Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. 2 Corinthians 5:17b
A believer’s experience of the truth of God is no mere fancy. However severely experimental godliness may have been stigmatized by an unrenewed world, as the offspring of a morbid imagination, the product of an enthusiastic mind, “he that believes in the Son of God has the witness in himself,” that he has yielded the consent of his judgment and his affections to no “cunningly-devised fable.”
A sense of sin – brokenness and contrition before God – faith in the atoning blood of Christ – a sweet consciousness of pardon, acceptance, adoption, and joy in the Holy Spirit, are no mere hallucinations of a disordered mind. To read one’s pardon, fully, fairly written out – to look up to God as one accepted, adopted, to feel the spirit going out to Him in filial love and confidence, breathing its tender and endearing epithet, “Abba, Father,” – to refer every trial, cross, and dispensation of His providence to His tender and unchangeable love – to have one’s will, naturally so rebellious and perverse, completely absorbed in His – to be as a weaned child, simply and unreservedly yielded up to His disposal, and to live in the patient waiting for the glory that is to be revealed – oh, this is reality, sweet, blessed, solemn reality!
Holy and happy is that man whose heart is not a stranger to these truths.
Octavius Winslow (1808-1878)
A Particular Baptist Blog 