Scriptural Sanctification - Media Sabda Org

The following is taken from a record of his experience years after his marked conversion. This
experience came during an hour of "contemplation and prayer." He says:
"The person of Christ appeared ineffably excellent, with an excellency great enough to swallow
up all thought and conception -- which continued, as near as I can judge, about an hour; which kept
me a greater part of the time in a flood of tears and weeping aloud. I felt an ardency of soul to be,
what I know not otherwise how to express, emptied and annihilated; to be in the dust and to be full
of Christ alone; to love him with a holy and pure love; to trust in him; to live upon him; to serve him;
and to be perfectly sanctified and made pure with a divine and heavenly purity."
And those who know of his subsequent life believe that the desire and prayer of his heart on this
occasion had a response from heaven. President Edwards himself gives the following description of
some of his subsequent experiences.
"I found from time to time an inward sweetness that would carry me away in my contemplations.
This I know not how to express otherwise than as a calm, sweet abstraction of the soul from all the
concerns of the world, and sometimes a kind of vision or fixed ideas and imaginations of being alone
in the mountains, or some solitary wilderness, far from all mankind, sweetly conversing with Christ,
and wrapped and swallowed up in God."
Dr. Gordon, in commenting on the above, says:
"We have heard Edwards called "the Isaiah of the Christian dispensation," profound wisdom and
seraphic devotion being so wonderfully united in him. Certainly here is a scene in the great
theologian's life which is strangely like that which the prophet so vividly pictured in his own. There
is the same overpowering vision of the Lord, the same melting of heart before his awful purity, and
the same self-surrendering consecration to his service. If the sealing of the Spirit can ever be
discovered in the lives of modern saints, we should say that here is a conspicuous instance. And as
we hear him preaching at Enfield, not long after, when, as he speaks, the impression of eternal things
is so powerful that men cling to the pillars of the Church, trembling before the impending terror of
the Lord, which he so vividly pictures, we exclaim, 'Truly the anointing which he hath received
abideth on Him!'"
We note three things in this experience: (1) that it was subsequent to conversion, (2) that it was
instantaneous, and (3) that it was an ethical and abiding fullness of the Spirit.
We next give the testimony of Mrs. President Edwards, which was put on record by her
distinguished husband. It seems, from what he says, that after Mrs. Edwards' conversion she had
been "subject to great unsteadiness in grace and frequent melancholy." It is said that while in this
frame of mind she "desired God above all other things," and that "this desire expressed itself in the
most searching self-surrender; and the delight which followed was this desire finding rest in its
supreme object." Of what followed this "extraordinary self-dedication and renunciation of the world"
President Edwards says: