For He has not only
begun a good work in you, but He has begun that special and peculiar work
which, when it goes on to perfection, makes a great and an eminent saint
of God. To know your own heart as you evidently know it, and to hate it
as you say you hate it, and to hunger after a clean heart as, with every
breath, you hunger,--all that, if you would only believe it, sets you, or
will yet set you, high up among the people of God. Be comforted; it is
your bounden duty to be comforted. God deserves it at your hands that
you be more than comforted amid such unmistakable signs of His eminent
grace to you. And be patient under your exceptional sanctification. Rome
was not built in a day. You cannot reverse the awful law of your
sanctification. You cannot be saved by Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit
without seeing yourself, and you cannot see yourself without hating
yourself, and you cannot begin to hate yourself without all your hatred
henceforth turning against yourself. You are deep in the red-hot bosom
of the refiner's fire. And when you are once sufficiently tried by the
Divine Refiner of Souls, He will in His own good time and way bring you
out as gold.
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