God in You

And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness. EPHESIANS 4:24

The centre of Amanda Smith’s life and teaching was a single Sunday morning in September 1868. She had been converted for twelve years, and for almost all of that time she had been hungry for something she could not find or even name. The chapter of her Autobiography called The Blessing of Sanctification tells how she found it, and it is the key to everything else she believed.

Twelve years in the wilderness

The hunger came soon after her conversion. She was leading a class, praying with the dying at midnight, seeing souls converted, and still there was an ache she could not explain. A minister’s wife told her that if she kept on so she would go crazy. Then one day she read the first verse of the forty-second Psalm, and found words for it at last. “Oh!” she said, “That’s what I wanted—God!”

As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. PSALM 42:1

So she tried works. She would be immersed, and then, having done everything the Bible required, the Lord would be obliged to give her the blessing. When that fell through she proposed foot-washing with her band of praying sisters. That too was hindered again and again, and she came to see the hindrance as mercy: otherwise, she wrote, she might have gone about teaching that immersion and foot-washing were necessary to be sanctified. The Lord had saved her from seeking salvation by works.

This only would I learn of you, Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith? GALATIANS 3:2

Green Street

What finally led her to Green Street was, as she believed, an inward word: on Sunday morning go and hear John Inskip. She was argued with at every corner on the way — her husband would be angry, she should go somewhere nearer, Inskip was not even there — and went on. He was there, and took his text from Ephesians 4:24.

During the sermon she seemed three times to hear her baby screaming at home, and each time a quiet voice said, Trust the Lord. At the third she said she would trust the Lord with the child even if he were dead. Just then Inskip spoke of those who were troubled about how they could keep the blessing if they got it. She was sure he meant her. He gave an illustration: when you go to bed tired you do not arrange anything in order to breathe; you simply breathe all night. “You don’t need to fix any way for God to live in you,” she heard him say; “get God in you in all His fullness and he will live Himself.”

That was the moment. She felt herself, as she put it, sink down out of sight of herself and then rise, and words rang through her like a bell: God in you. She asked herself, doing what? And the answer came: ruling every ambition and desire, and bringing every thought into captivity to His will.

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me. GALATIANS 2:20

A lamp in a dark room

Inskip gave another illustration that morning, and she never forgot it. The blessing of purity, like pardon, is received by faith; and if by faith, why not now? “How long is a dark room dark when you take a lighted lamp into it?” That is the heart of her doctrine of entire sanctification: that it is received, like justification, by faith, in a moment, as a gift.

Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:24

She came to understand the difference between her conversion and her sanctification with a picture that could only have come from a washerwoman who sewed at night. What is the difference, she asked the Lord, between the two? And the answer came as a question: what is the difference between sunlight and moonlight? She had often sewed by moonlight, and it was beautiful; that was her justified state. But the sun gets into every crack and nail-hole and leaves no room for frost. There were deep recesses in her heart that the moonlight did not reveal; the sunlight of sanctification searched them all.

The second touch

She also asked, as many do, why God had not done it all at once. The question, she came to believe, was meant to make her think unkindly of God. The answer came by another question: why did Jesus not make the blind man at Bethsaida see clearly at the first touch? He had the same power in both. She concluded that it was none of her business why; it was enough that He had done it. She quit, as she put it, asking God questions about His own work.

After that he put his hands again upon his eyes, and made him look up: and he was restored, and saw every man clearly. MARK 8:25

Weighing the doctrine

Here the reader must weigh her carefully. Amanda Smith taught, with the Methodist holiness movement of Phoebe Palmer and John Inskip, that entire sanctification is a distinct second work of grace, received instantaneously by faith after conversion, which cleanses the heart from inbred sin and fills it with perfect love. Many sincere and careful Christians read the New Testament differently. They see sanctification as a lifelong work, never complete in this life, and fear that the language of a finished experience can lead to despair or self-deception.

Both sides should notice what she did not claim. She never said that a sanctified person does not sin, grow, or struggle. Her own book is full of her failures after 1868, and she insisted, “There is much of the human nature for us to battle with, even after we are wholly sanctified.” She described her experience not as arrival but as the inauguration, as she put it, of a perpetual May-day that would go on increasing in faith and light and strength. And the heart of what she received on Green Street is something every tradition should want: the believer ceasing to hold herself together and trusting God to live in her. Whether it comes once, or many times, or as a gradual dawning, that is the thing to seek.

Now the God of peace … make you perfect in every good work to do his will, working in you that which is wellpleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ. HEBREWS 13:20–21

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Can you name the hunger in you as she did — not for a blessing or an experience, but for God? Pray Psalm 42:1 as your own prayer this week.

2. Notice where you are trying to earn from God, by some religious act or discipline, what He means to give by faith. Stop, and ask for it as a gift.

3. Take Inskip’s illustration to bed with you tonight. You do not arrange your breathing; ask God to live in you as simply as that.

4. Where you disagree with her doctrine of a second blessing, write down from Scripture why. Then ask whether you have the thing itself: a heart that has stopped holding back from God.

5. Ask God to shine into the dark corners of your heart that the moonlight has not reached. Wait for Him to show you one, and deal with it.

A PRAYER

Lord God, my soul pants after You. Not after a blessing, not after a feeling, but after You.

I have tried to hold myself together, and to earn from You what You mean to give. I stop now. Come and live in me, and live Yourself.

Rule every ambition and desire, and bring every thought into captivity to Your will.

Shine into every corner of my heart, and leave no room for frost, through Jesus Christ my Lord. Amen.