WHEN THE TIDE SEEMINGLY GOES OUT . . .

William Booth’s best known piece of writing may be the seven verses of his song, O Boundless Salvation . . . deep ocean of love.  Recently it was the theme song of The Salvation Army’s 150^th anniversary celebration in the city of its birth in 1865, London, England.  The song is a powerful metaphor for the saving grace of God, his immeasurable and unfathomable love for the world.

Samuel Logan Brengle also makes reference to the love of God as an ocean of love when he states that when the Holy Spirit fills our hearts and lives and abides in us, “the low water mark of our experience will be ‘perfect peace’.”  He writes that he doesn’t dare say what the high water mark will be.  Brengle raises a helpful word of assurance for those who worry that the tide has gone out.   To those concerned when all the high, spirited emotion of spiritual experience seems to disappear, and when it seems like the Holy Spirit has left us high and dry.  He writes –

“Don’t think that when the tide flows out to the low water mark that the Comforter (the Holy Spirit) has left you. . . Don’t think he has left you because you are not overflowing with emotion.  Hold fast to your faith. . . The Holy Spirit is not capricious and fickle. . . Be true, be full of faith, and you will be able to say with Paul: ‘I am persuaded that that neither death, not life, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate me from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ (Rom. 8:37-39.”

In our daily experience of God’s deep ocean of love, the emotions of the experience will ebb and flow.  There will be higher and higher water marks as we mature and grow, and as God’s infilling of his holy love increases.  But there will be low water marks as well.  That’s a good thing.  It means that as we grow in God’s grace our capacity to receive his love increases.  What was a high water mark becomes merely a lower water mark in the process of our growing in capacity more and more.  What at first was a thimble like capacity to love becomes the capacity of a coffee mug, then a bath tub, swimming pool, and Lake Michigan.  The purpose of our growth in grace and in his likeness is to be filled each day to the brim.  Each day we grow.  He sets the brim a little higher and fills us again with his very self.  

When you think the tide has seemingly gone out, rejoice!  God is steadfast and faithful.  He is at work growing your capacity to be filled. He then fills to the brim and we do unimaginable things for the Kingdom. Glory to God!

Fill my cup, Lord.  I lift it up, Lord.

Thy Kingdom come!

THE WAY SOCIAL HOLINESS WORKS

The Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is social in nature.  While the three in one nature is a mystery, what is amazing is that God’s love seeks to draw us into the social life of the Trinity.  Our life in Christ is social, that is to say dynamic, interactive, interpersonal, intimate, collective, and filled with loving fellowship.  That is because at the very heart of life is the holy, love of God. For God so loved the world, loved us so much, that he took sacrificial action on our behalf (John 1:14).  Christ’s life and death was a labor and offering of unreserved love for us.  The gift of God’s very self at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit, was a gift of perfect love, holy and pure.  The entire story of God and man is a love story, a social narrative of God’s grace and our response over millennia.  It is a story of God’s great gift of our restoration to holiness, his likeness and infilling.  It is a story of how God deploys human agency to make possible a full salvation.  Its a story of the way social holiness works.

Here is a snapshot of how God’s love is passed to us and then from us to others.  It is a snapshot of the social nature of holiness.  I’ve known Dr. David Rightmire nearly all my life.  I first met him at his sister’s birthday party in Waltham, Massachusetts when he was five years old and I was eight.  While we have traveled different paths over the years, we now live in the same town (Wilmore, Kentucky) only a block from each other and enjoy a renewed friendship.  David is a professor at Asbury University.  He is a highly respected teacher and scholar.  He is the author of Sanctified Sanity: The Life and Theology of Samuel Logan Brengle.  Brengle was a Salvation Army officer and a renowned proponent of Wesleyan Holiness in the early twentieth century.  David’s writing on Brengle is a labor of love, a gift of knowledge to others.  His book is so well written, covering the life and theology of Brengle, that after reading it I gave a copy to my daughter and son, and more recently to my

daughter-in-law.

My daughter read Sanctified Sanity thoroughly then took up reading Brengle’s Helps to Holiness and other books.  She began telling her husband about Brengle and gave him a copy of the book as a gift.  He then shared Brengle with four of his friends: a pastor, and three seminary students. This led the five of them to use Brengle’s writings on holiness as the focus of their weekly Bible study on early Friday mornings.  How wonderful! 

David’s labor of love, Sanctified Sanity, is now  available in a revised and expanded edition.  I expect it will be passed on to others inspiring a renewed interest in the writings of Samuel Logan Brengle, God’s remarkable soldier/saint.  This is how social holiness works. It moves from the love of the writer to the reader.  In love the reader passes the Good News of a full salvation exposited by Brengle to others  so, they too may be “filled to the measure of the fullness of God” (Ephesians 2:19), and then share the message of that fullness with yet others.  Thanks be to God for his unimaginable gifts that keep on giving!

That we might be partakers of the divine nature.

2 Peter 1:4

WHAT TO DO ABOUT SIN

Bramwell & William Booth

There is a story about The Salvation Army’s founder, General William Booth.  His son, Bramwell, was passing by his father’s home very late one night and saw the light still on in the General’s bedroom with the General pacing back and forth.  He was advanced in age and somewhat frail. Bramwell inquired, “Father, what are you doing up so late?  Shouldn’t you be asleep by now.”  Booth’s response was something to the effect, “I can’t stop thinking about the peoples' sin.  What are they to do about their sin.”

General Booth was a realist.  Sin was a major issue for all people then as it is now.  In reality, the General and his Army would be steadfast in their teaching and preaching about sin and the need for a full salvation for all humanity.  Their mission did not just stop with getting people saved from the uttermost of sin, but helping them to go on to being saved to the uttermost of Christlikeness, holiness.

We don’t hear teaching and preaching about sin much anymore.  It’s rare, and holiness seems to be off the table as a topic as well.  There is no doubt that sin abounds.  We read it in the paper, see it portrayed in the media, and celebrate it with time spent watching it on Netficks and on the internet.  So many Christians remain burdened down by sin.  We find laudable a supposedly elite group of saints who remind us that there is something to the idea of holiness, but ignore God's offer of a full salvation, a complete work of grace.  Sadly it's true now. Neither sin nor holiness are topics to be raised in polite company. We don’t teach it nor preach it much.  How far we’ve drifted (fallen) away from what’s on God’s heart and mind, his desire for every believer.

John Wesley had something to say about sin.  In his 1763 sermon, On Sin In Believers, he says the following:

          There are in every person, even after he is justified, two contrary Principles, nature and grace, termed by St. Paul the flesh and the spirit.  Hence, although even babes in Christ are sanctified, yet it is only in part.  In a degree, according to the measure of their faith, they are spiritual; yet in degree they are carnal . . . they feel a will not wholly resigned to the will of God. They know they are in him; and yet find a heart ready to depart from

him, a proneness to evil in many instances, and a backwardness to that which

is good. . . and . . . Although we are renewed, cleansed, purified, sanctified the moment we truly believe in Christ, yet we are not then renewed, cleansed, purified altogether, but the flesh, the evil nature still remains (though subdued) and wars against the Spirit.

This word from Wesley likely disturbed his listeners.  It was not that they were a band of robbers or murders, but their small lies, deceits, gossip, dishonesty, fained concerns for others, their outward appearance of holiness and yet inward sin was being called for what it was, a remaining carnality, a residue of sinful habits of the heart.  This is a word we don’t like to hear today, but where is there not “a proneness to evil” and "a backwardness to that which is good,” if not in sins of commission, then in sins of omission?

Nevertheless, God does not will us to continue a life that leans readily into sin.  Where sin abounded, grace more abounded (Romans 5:20), and still does.  Our salvation can be a full one:  from the guilt and penalty of sin in the past to power over sin and to sanctification, purity of heart, holiness in the likeness of Our Lord.  Thanks be to God.

            May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through.

            May your whole spirit, soul, and body be kept blameless at the coming

            of our Lord Jesus Christ.  The one who calls you is faithful.  He will do it.

1 Thessalonians 5:23-34

INTIMACY WITH GOD

The Temple in Jesus’ day was designed around the idea of intimacy.  As you moved through each gate and court you progressed toward the holy of holies where only the High Priest once a year could enter on behalf of the nation into God’s presence.  Gentiles then women could only go so far, then men, and even priest.  Proximity to God was limited.  With the sacrifice of Christ on the cross and His resurrection, that all changed.  No longer is intimacy with God so bounded and constrained, but rather open and accessible to all.  Thanks be to God we can know God, not just know about Him.  We can come to an ever-deepening relationship with him.  It is up to us, though, to maintain and cultivate the intimacy we have with God by our daily obedient response to the grace he gives us each day.

Samuel Logan Brengle, in a chapter entitled “Knowing Jesus” (in Heart Talks on Holiness) raises the question of how we might maintain and cultivate communion and intimacy with Him.  He uses the metaphor of marriage to say,

“It is possible for a husband and wife to live together for many years, and instead of increasing, except in the most superficial way, in the knowledge of each other, to grow apart, until after many years they are heart strangers to each other, with separate interests, conflicting desires, tempers, and alien affinities.  To really know each other they must be bound together by stronger ties than mere legal forms; they must commune with each other, live in each other’s hearts, enter into each other’s joys, and share each other’s sorrows, counsel each other in perplexity, seek the same ends and cultivate the same spirit.

And so to know Jesus, there must be sympathy, fellowship, friendship constantly cultivated.  The heart must turn to Him, pour itself out before Him, share its hopes, its joys, its fears with Him, draw its consolations, its strength, its courage, its sufficiency, its life from Him, trust and obey Him and delight itself in Him as its everlasting portion.

Secret prayer must often bring the soul face to face with Him, and the Bible, God’s record of Him, must be daily, diligently and lovingly searched, and faithfully applied to daily life.  Thus shall we know Him, and be ‘changed into the same image, from glory to glory, as by the Spirit of the Lord,’ and people shall see and feel ‘Christ in us, the hope of glory.’”

One of the great blessings of experiencing each day an increasing intimacy with God is His continuing work shaping us into His likeness.  With His hands on the clay of our lives, He is shaping and perfecting us so that He can fill our hearts and lives with his very self in His desire to be intimate and make Himself known.  Glory to such a God!