Introduction

For this is the will of God, even your sanctification. 1 THESSALONIANS 4:3

Amanda Berry Smith is usually remembered as a story. She was born into slavery in Maryland in 1837, and her father bought her freedom with years of extra labour by night. She had about three months of schooling in her whole life. She buried two husbands and four of her five children, and for years she kept herself and her daughter by taking in washing. Then, with no ordination, no salary and no society behind her, she became one of the best-known holiness preachers of her century, in America, Britain, India and West Africa.

But this book is not only about her story. It is about what she taught. She wrote no treatise and no book of sermons, only one large book, An Autobiography, published in 1893, which she called in its last pages just the simple story of God’s dealings with her. Yet the story is full of teaching, and the teaching is not naive. On conversion and assurance, on holiness and temptation, on prayer and guidance, on suffering and on race, she saw things clearly and said them plainly. Bishop James Thoburn of India, who knew her well, wrote in the introduction to her Autobiography that he had learned more of real use to him as a preacher from her than from any other one person he had met. She was a theologian of lived holiness. Her classroom was a wash-tub and a cellar floor, and her examinations were set by grief, poverty and prejudice.

One thread

Her teaching is easy to summarise, because she learned it in one sentence on one Sunday morning, and spent the rest of her life unfolding it. In September 1868, in the Green Street Methodist church in New York, the only Black woman in the congregation, she heard John Inskip say that a believer need not fix any way for God to live in her; she had only to get God in her in all His fullness, and He would live Himself. The words that rang through her, as she tells it, were these: “God in you, God in you.”

Christ in you, the hope of glory. COLOSSIANS 1:27

That is the thread through all of it. Salvation, for Amanda Smith, was not only pardon, though it began there. It was God Himself come to dwell in the heart, to rule it and fill it. God in you meant assurance, because the Spirit who lives within bears witness. It meant holiness, because He cleanses the house He lives in. It meant freedom from fear — the fear of white people, the fear of men and women, the fear of the ocean — because the perfect love of God casts fear out. It meant guidance, because He speaks. It meant daily bread, because He is a Father. It meant strength to bury a child and say Thy will be done. And it meant that a washerwoman might be sent anywhere in the world, because the One who sent her would go with her.

So the question to carry through this book is her question: is God in me, or only near me? Do I know Him as a doctrine, or as the One who lives here?

How this book is arranged

After a chapter on her life, the book follows the order of her own experience: conversion, the witness of the Spirit, and the blessing she called sanctification. Then it follows that grace into a hard marriage and daily work, into her deliverance from the fear of man and the honest witness about colour and the church that it set free. Next come the inner lessons she learned the hard way — dark seasons, guidance, obedience, prayer for daily bread, bereavement and sickness. The rest follow her outward: her call to preach, her fellowship in the holiness movement, her work in India and Africa, temperance, children, and her plain and simple life.

Each chapter ends with application points and a prayer. She never told a story for its own sake; every account in her book ends in a lesson, a hymn, or a Hallelujah. Read one chapter at a time. Stop at the application points and actually attempt them. Pray the prayer, or better, pray your own.

Where she must be read with care

This is not a book of hero-worship, and it is better to say at the outset where she must be read with care.

First, impressions. She lived by inward whispers, texts that seemed to leap from the page, and signs she asked of God. Many were plainly used by Him. But she tells us herself that she was once badly misled by what looked like the Lord’s will, and that she had to learn by painful experience to tell the Spirit’s voice from her own wishes and the tempter’s.

Second, holiness. She taught, with the Methodist holiness movement of her day, that entire sanctification is a second definite work of grace, received by faith after conversion. Many godly Christians read the same Scriptures and see a lifelong process of growth rather than a single crisis. This book notes where the disagreement lies.

Third, her era. She saw India and Africa as a nineteenth-century missionary, and wrote of heathen darkness and Christian civilisation in the language of her time. Some of her judgements will trouble a modern reader; she was also often more honest than her contemporaries about the failures of missionaries and churches. We will state both soberly.

Fourth, temperance. She held total abstinence from alcohol as a rule for every Christian, not as a wise choice for many.

Why read her at all, then? Because on the central matter she was right, and because she lived it at a cost few of us will ever pay. So the counsel of this book is the counsel of Scripture: Prove all things; hold fast that which is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Weigh every chapter against the Word of God. Where she is faithful — and on the reality of the new birth, the witness of the Spirit, the love that casts out fear, and the faithfulness of God to the poor, she is faithful indeed — receive it and act on it. Where she presses beyond what is written, mark it, set it aside, and lose nothing.

Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the LORD of hosts. ZECHARIAH 4:6

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Write down, honestly, how you would answer her question: is God in me, or only near me? What evidence would you give?

2. Decide now how you will read this book — one chapter at a time, with the application points actually attempted before you go on.

3. Name one fear that governs more of your life than it should. Keep it in view as you read; she will have something to say to it.

4. Where you already suspect you will disagree with her, note it, and resolve to test her by Scripture rather than by your habits.

5. Find her Autobiography in the Ochorus library and read its short preface. Notice how little she had, and what she did with it.

A PRAYER

Lord God, You chose a washerwoman who had three months of schooling and made her a teacher of Your people. You are not limited by what I lack.

I know a great deal about You. Come and live in me, so that I know You.

Where Your servant saw truly, open my eyes to see it too. Where she went beyond Your Word, give me wisdom to see it and humility not to despise her.

Let this book do more than move me. Let it change me, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.