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Testimonies for the Church Volume 9
Will you, my ministering brethren, grasp the rich promises of
God? Will you put self out of sight and let Jesus appear? Self must
die before God can work through you. I feel alarmed as I see self
cropping out in one and another here and there. I tell you, in the
name of Jesus of Nazareth, your wills must die; they must become
as God’s will. He wants to melt you over and to cleanse you from
every defilement. There is a great work to be done for you before
you can be filled with the power of God. I beseech you to draw nigh
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to Him, that you may realize His rich blessing before this meeting
closes.
There are those here upon whom great light in warnings and
reproofs has shone. Whenever reproofs are given, the enemy seeks
to create in those reproved a desire for human sympathy. Therefore
I would warn you to beware lest in appealing to the sympathy of
others and going back over your past trials, you again err on the
same points in seeking to build yourselves up. The Lord brings His
erring children over the same ground again and again; but if they
continually fail to heed the admonitions of His Spirit, if they fail to
reform on every point where they have erred, He will finally leave
them to their own weakness.
I entreat you, brethren, to come to Christ and drink; drink freely
of the water of salvation. Do not appeal to your own feelings. Do
not think that sentimentalism is religion. Shake yourself from every
human prop and lean heavily upon Christ. You need a new fitting up
before you are prepared to engage in the work of saving souls. Your
words, your actions, have an influence upon others, and you must
meet that influence in the day of God. Jesus says: “Behold, I have
set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it.”
Revelation
3:8
. Light is shining from that door, and it is our privilege to receive
it if we will. Let us direct our eyes within that open door and try to
receive all that Christ is willing to bestow.
Each one will have a close struggle to overcome sin in his own
heart. This is at times a very painful and discouraging work; be-
cause, as we see the deformities in our character, we keep looking
at them, when we should look to Jesus and put on the robe of His
righteousness. Everyone who enters the pearly gates of the city of
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God will enter there as a conqueror, and his greatest conquest will
have been the conquest of self.