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Holiness: Pitfalls, Struggles, and VictoryCopyright 2016 by David Cloud

ISBN 978-1-58318-215-4

Published by Way of Life LiteratureP.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061

866-295-4143 (toll free) • fbns@wayoflife.orghttp://www.wayoflife.org

Canada: Bethel Baptist Church, 4212 Campbell St. N., London, Ont. N6P 1A6

519-652-2619

Printed in Canada byBethel Baptist Print Ministry

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CONTENTS

....................................................................Walking or Flying 5...........................................................................Introduction 19

.......................................................................Revival Is Near 21...........................................................Principles of Holiness 29

.............................................................The Path of Holiness 61.......................................................On Doubting Salvation 138

...................................................................Eternal Security 151

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Holiness: Pitfalls, Struggles, and Victory

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Walking or Flying

By the time I came to Christ at age 23, I was a mess because of sin. I started drinking in high school and using drugs during a tour in Vietnam. After I returned to the States and was discharged from the Army, I sold drugs for a living for a short while, then I traveled across America from Florida to California and back twice, hitchhiking much of the way. I was living the foolish rock & roll lifestyle to the hilt. I joined a Hindu meditation society and dabbled in other philosophies.

Filthy habits, immorality, drugs, liquor, cursing and blasphemy, these things wound the spirit deeply, and they leave moral and emotional scars. You can’t play with fire without getting burned, and burns, even when healed, leave scars.

I have struggled with depression throughout my Christian life, and I am convinced that it stems from my former lifestyle, particularly the heavy drug usage and even more particularly the hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD and psilocybin. I believe I was harmed psychically and emotionally by marijuana, too, which was my first drug other than liquor and proved to be the door to other drugs.

By the time I came to Christ, I was deeply depressed. I never had a happy thought. I didn’t look forward to anything. My emotions were dead. My feelings were dark and anxious.

I came to Christ in a motel room in Daytona Beach, Florida, in the summer of 1973. I had spent a few days traveling with a Christian brother who patiently taught me the Bible, and the final night together the Lord answered the prayers of my mother and father and godly maternal grandmother and others, and I was peacefully but dramatically converted. One hour I was antagonistic toward Christ and the Bible, believing there are many paths to God and that I needed to follow my own heart, and the next hour

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I was a Bible believer who was 100% convinced that Christ is the only Lord and Saviour.

I began to grow and I was greatly changed in many ways, but I was still depressed a lot. It wasn’t as deep and relentless as before, and now I looked forward to many things and was excited about life and could laugh again; but the depression was still real, and the devil used that. He would whisper to me that God hadn’t accepted me, that I was a hypocrite, that I was unloveable and unloved, that there was no hope that I could be changed. Some nights, especially, the battle was terrible. Many times I again called out to the Lord to save me! The problem wasn’t limited to depression. The problem

was sin. I still got angry a lot. My thoughts weren’t always pure. I still doubted and feared. I still loved rock & roll. I was still greatly tempted by the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. I had renounced the world for Christ; I understand the world’s emptiness and unholiness, and on one hand I didn’t want anything more to do with it, but the world still had a hold on me in some ways.

I wanted complete, abiding, unchanging victory, but I couldn’t find it.

I am reminded of Harry Ironside’s description of his early Christian life.

“As nearly as I can now recollect, I was in the enjoyment of the knowledge of God’s salvation about a month when, in some dispute with my brother, who was younger than I, my temper suddenly escaped control, and in an angry passion I struck and felled him to the ground. Horror immediately filled my soul. I needed not his sarcastic taunt, ‘Well, you are a nice Christian!’ ... From this time on mine was an ‘up-and-down experience,’ to use a term often heard in ‘testimony meetings.’ I longed for perfect victory over the lusts and desires of the flesh. Yet I seemed to have more trouble with evil thoughts and unholy propensities than I had ever known before. For a long

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time I kept these conflicts hidden, and known only to God and to myself” (Ironside, Holiness the False and the True).

For the first several weeks after I came to Christ, I didn’t have a good church or Christian friends to help me. I was looking for a church, but I hadn’t yet found a scriptural one. It was a difficult time, but the Lord used even those experiences to teach me things I probably could not have learned otherwise (Romans 8:28).

Forty-three years later, I don’t have deep and dark and relentless depression. That’s long gone, but at times I am plagued with mild depression, sometimes worse than other times. Many mornings I wake up depressed, and there are days when it doesn’t entirely leave. Then I have very good days with no depression at all and I experience a lot of joy.

I am saying that sin leaves scars and deep sin leaves deep scars, and you will live with those scars the rest of this life, and they will affect the depth and height of your holiness.

(I am not writing a treatise on depression here. There are causes for it other than the scars of sin, and these include physical ailments and the sovereignty of God, Romans 8:28. The famous preacher Charles Spurgeon had a lot of depression, and he didn’t sow any “wild oats,” to speak of.)This must not be an excuse for sin, but it is a reality,

nonetheless. It is a reminder of the importance of getting saved young

and living for Christ so that one’s life is not scarred by wallowing in sin. The popular idea that it is alright, perhaps even good, for young people in Christian homes and churches to “sow some wild oats” is foolish and devilish.

I began devouring Scripture from the first day I was saved. The man who led me to Christ bought me a large print King James Bible and a Strong’s Concordance, and I literally wore them out the first year.

I wanted to “prove all things” by God’s Word so that I would not go astray or be deceived, and I understood that I

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could not do this unless I knew God’s Word. I held fast to two promises from Scripture. One was John 8:31-32, which is a promise that those who continue in God’s Word will know the truth and be set free. The other was John 7:17, which says that those who do God’s will shall know true doctrine. I understood these to be conditional promises. If I continue in God’s Word--reading, studying, memorizing, meditating, and obeying--I will know the truth and understand sound doctrine.

As a young Christian, I also I began studying about holiness and spiritual victory in resources outside of the Bible.

Since I was led to Christ by an old-line Pentecostal, I first studied this from a Pentecostal perspective. I read books and attended some Pentecostal services and a Nicky Cruz Crusade. I wanted everything the Lord had for me, and longed for spiritual victory and growth. I wanted to get beyond the struggle that I was experiencing as a young Christian.

Pentecostalism emphasizes a perfectionist holiness experience that centers on a “baptism of the Spirit.” In Pentecostal meetings, there is pressure to seek this experience and to display an exuberance. I was supposed to be and expected to be “be happy in the Lord,” but I wasn’t so very happy! It all felt very artificial and forced.

I was encouraged by James 5:13. The afflicted isn’t told to be merry; he is told to pray.

I prayed about whether I should seek the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and I have no doubt that I would have sought it with all my heart had I found justification in Scripture to do so. But I was studying Scripture earnestly and trying to test everything by it, and I couldn’t find justification to seek the baptism of the Spirit. There is no Scriptural command to seek it; the only mention of it in the Epistles is in the past tense (1 Cor. 12:13); so I did not pursue that. The more I studied the Scripture and the more I examined Pentecostalism, the more

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I saw that the “baptisms” and “tongues” and “prophesyings” practiced today are not what we find in Scripture. I gradually came to a secessionist position on the apostolic gifts, being convinced that the sign gifts were apostolic and pertained to the laying of the church’s foundation (2 Cor. 12:12; Eph. 2:20). I don’t believe that miracles ceased, but I believe that sign miracles ceased. I was further confirmed in this by the study of history, as I cannot see the apostolic sign gifts operating scripturally anywhere in history since the apostles.

Fairly early in my Christian life I talked with a Pentecostal preacher from England who claimed to be a prophet. He was preaching second Spirit baptisms and holy perfectionism. When I inquired about his walk with Christ, he admitted that he had not achieved perfection. He said, “I do get frustrated and angry at times when I travel.” I thought, “Welcome to the real world! You don’t have anything that I don’t have.” That was one of the many occasions when I realized that those who preach perfectionism or “always overflowing cup” experiences are theoreticians who don’t actually live it.

At the first independent Baptist church I joined, I was introduced to “deeper life” or “higher life” teachings. The first book I read on that was Calvary Road by Roy and Revel Hession. A godly Christian woman recommended it. She told me that she read Calvary Road every year. Published in 1950, Calvary Road contains messages that first appeared in a revival paper titled Challenge published by the Hessions beginning in the 1940s. It describes an experience called “walking in revival” and “walking in the way of the cross” and “the highway life” that is achieved by focusing one’s attention on Calvary. It contains many excellent teachings on dying to self, humility, and sensitivity to sin. But there is an overriding emphasis that one can walk in a near perfect spiritual revival experience that is described as a “life that will fill us and overflow through us,” “constant peace,” “walking along the Highway, with hearts overflowing,” “cups overflowing,”

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Roy Hession said that when he first came to this understanding and experience it “was like beginning my Christian life all over again.” Consider these excerpts from his autobiography My Calvary Road:

“I recounted my struggles with self and acknowledged the new relationship with Jesus which I had entered by faith. ... In the light of our own recent experience of Christ, we preached a two-fold message: full salvation for the Christian quite as much as an initial salvation for the non-Christian. ... If consecration is thorough and complete, it need not be repeated. ‘Reconsecration’ is the language of piecemeal surrender to the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Thus Hession taught that it is necessary for the believer to enter into a second experience of Christ, a “full salvation,” and that if one achieves this experience he will be completely and permanently surrendered and have a daily “overflowing cup” Christian life.

Calvary Road is presented as a fool-proof plan for constant spiritual revival, but there is no such thing. While Calvary Road does not consist of one “key,” it does consist of several things that are presented together as the “key.”

Let me hasten to say that if it weren’t for the emphasis on entering into an abiding overflowing cup experience that one can allegedly achieve and maintain, I would recommend Calvary Road, because it does contain many good truths. But the overriding emphasis on a constant overflowing cup experience and the teaching that one can get beyond the necessity of “reconsecration” is a serious error, in my estimation.

Calvary Road didn’t encourage me; it discouraged me tremendously. I tried everything taught in Calvary Road as best as I could with what I believe was complete dependence in Christ and dying to self, but instead of an always “overflowing cup,” my cup was often half empty. In fact, sometimes it seemed that there were only a couple ounces of

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holiness slopping around at the bottom! Forty plus years later, I still have days like that.

I also read Miles Stanford’s Green Letters and others along that line, but I found the same emphasis, which, to me, was the little fox that spoiled the vine.

I also read a booklet by John R. Rice about experiences of various “great” preachers that allegedly placed them on a higher plane of spiritual life and power. It was titled How Great Soul Sinners Were Filled with the Holy Spirit. It was basically a Pentecostal baptism of the Holy Spirit experience, but it was taught by a fundamental Baptist.

I tried to do everything I learned. I desperately wanted more spiritual victory. I was as earnest as I knew how to be, and I still am. I tried resting. I tried abiding. I tried doing nothing so that Christ would be all in all. I tried doing everything. I tried walking in continual identification. I tried reckoning. I prayed. I wept. I asked the Lord to show me everything that displeased Him. I confessed and repented. I begged the Lord to put me on that “higher plane” and plunge me into that “deeper life,” and I begged again and again. Through it all, I was growing. But it was a walking

experience, not a flying one. Many of the steps were baby steps, and often the “walk” was more like slogging through deep mud. But through it all, I was growing.

I would read 1 Corinthians 13 and Galatians 5:22-23 and 1 Peter 1:15-16 and other passages about Christlikeness, holy perfection, and joy unspeakable, and I would get discouraged, but I was growing.

As I look back, my experience was not unscriptural. The problem was that I had come to believe that there was some key or secret that would carry me beyond the struggle into a near perfectionist or always overflowing cup experience, but there isn’t.

I had come to believe that I could somehow replace a gradual process of spiritual growth with a more pleasant,

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quicker, less painful experience, but the slow, gradual process is the scriptural path.

I had come to believe that I was either completely Spirit filled and Spirit controlled or I was totally lacking in Spirit filling and control; I was either completely “abiding in Christ” or I wasn’t abiding at all. But there is no such either/or in biblical sanctification in this present life.

Christ has the fulness of the Spirit, but His people partake of that fulness only in part (John 1:16; 3:34).

It was false teaching that caused my confusion and discouragement.

If someone disagrees with this, let him demonstrate the complete fulness of the Spirit and always overflowing cup experience of sanctification in his life and show the way in this. (And I would want some confirming testimonies from people very close to that person.)The book that helped me more in those days than any

other outside of the Bible was HARRY IRONSIDE’S HOLINESS: THE FALSE AND THE TRUE. He begins by relating his own experience as a young preacher in the Salvation Army. Believing the doctrine of entire sanctification, he sought this “experience.” It is called “the second blessing,” “perfect love,” “higher life,” and other things. Sanctification was considered “a second work of grace,” an experience whereby the child of God could achieve perfection.

He said, “... such was the teaching, and coupled with it were heartfelt testimonies of experiences so remarkable that I could not doubt their genuineness. ... bad tempers had [allegedly] been rooted out ... evil propensities and unholy appetites had been instantly destroyed when holiness was claimed by faith.”

Ironside believed that he could achieve this experience if he could only meet the conditions. He asked God to show him every unholy thing in his life so he could renounce it. He gave up everything he could think of that would hinder him

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in getting “the blessing.” Though he loved reading, he gave up all literature except the Bible and “holiness writings.”

Finally during a period of intense fasting and confessing and repenting and surrendering, he had a powerful emotional experience and felt that he had “gotten it.”

“... my brain and nerves were unstrung by the long midnight vigil and the intense anxiety of previous months, and I fell almost fainting to the ground. Then a holy ecstasy seemed to thrill all my being. This I thought was the coming into my heart of the Comforter. I cried out in confidence, ‘Lord, I believe Thou dost come in. Thou dost cleanse and purify me from all sin. I claim it now. The work is done. I am sanctified by Thy blood. Thou dost make me holy. I believe; I believe!’ I was unspeakably happy. I felt that all my struggles were ended.”

He stood in a church service and testified that he had found complete sanctification.

He could now sing a favorite holiness song with enthusiasm:

Some people I know don’t live holy;They battle with unconquered sin,Not daring to consecrate fully,Or they full salvation would sin.

With malice they have constant trouble,From doubting they long to be free,With most things about them they grumble;Praise God, this is not so with ME!

But it wasn’t long before he realized that sin was still present and by no means was he entirely sanctified.

“As time went on, I began to be again conscious of inward desires toward evil--of thoughts that were unholy. I was nonplused. Going to a leading teacher for help, he said, ‘These are but temptations. Temptation is not sin. You only sin if you yield to the evil suggestion.’

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This gave me peace for a time. I found it was the general way of excusing such evident movings of a fallen nature, which was supposed to have been eliminated. But gradually I sank to a lower and lower plane, permitting things I would once have shunned; and I even observed that all about me did the same. ... I was tormented with the thought that I had backslidden, and might be lost eternally after all my former happy experiences of the Lord’s goodness.”

Eventually he became so discouraged and defeated that he ended up in a rest home. He was “almost a nervous wreck, worn out in body and most acutely distressed in mind.”

He planned to have six months of rest and recuperation. There, through the ministry of the printed page and help from some wise Christians, he learned the truth about sanctification and holiness. The truth lifted Ironside out of his despair and confusion,

and it did the same for me. Through sound teaching I was able to settle down in my Christian life and not be so tossed to and fro like a cork on restless water. I didn’t have the complete fulness of anything, but I was growing, and I was content to grow.

Ironside vividly described the terrible fruit of the “Holiness perfectionist” doctrine of sanctification as follows:

“... thousands are yearly being disheartened and discouraged by their teaching; hundreds yearly are ensnared into infidelity through the collapse of the vain effort to attain the unattainable; scores have actually lost their minds and are now inmates of asylums because of the mental grief and anguish resultant upon their bitter disappointment in the search for holiness ...

“And now I began to see what a string of derelicts this holiness teaching left in its train. I could count scores of persons who had gone into utter infidelity because of it. They always gave the same reason: ‘I tried it all. I found it a failure. So I concluded the Bible teaching was all a

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delusion, and religion was a mere matter of the emotions.’ Many more (and I knew several such intimately) lapsed into insanity after floundering in the morass of this emotional religion for years—and people said that studying the Bible had driven them crazy, How little they knew that it was lack of Bible knowledge that was accountable for their wretched mental state—and absolutely unscriptural use of isolated passages of Scripture! ...

“I have observed that debt and its twin brother, worry, are as common among such professors as among others. In fact, the sinfulness of worrying rarely seems to be apprehended by them. Holiness advocates have all the little unpleasant ways that are so trying in many of us: they are no more free from penuriousness, tattling, evil-speaking, selfishness, and kindred weaknesses, than their neighbors.

“And as to downright wickedness and uncleanness, I regret to have to record that sins of a positively immoral character are, I fear, far more frequently met with in holiness churches and missions, and Salvation Army bands, than the outsider would think possible. ... The path of the holiness movement (including, of course, the Salvation Army) is strewn with thousands of such moral and spiritual breakdowns. I would not dare to try to tell of the scores, yea, hundreds, of ‘sanctified’ officers and soldiers who to my personal knowledge were dismissed from or left the ‘Army’ in disgrace during my five years' officership. It will be objected that such persons had ‘lost their sanctification’ ere lapsing into these evil practises; but of what real value is a ‘sanctification’ that leaves its possessor not one whit more to be relied upon than one who lays claim to nothing of the sort? ...

“Superstition and fanaticism of the grossest character find a hotbed among ‘holiness’ advocates. Witness the present disgusting ‘Tongues Movement,’ with all its attendant delusions and insanities. An unhealthy

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