In a Deep Pit

[A.B. Simpson tells of a testimony he heard from a Chinaman]:

"I was down in a deep pit, half sunk in the mire and was crying for someone to help me out."

[The man tells how Confucius and Buddha could not help him, but Jesus could.]

"I cried out to Him: 'Oh, Father, can you help me?' 'My child,' he said, 'what is the matter?' Before I could answer Him, He was down in the mire by my side; He folded his arms about me and lifted me up, and then He fed and rested me. When I was well, He did not say, 'Now, don't do that again,' but He said, 'We will walk on together now'; and we have been walking together until this day."

That's what Jesus Christ will do for you, beloved! He comes down to you where you are. He becomes your trust within you, and then you go on together until the resurrection light and glory of the coming age bursts in upon you. May God help us all to receive Him thus fully for his own name's sake! Amen.

-- A.B. Simpson, The Four-fold Gospel

How Is Jesus Our Healer?

1. Because He has brought healing for us with His stripes. It is a part of His purchased redemption on Calvary...



2. Because it is in His risen life in us. We have healing not only from Jesus, but in Jesus...



3. Because He enables us to take it by becoming our power to believe. He gives the faith to trust Him if we will receive it... He comes down to your helplessness and becomes our trust as well as our healing...



-- A.B. Simpson, The Four-fold Gospel

How Healing Is Received (cont.)

8. Divine healing is in accordance with all the facts of Church history... Great multitudes of healed ones proclaim with one voice: "Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, and today, and forever." All down through the middle ages the pure Church believed this truth and taught it...

9. Divine healing is one of the signs of the age. It is the forerunner of Christ's coming. It is God's answer to the infidelity of today. Man may try to reason it down with the force of his intellect. God meets it with this unanswerable proof of His power.

-- A.B. Simpson, The Four-fold Gospel

How Healing Is Received

6. Divine healing comes by the grace of God, not through the work of man... We cannot help God out in it. It comes to us as a gift...

7. It comes to us by faith. It is not the faith that heals. God heals, but faith receives it. We believe that God is healing before any evidence is given. It is to be believed as a present reality... We are to act as it it were already true. God wants us to lean on Him, and trust Him, and then rejoice and praise Him for what He has given, with no doubt or fear.

-- A.B. Simpson, The Four-fold Gospel

How Healing Is Received (cont.)

4. Divine healing comes to us through the life of Jesus Christ, who rose from the dead in His own body... This is our Christ, a living physical Christ, and He is able and willing to share His physical life with you, by breathing into you His strength...

5. It is the work of His Holy Spirit, quickening the body. When Christ healed the sick while He was upon earth, it was not by the Deity that dwelt in His humanity... Jesus healed by the Holy Ghost... Especially should we expect to see His working in these days, because they are the days of His own Dispensation, the days in which it has been prophesied that there shall be signs and wonders...

-- A. B. Simpson, The Four-fold Gospel

Divine Healing in the Redemption

I think this is a really thought-provoking passage. Lep



Divine healing is part of the redemption work of Jesus Christ. It is one of the things He came to bring. Its foundation stone is the cross of Calvary. "He redeemeth thy life from destruction." (Psalm 103)... "By His stripes we are healed." That is the redemption work of Christ. You have a right to it, beloved, for His body bore all the liability of your body on the cross. Take it and love Him better, because it came from His stripes. I love to think of that word as being in the singular number, stripe. That is the Greek meaning. His body was so beaten that it was all one stripe. There was not an inch of His flesh but was lacerated for us. There is not a fibre of your body but Christ has suffered there to redeem it.

-- A.B. Simpson, The Four-fold Gospel

Walk With God Required

That is the meaning of many of God's chastenings. There is much that He would say to men through His dealings with their bodies, and it is necessary to get their full meaning into the soul before Divine healing can be received, and kept after it has been received. It is not a cast-iron patent that works inexorably in one way always; it requires a walk that is very close with God. When the soul is thus walking in harmony and obedience to Him, the life of God can fully flow into the body. Thank God, we cannot have it and have the devil, too.

-- A.B. Simpson, The Four-fold Gospel

Sickness and Discipline

It may be, however, that your sickness has been allowed to come as a discipline. You may have been holding back part of the full testimony or service Christ has called you to. I am afraid, then, you cannot be healed till that difficulty is made right. You may be in some wrong and crooked attitude. He probably will not restore you till that is adjusted.

-- A.B. Simpson, The Four-fold Gospel

What Divine Healing Is

1. It is the supernatural, Divine power of God, infused into human bodies, renewing their strength and replacing the weakness and suffering human frames by the life and power of God. It is a touch of the Divine omnipotence, and nothing short of it...

2. It is founded, not on the [illegible] of man, or on the testimony of those who have been healed, but on the Word of God alone. All the testimony that could be gathered from the whole universe would not establish the truth of such a doctrine, if it is not to be found in the Scriptures...

3. It ever recognizes the will of God, and bows to that profound submission. A Christian who is looking for Divine healing will wait till he knows the will of God, and having learned that, he will claim it without wavering. If the sufferer is convinced that the work God gave him to do is done, and that now he is called home, then he should acquiesce in that will and lie down in those blessed arms and rest...

-- A.B. Simpson, The Four-fold Gospel

What Divine Healing Is Not (pt. 4)

(Items 6 & 8 are garbled on my ereader.)



7. Divine healing is not will power. No person can grapple with his own helplessness and turn it over into strength... If man is down, all the power in his own soul will not avail to lift him up...

9. Neither is it physical immortality, but it is fullness of life until the life-work is done, and then receiving our complete resurrection life at the coming of Christ.

10. Diving healing is not a mercenary medical profession that men adopt as they would adopt a trade or profession in order to make something out of it. If you find the mercenary idea appearing in it for a moment, discountenance and repudiate it. All the gifts of God are as free as the blood of Calvary.

-- A.B. Simpson, The Four-fold Gospel

What Divine Healing Is Not (pt. 3)

5. Divine healing is not prayer power. There are many Christians who greatly desire others to pray for them. If they can secure a certain quantity of prayer there will come a corresponding influence for good upon them, and if all the Christians in the world were to pray for them, they would expect to be healed. There is a general notion that there is a great deal of power in prayer which must have an effect if it can be concentrated. And if enough of it could be obtained, it would move mountains and perhaps be able to break down God' stubborn will. This is practically what this view teaches. There is no power in prayer unless it is the prayer of God Himself. Unless you are in contact with Christ the living Healer, there is no healing. Christ's healing is by His own Divine touch. It is not prayer cure, but Christ-Healing.

-- A.B. Simpson, The Four-fold Gospel

What Divine Healing Is Not (pt. 2)

2. Divine healing is not metaphysical healing. It is not a system of rationalism...

3. Divine healing is not magnetic healing. It is not a mysterious current which flows into one body from another...

4. Divine healing is not spiritualism... If Satan had power to bind a woman in Christ's time, for eighteen years, he had power to unbind her just as quickly. If sickness was his work then, it must surely be the same now. If he can use some persons better if they are strong and well, he will do so. Other instruments he can use better in weakness and pain...

-- A. B Simpson, The Four-fold Gospel

What Divine Healing Is Not

1. Divine healing is not medical healing.  It does not come to us through medicines, nor is it God's especial blessing on remedies and means.  It is the direct power of the Almighty hand of God Himself.  "Himself took our infirmities"...  We have nothing to say against the use of remedies so far as those are concerned who are not ready to trust their bodies fully to the Lord...  We cheerfully admit that their remedies have some value as far as they go.  There is some power in man's attempts to stop the tides of evil that sweep over a suffering world.  But there comes a point in all efforts when we have to say, "Thus far shalt thou go and no further."  Yet no one ought rashly to give up these human helps until they have got a better one.  Unless they have been led to trust Christ entirely for something higher and stronger than their nature life, they had better stick to natural remedies.  They need to be sure that God's Word distinctly presents healing for disease, and it does it as definitely as it does forgiveness of sin.

-- A.B. Simpson, The Four-fold Gospel

   

Practical Steps of Sanctification (pt. 2)

The moment we are consecrated to Jesus Christ we learn the secret that He is to be all-in-all to us.  But when we try to practice this truth, we find that it takes time and patience to learn it thoroughly .  We must learn to lean on Him.  We must learn little by little how to take Him for every need...  Remember the secret of it is, "Without Me ye can do nothing."  "I can do all things in Christ, who strengtheneth me."-- A. B. Simpson, The Four-fold Gospel

 

Practical Steps of Sanctification

Practical steps by which this life of sanctification is lived out day by day.
1. We are to live a life of implicit obedience to God, doing always what He bids and being henceforth wholly under His direction.
2. We are to ever listen diligently to His voice.  We will need to listen closely, for Jesus speaks softly.
3. In every time of conflict or temptation or testing, we are to draw near to God and give the matter over to Him.
-- A.B. Simpson, The Four-fold Gospel  

How Sanctification is Received (pt. 2)

2.  We must come to see Jesus as our sanctifier...  We must see in Him that great deliverer, and know that He is able to meet our every need and supply it.
3. We must make an entire surrender to Him in everything.  We must give ourselves to him thoroughly, definitely and unconditionally, and have it graven in the heart, as if it were written on the rocks, or painted on the sky...
4. We must believe that He receives the consecration we make...
Keep these four steps clear...  Jesus is my Sanctifier and my all-in-all.  I surrender everything into His hand for Him to do with as He thinks best... I believe He will be to me all I need in this life or in the world to come.
-- A.B. Simpson, The Four-fold Gospel

How Sanctification Is Received

1.  We must have a Divine revelation of our own need of sanctification before we will seek to obtain it.  We must see for ourselves that we are not sanctified, and that we must be sanctified if we would be happy.  The first thing God does often to bring us where we will see this, is to make us thoroughly ashamed of ourselves by letting us fall into mistakes and by bringing our frailties to our notice.  In these humiliating self-revealings we are able to see where we are not righteous, and we are made to learn that we cannot keep our resolutions of amendments that we make in our own strength.

-- A.B. Simpson, The Four-fold Gospel


 

Fully Dedicated

When the tabernacle was finished the Holy Ghost came down and possessed it, and dwelt in a burning fire upon the ark of the covenant, between the cherubim.  God lived there after it was dedicated to Him.  So when we are dedicated to God, He comes to live in us and transfuses His life though all our being.  -- A.B. Simpson, The Four-fold Gospel 

The Source of Sanctification (pt. 2)

3. Sanctification is to be received as one of the free gifts God desires to bestow upon us.  If it is not a gift then it is not a part of redemption.  If it is a part of redemption, then it is as free as the blood of Jesus.
4. It comes through the personal indwelling of Jesus.  He does not put righteousness into the heart simply, but He comes there personally Himself to live.
-- A.B. Simpson, The Four-fold Gospel

The Source of Sanctification

1. He has purchased it for us.  It is part of the fruit of Calvary... 
2. It does not come to us by our efforts, but it is made over to us as the purchase of His death upon the cross.  It is ours by the purchase of Jesus just as much as forgiveness is.  You have as much right to be holy and sanctified as you have to be saved.  You can go to God and claim it as your inheritance as much as you can your pardon for sin.  If you do not have it you are falling short of your redemption privileges.
-- A.B. Simpson, The Four-fold Gospel 

 

What Sanctification Is (part 2)

3. Sanctification includes conformity to the likeness of God.  We are to be in His image, and stamped with the impress of Jesus Christ.
4. Sanctification means conformity also to the will as well as the likeness of God... He desires the Divine will above everything else in life as kinder and wiser for him than anything else can be.
5. Sanctification means love, supreme love to God and all mankind... We cannot be conformed to the image of God without love, for God is love.
-- A.B. Simpson, The Four-fold Gospel