W. B. Godbey - Enter His Rest

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anti-Christ. Therefore he does his best by his preaching to convince the sinner that he cannot get to Christ, meet Him and receive his salvation. This is an undeniable fact, since he actually tells him he has no right to pray, whereas prayer is the only possible method of access to the Savior. Hence you see this poor, mistaken man actually heads the sinner off and paralyzes all of his efforts to get to Christ, by telling him that he has no right to pray, and if he does God will not hear him. At the same time he pleads with him with all his might to come and join the church and let him immerse him in water for the remission of his sins, which is farcical and blasphemous. Jesus alone has the power to save a soul (Acts 4:12). Our work is nothing but to tell the poor lost sinners about Him, and to do our utmost by our prayers and instructions to encourage them in their seeking after Him. This has always been the only way of salvation. God says through His own prophet: “Let the wicked man forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him, return unto the Lord, who will have mercy on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.” There never from the beginning has been any other way of salvation but for a man to seek and find the Lord for himself and get truly, knowingly, and intelligently saved, which God always attests by His Holy Spirit so that we know it is better than anything else. God is the greatest of all teachers. When men teach us an important truth, we know it but when God teaches us, we know infinitely better than anything that man can possibly teach us. When they get people utterly alienated from the influence of the Holy Ghost, there is no longer any probability of their finding Jesus their Savior, as the Holy Ghost alone can reveal Him. Consequently in every protracted meeting they would begin by preaching against the work of the Holy Spirit, tantalizing and mocking frequently in order to stir up the risibles of the people and expedite their utter alienation from the Holy Spirit. After they thought they had convinced them that there was no such thing as Holy Ghost religion, that it was all wild-fire and fanaticism, then, changing their tactics, they would preach on sin and Hell, not holding up Jesus and His precious blood as the remedy, but obedience and especially church joining, confession and immersion. They would often speak very pathetically of the Savior's dying love, which was much to our edification, but all of that dying love is of no avail to the sinner unless he can find Him and get Him to save him. This he can never do unless the Holy Ghost has revealed Him; on this the Word is clear and explicit. “No one can say that Jesus is Lord but by the Holy Ghost.” Therefore when they ridicule, and with sarcasm, witticism, burlesque and vociferous speeches have convinced the people that there is no Holy Ghost nor experimental religion, do you not see that they have already effectually headed them off from Jesus, whom none but the Holy Ghost can reveal? Oh, that those preachers could only be converted to God, so they would fly from the office of anti-Christ, as from the mouth of Hell, and take their places where they are so much needed as the preachers of our glorious Savior who is mighty to save. The human heart spontaneously bows in reverential awe to everything in all the universe on which its salvation from sin, death and Hell depends. I have conversed with many heathen bowing before their idols. They all denied that they were worshipping them; but said that they had them because they reminded them of God. As the holiness people are from all churches, sects and nationalities, therefore we have a constant fight to keep them out of the different initial phases of idolatry, always more or less prevalent in Christian nations. See where Catholicism has gone so deep into idolatry that it is hard to tell whether their condition is any more hopeful than that of the heathen. They actually seem to have lost a personal knowledge of God. Sanctification gloriously delivers every soul from idolatry in all of its forms and phases. Hezekiah was a great leader of the most prevalent Holiness Movement which had been known in the Jewish Church. He traveled all over the country destroying idols everywhere and doing his best to exterminate idol worship out of the land. Yet his only son, Manasseh, who succeeded him on the throne and reigned fifty-three years, went into idolatry and even had idols put into the holy temple and worshipped there. God permitted the king of Babylon to take him away captive. There he suffered awful horrors, as they made a specialty of punishing him in a most unmerciful manner. But these terrible sufferings brought him to repentance, so that he got down low, humbling himself before God and crying for His mercy till He heard him and delivered him out of his captivity, sent him back to Jerusalem and restored to him his kingdom. After this Manasseh did his best to reform the nation from idolatry, but could not.
The last great Holiness Movement in the Jewish Church was by Josiah. He went down to the bottom of things and did his best to exterminate idolatry out of the nation, traveling extensively and everywhere destroying the idols. The shrine of Moloch had stood in the valley of Hinnom, west of Jerusalem, ever since the days of Solomon. He utterly exterminated it and everything pertaining to idol worship. After all of his faithful efforts to purify the land from idolatry, when he passed away to his heavenly home the people soon began to drift back into the different forms of idol worship. You have observed all of your life that when people want a revival, they have to take their eyes off of all their ordinances and lay down their churchisms and all of their controversies and get on their faces before God. When they go back to their churchisms they grieve the Spirit, and the revival evanesces. The Holiness Movement is God's revival for the evangelization of the world. He has brought us together from all parts of the world, that we may unite our hearts and hands and, losing sight of the various phases of those churchisms in which we were born, dropping the curtain over the dark, unsatisfactory past and leaving it with all of its wrecks, disappointments, difficulties and failures, march out under the blood-stained banner for the salvation of the world. While we follow the blood-stained banner, we fight under the flag which means no compromise with sin or error. In that we are utterly free from all partisan alliances, legalisms and creedisms of every form and phase. We have forever closed our eyes to everything but God and His Word. In this exterminating war with sin and Satan we have no fight with churches. God has laid them all on our hearts, and we feel, like Paul, that we are truly indebted to all. We love all of the churches with a perfect love, which prepares us for martyrdom. This unutterable love constrains us to tell the whole truth, however unsavory it may be to their perverted olfactories. Medical science reveals that the most powerful remedies and most indispensable in therapeutics are invariably the most nauseous to the patient. Palatable medicines are not generally worth administering. Heb. 4:12 tells us, “The Word of God is a two-edged sword.” If we have the courage heroically to hug the salvation edge, it will quickly cut out of us everything we cannot take to Heaven with us. If we shrink from the salvation edge, we are bound to meet the damnation edge, which will cut out forever all of our hopes of Heaven. If we will not take the precious promises in the Bible, which superabound like a rolling ocean without bank or bottom, we are destined to take the awful judgments pronounced in that volume of infallible truth. Well has man been denominated by philosophers “the religious animal.” When I traveled around the world I saw that the poor heathen were quite as religious as the Christians; but the trouble is there is no Savior from sin in all their religion. Their idols stand between them and God, so that they stop short of Him “who is mighty to save and strong to deliver.” In Christian lands, the water god is the most prominent; the same is true in heathen lands. They throng their holy rivers by the millions and plunge beneath the limpid wave to get rid of their sins, in their heathen blindness doing just what myriads are doing amid the glorious light of Christian civilization, showing thereby the universal trend toward idolatry. Shall we not put away every god but Jesus? When we have Him, we have the heavenly Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Col. 2:9, “In Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.” You are complete in Him, who is the head of all government and authority. Therefore you see plainly that when you have Him enthroned, crowned and sceptered, reigning in your heart and life without a rival, then you have the glorious heavenly Trinity, and everything else appertaining to life and godliness. Hence the pertinency of the unceasing battle-cry, “Jesus only.” The truth is, the very fact that you are running after other things is prima facie evidence that you do not have Him enthroned in your heart. He makes the life a cloudless sunshine, and so satisfies the longings of the immortal soul that you rest in perfect peace, having the full satiety of your hitherto insatiable spirit. If Jesus had been enthroned in my heart, I never would have constrained that Methodist preacher to immerse me in water, because I would have been perfectly satisfied already. In writing my biography I have already given you quite a history of my debates with the Campbellites, which covered a space of ten years, during the very flower of my young manhood. Some who, in the Providence of God, may read this may conclude that I have a retaliatory spirit; in this I have the consolation that they are mistaken. I know that I love all the people whom I have met on the controversial floor with the perfect love which prepares me to die for them. Of this, God is my judge. If He needs my
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AUTOBIOGRAPHY of WILLIAM BAXTER (W.
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So he did. What was the result? He
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Jerusalem, A. D. 1099. You will fin
Page 7 and 8: 1. CHILDHOOD I was born June 3, 183
Page 9 and 10: in all ages and nations have alread
Page 11 and 12: the catacombs of Egypt four thousan
Page 13 and 14: a great mistake in living a life so
Page 15 and 16: There were no factories then and ha
Page 17 and 18: een for this perpetual series of in
Page 19 and 20: profitable pastime and erudition. I
Page 21 and 22: When love Divine first found me; Wh
Page 23 and 24: This is a dangerous attitude. The D
Page 25 and 26: ut in the Hebrew and Greek, which a
Page 27 and 28: came and, to my unutterable surpris
Page 29 and 30: saving the heathen of your home cit
Page 31 and 32: ut I thought I had to do something
Page 33 and 34: among the tribes assembled at Shilo
Page 35 and 36: on, the Lord has continued to broad
Page 37 and 38: moderators when they differed in an
Page 39 and 40: In my case, it was simply a matter
Page 41 and 42: the soul which our Savior gives, an
Page 43 and 44: calculated to derail and sidetrack
Page 45 and 46: fortifying Jerusalem by impregnable
Page 47 and 48: our Lord. There are four justificat
Page 49 and 50: The retention of pure spirituality
Page 51 and 52: you are entangled in the dismal swa
Page 53 and 54: We have holiness churches now in co
Page 55 and 56: what he does not know. The Gospel i
Page 57: the Campbellite preachers a place i
Page 61 and 62: Of my Savior possessed, I was perfe
Page 63 and 64: constantly increasing potency, illu
Page 65 and 66: A presiding elder, making a speech
Page 67 and 68: plains once hardened by the tread o
Page 69 and 70: gladly, pursuant to their desire, i
Page 71 and 72: Solomon; if they had they would not
Page 73 and 74: souls. It is bad enough for the poo
Page 75 and 76: dictionary, which only gives the pa
Page 77 and 78: up the “new man” to walk in new
Page 79 and 80: unkindly and misrepresent me. God h
Page 81 and 82: shut out from the world lest they m
Page 83 and 84: your houses, and do not bid him God
Page 85 and 86: 9. THE WHISKEY WAR When a little la
Page 87 and 88: he would better follow my advice, s
Page 89 and 90: Greenland, before the meeting was o
Page 91 and 92: and give them a dead man, such as t
Page 93 and 94: who are utterly inaccessible to the
Page 95 and 96: contrast in that respect between th
Page 97 and 98: used for four days with all my migh
Page 99 and 100: them. It means that we should preac
Page 101 and 102: of spirits, I Cor. 12:8-10, in whos
Page 103 and 104: country, and the people came from a
Page 105 and 106: awful contagious disease which they
Page 107 and 108: one felt exceedingly fortunate if h
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Then as I pass along, I'll sing a C
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own game; because the counterfeit o
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stopped at a hotel, the Methodist p
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The second Saturday and Sunday of o
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who they were. “Oh, that man with
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heard of his death so soon afterwar
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he did not well understand English.
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And dwell where Jesus is. “Thou a
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so clearly that he can explain it t
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minds the mastery of the situation
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lucre alone can relax. Having paid
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earing the image of Caesar. When th
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omnipotent Spirit, conferring on us
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streets by the feet till the angels
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people, which would soon vitiate th
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holy. Entire sanctification, I. e.,
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about fifty to one hundred pages ea
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and upright. Among these twenty-sev
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prophetic data which you will find
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face and govern themselves accordin
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(22.) ”CARNALITY” This word is
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heroically that they even got the e
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pride, vanity, egotism and my own w
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These books and booklets, all told,
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that we may prevail with the Great
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took the meeting out of my hand, el
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ecause they do not get well, they s
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elucidation of His mighty works sho
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trump, will give one tremendous hea
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throughout the Movement, which now
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scattered throughout the country, h
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After he had gotten clearly away fr
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W. B. Godbey - Enter His Rest

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