Scriptural Sanctification - Media Sabda Org

SCRIPTURAL SANCTIFICATION:
An
Attempted Solution of the Holiness Problem
By The
Rev. John R. Brooks, D.D.
Chapter 16
TESTIMONY FROM EXPERIENCE CONTINUED
-- MULLER, FINNEY AND TAYLOR --
With some degree of reluctance we turn from the rich field of Christian experience and testimony
of the past centuries to the still richer one of the current century.
Go now with us where we may see "the standing miracle of the nineteenth century," George
Muller's Orphanage at Bristol, England. Does any one ask what is the secret of this one man's
"sheltering, feeding, clothing, and educating thousands of poor children through a long series of
years, with no funds or resources to draw from except what God has sent him in answer to prayer"?
The money expended in this work amounts to millions of dollars. This secret is revealed by a
distinguished divine, who gives the following short sketch of Miller's spiritual life:
"George Muller was converted in 1825 while a student in the University of Halle, but until 1829
he seems hardly to have known whether there be any Holy Spirit. He has graphically told us how in
that year, while staying at Tergumouth, in England, he was made acquainted with the person and
office work of the Comforter, and how the blessed secret of the Spirit's guidance and illumination
and induement was made known to him. It all came to him now as a divine baptism."
Of what followed this divine baptism we will let him, in his Life of Trust, speak: "In the
beginning of September I returned to London, much better in body; and as to my soul the change was
so great that it was like a second conversion." In speaking of the effect of studying the word under
the illuminating influence of the divine Anointer, he says: "The result was that the first evening I shut
myself in my room, to give myself to prayer and meditation over the Scriptures, I learned more in
a few hours than I had done during a period of several months previously."
His subsequent "work of faith and labor of love" for nearly three -fourths of a century attest the
fact that this "divine baptism" or "second conversion" was thorough in its nature and permanent in
its results. The author quoted above well says:
"He who four years before had drank of the water of life, now found it within him 'a well of water
springing up unto everlasting life,' and the third experience began at once to follow: 'Out of his heart
shall flow rivers of living water.' How many orphans' lives have those streams since enriched and
made glad!"
Four marks of this full salvation are here seen: It was after conversion, was instantaneous, was
certified to consciousness, and was abiding.