thee.<br />
“And when rise from the vile world<br />
Up to my home in Heaven,<br />
Down will I cast mine eyes once more,<br />
Where I was first forgiven.”<br />
That wood was soon afterward cleared up and turned into a corn-field, but my heart, in all my wanderings these<br />
fifty-seven years, three times traveling in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and once around the world, has ever turned<br />
back to that hallowed spot, dearest to me in all the earth. I verily expect to remember it through all eternity.<br />
There the battle of long and weary years between faith and doubt, grace and sin, Christ and Satan, Heaven and<br />
Hell, culminated in glorious victory for my poor soul.<br />
I, was converted in the Baptist meeting, where nothing was said about sanctification. Indeed, the Methodists a<br />
that time were silent on it. My conversion was clearly witnessed to by the blessed Holy Spirit, who gave me<br />
power in public prayer to the delight and astonishment of the people, who shouted the praises of God for the<br />
blessings which descended on them during my prayers; meanwhile I was faithful in duty and always ready to<br />
give a reason for the hope that was within me, with meekness and fear. But I soon found an aching void within<br />
which the world could never fill.<br />
Painfully realizing that I needed something more to satisfy my longing soul, I talked to preachers and pilgrims,<br />
who told me not to be discouraged, because, it was the inward conflict which they all had, and that I must<br />
endure it during this life.<br />
Reading the old Methodist books, I found much on sanctification as a second work of grace, but in the absence<br />
of a teacher or even a witness to it, I did not know how to seek it. Our country was all flooded with water<br />
religion, preached by the Campbellites everywhere, who make it a condition of pardon and salvation. As they<br />
constantly fought experimental religion, which I knew to be true, because I had it, I had no inclination to fall in<br />
with them; but the Baptist brethren, with whom I got converted, practiced immersion, and among all there was<br />
so much said about it, that I, being ignorant and deeply solicitous to, be right, and knowing I needed something,<br />
therefore came to the conclusion that the thing for me to do was to be immersed. Consequently I called on a<br />
Methodist preacher to favor me with the ordinance. I found him very unwilling and disposed to argue me out of<br />
it. I told him it was not worth while to spend time over it, because I had made up my mind to receive it. My<br />
father was a preacher and he was satisfied I would be. Therefore, loathe to give up the Methodist preacher, as he<br />
felt sure I would go to the Baptists, he consented to accommodate me, giving me the time and place when he<br />
was going to immerse some people and charging me to tell no one, but to come along and fall in with the<br />
candidates and he would wait on me along with the balance. At that time the Methodist preacher had<br />
conscientious scruples about re-baptizing people; they are not so particular now. Consequently I came at the<br />
time appointed and he immersed me with the others. I received it in good faith, hoping that it would supply the<br />
deficiency which I realized in, my experience, but in this I was mistaken; I soon found the same aching void<br />
within.<br />
Four years from that time I began to preach in the Methodist Church, and have been at it these fifty-three years.<br />
I preached fifteen years under a woe, feeling, “Woe is unto me if I preach not the Gospel.” Nineteen years after<br />
my conversion, in December, 1868, the Lord gloriously sanctified me, giving me that wonderful satisfying<br />
portion which I sought in immersion and a thousand other ways, but finally found when I gave up everything<br />
else and took Jesus for everything in time and in eternity. I have always been very grateful to Brother William<br />
Johns, my neighbor boy about ten years my senior, for immersing me at my request. I have always been glad<br />
that under the circumstances I did satisfy my own conscience, doing the best I could. I took it for the full<br />
satisfaction of my longing soul, which is but another name for sanctification, but found to my sorrow that it<br />
could not do it.<br />
In the preceding paragraph I made allusion to our forensic club, with which I identified myself when a small lad.<br />
During the seven years which transpired after I had learned about all I could in the common schools of that<br />
country, as above mentioned, God, in <strong>His</strong> providence, sent that able mathematician into our community, who