W. B. Godbey - Enter His Rest

martyrdom to save others, to establish His truth, and to glorify His great name, I respond with shouts of victory.
I am like the Baptist missionary motto, which exhibits an ox standing between the altar and the plow, “Ready for
service or sacrifice.” I have no creed to serve, and no dogma to defend. I have lost sight of everything but God
and His precious truth, by which alone sinners can be saved.
Hezekiah, while destroying idols on all sides, exterminated the brazen serpent, because the people would burn
incense to it, I. e., worship it. That was idolatry. That brazen serpent was certainly an exceedingly precious
memento of a glorious deliverance which had taken place hundreds of years before; and that godly king so
realized its consolation as a souvenir of a glorious, merciful intervention, yet when the people would worship it,
he utterly destroyed it, grinding it into powder, and throwing it into the brook Kedron.
George Fox, the paragon saint of the Friend's religion, had no objection to the ordinances per se; he appreciated
them as precious mementos of redeeming mercy and saving grace, yet he eliminated them altogether and
declined to administer them, because he saw the people on all sides looking to them for salvation.
I would a thousand times rather take the place of a dry-land Quaker than a water-log Campbellite.
When timber gets water-logged it always sinks to the bottom of the rivers, where it rots and is lost forever.
When Christians get water-logged, if they abide in that condition, they will not only forfeit all the saving grace
they ever had, but sink to the bottom of Hell. Good Lord, help us to beware of hydrolatry!
I have not yet written anything about the mode of baptism, for all that you have seen that is on the design. There
is where we meet the tug of war. If you take it like the Campbellites and the Mormons, as an indispensable
condition of salvation, you become an idolater and are in awful danger of losing your soul, world without end.
This arises from the fact that our Savior is omnipotent and needs no help to save your soul or mine. Therefore
when you take in a Campbellite preacher, or Mormon prophet, or a Roman Catholic priest to help Him, you
offer Him a downright insult; consequently He leaves the preacher and the water god to serve you. God only
saves people when they utterly abandon the water god and every other idol and say to the preachers, “Stand
back and let me go and meet the Lord!” Even Mohammed, the Arabian false prophet, in his Koran when he tells
about going with the angel Gabriel up to Heaven; to stand before God and receive his commission, said that
when they had finally reached the sixth heaven, Gabriel asked to be excused, telling him he could escort him no
farther on his way to God; that he would find Him on the throne of the universe in the seventh heaven at quite a
distance. Therefore he must go on alone and stand before the effulgent throne of the great God of the universe,
hear His message and receive his commission.
I was a chronic mourner all my life, but never got salvation till I was sixteen years old. I was in the midst of a
glorious revival among the Baptists, all of the Methodists in that country having united with them in a glorious
revival effort. Finally, when I found the Lord and He saved my soul, I was in the woods alone, prostrate on the
ground and crying for mercy, my sins like a mountain crushing me down to Hell. When I reached the point of
utter desperation and gave up my preaching father, shouting Methodist mother, all the good church members,
my own irreproachable moral character, which Satan had manipulated into a mountain of self-righteousness
with which he had covered me and was pulling me into Hell, and absolutely realized that none of these could
help me and I deserved nothing but a place in Hell, and said: “O Lord, just send me there; I now confess
judgment against my own soul,” then the darkness which had wrapped me in Satan's midnight sped away and
the glorious Sun of righteousness did rise in my soul with healing in His wings. I had been down in a deep
valley alone amid the forests, crying from the depths of my hopeless soul. I found myself on the top of the
highest hill, leaping for joy. A new world had burst on me and everything looked so beautiful that language is
utterly impoverished to this day in an attempt to describe the rapture of my spirit. I could but sing:
“Oh, how happy are they, who their Savior obey;
And have laid up their treasures above.
Tongue cannot express the sweet comfort and peace
Of a soul in its earliest love.
“That sweet comfort was mine, when the favor
Divine I first found in the life-giving blood;