His Deeper Work in Us by J Sidlow Baxter.
Some of the theological questions which were rifest twenty-five years ago are dead issues today. So quickly do human thought-currents change. It may be, also, that some of the older “strife of theories” which gathered round the subject of Scriptural holiness a generation or so ago has now spent itself into a rueful memory.
But may God save us from ever thinking that holiness itself is a spent issue; for Christian holiness, by which I mean individual holiness inwrought by the Holy Spirit, and then out-wrought through Christlike character, is a living issue, the importance of which nothing can ever eclipse. When the organized Church treats that as a spent issue, we may well write “Ichabod” over its doors. Only a few evenings ago a college professor said to me over the telephone, “My wife and I want to talk with you about the matter of holiness. We want to be all that God would have us be in this present life, so we want to know what the teaching of Scripture really is about holiness. Is it the eradication of all hereditary sin-bias in human nature? Can we ever become ’dead to sin’? What is the truth about being ‘filled with the Spirit’? Does it have to show itself by our ‘speaking in tongues’?” That professor and his wife represent thousands of holiness-hungry hearts. To some of those, at least, may the pages of this little book be as “a light from heaven” (Acts 9:3).
