Conclusion

Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord. HEBREWS 12:14

Seventeen chapters can make it look as though Amanda Smith taught a great many things. She taught one thing, and everything else is that one thing lived out. The one thing is this: God in you. Follow it through and the whole shape appears. Conversion is the moment a proud and weary soul stops arranging its own salvation and says, Lord, I will believe Thee. Assurance is the Spirit within bearing witness that it is so. Holiness is God filling the house He has entered, ruling every ambition and desire, living Himself. And because He lives there, the rest follows: enduring grace at the wash-tub, love that casts out fear, a Father who speaks and must be obeyed, bread and rent from His hand, a will that can bend over a dying child, courage to preach without a title, a heart wide enough for every nation, and a life simple enough to care more for a soul than a bonnet.

The danger of this book

If you have read this far, you are in some danger, and she would have named it at once. The danger is that you enjoy her. It is easy to be moved by the story of a formerly enslaved washerwoman who preached on four continents, and to close the book exactly as you opened it. She had no interest in being admired. She wrote her whole Autobiography, she said, in the hope that it would bring readers nearer to God and to a deeper consecration, and she would be sadly disappointed if it did not.

But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. JAMES 1:22

So the plainest counsel this book can give is the counsel she gave at every altar. Go back to the chapter that unsettled you most — not the one you enjoyed. Take its application points and do them. Then take the next.

Two things to carry

First, let God in. Not a technique, a feeling or more information about holiness — she once longed to tell a woman who had read all the books that it was not in the books — but God Himself, received by faith, now. She believed that no one was too poor, too unschooled or too despised to be filled. She had been all of those.

Second, obey. The great test of her life was not whether she could feel God but whether she would do what He said: lift her hand, give the tract, go to Salem, cross the ocean. She confessed many failures, and she kept getting up. She reckoned that she could afford almost any loss except the loss that comes from disobeying God. Carry that arithmetic with you.

A last word about her

We have been honest about where she must be read with care: her reliance on impressions, signs and random texts; a doctrine of a second blessing that serious Christians dispute; judgements about India and Africa shaped by her era; and a rule of total abstinence laid on every conscience. None of this has been raised to diminish her. It has been raised because she herself hated hollowness and sham, and a portrait that left out the shadows would be exactly that.

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us. 2 CORINTHIANS 4:7

And the light is very bright. She was bought out of slavery by her father’s sleepless nights and set free again at the cross. She buried four children and two husbands and kept her faith. She washed and ironed through the night and found Christ at the ironing table. She walked into a white church afraid and walked out free. She preached without ordination. She crossed the ocean she feared and carried the gospel to three continents with no salary but the promises of God. She took other people’s children as her own. And when she wrote her story, she ended it not with herself but with a prayer for the younger women who would come after her.

Without holiness

That last page is the right place to end. She hoped that others, with better opportunities than she ever had, would take up the standard when she fell, bearing the inscription deeply engraved on heart and life: Without holiness, no man shall see the Lord. She did not mean a holiness of rules and bonnets. She meant the holiness she found on Green Street: God in you, living Himself.

Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy. JUDE 1:24

The standard is still there to be taken up.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Name the one chapter of this book that unsettled you most, and the one application point from it you have not yet done. Do it this week.

2. Ask God plainly to come and live in you fully, and to rule every ambition and desire. Do not wait for a feeling; believe Him.

3. Write down one act of obedience you have been postponing, and a date by which you will do it.

4. Where you disagree with her, write down why, from Scripture. Where you agree, write down what it will cost you.

5. Read her Autobiography for yourself, a chapter at a time, as a conversation with a sister who will not let you settle for less than God.

A PRAYER

Lord God, I have read about a woman who wanted nothing but You, and I am quite capable of admiring her and changing nothing.

Do not let me. Come and live in me, and live Yourself. Rule every ambition and desire, and cast out every fear.

Give me her obedience, her simplicity, her courage and her joy, and forgive me for the moments I have let pass.

Make me holy, for without holiness no one shall see You; and let me see You, through Jesus Christ. Amen.