Now,
understand me definitely, you cannot cleanse yourself. God cleanses
you through faith in the cleansing blood of His Son. It is His work.
You cannot grow into it. You can grow in it, but if you don't grow in
it you may know you are not in it--you are in something else. But you
can grow in it, because it is God's work, and He will do it when you
believe. But what of that? What are you after you are cleansed? I will
tell you. You are a clean baby: that is all. You are not a man in
Christ Jesus; you are only a babe--cleansed, indeed, and greatly
improved by the process, too, but you are not matured. Do not miss,
now, the broad distinction between purity and maturity. You are
purified, through faith, in a second; you are matured through many a
struggle and many a year. God cannot make a twenty-one-year-old saint
in one second less than twenty-one years. There is no platform marked
over with faith upon which a man may step and be lifted up into the
perfect stature of a man in Christ Jesus in a minute. It is not the
teaching of the Book. But all the year, loving, and giving, and
fighting, and praying, and walking in righteousness, you will mature
characters, and by and by you will grow into the manhood in Christ
Jesus that is set before us in the gospel.
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