It is not enough that we
renounce one sin or two sins or three sins or many sins, we must _renounce
all sin_. If we cling to one single known sin, it will shut us out of the
blessing. Here we find the cause of failure in many people who are praying
for the baptism with the Holy Spirit, going to conventions and hearing
about the baptism with the Holy Spirit, reading books about the baptism
with the Holy Spirit, perhaps spending whole nights in prayer for the
baptism with the Holy Spirit, and yet obtaining nothing. Why? Because
there is some sin to which they are clinging. People often say to me, or
write to me, "I have been praying for the baptism with the Holy Spirit for
a year (five years, ten years, one man said twenty years). Why do I not
receive?" In many such cases, I feel led to reply, "It is sin, and if I
could look down into your heart this moment as God looks into your heart,
I could put my finger on the specific sin." It may be what you are pleased
to call a small sin, but there are no small sins. There are sins that
concern small things, but every sin is an act of rebellion against God and
therefore no sin is a small sin. A controversy with God about the smallest
thing is sufficient to shut one out of the blessing. Mr. Finney tells of a
woman who was greatly exercised about the baptism with the Holy Spirit.
Every night after the meetings, she would go to her rooms and pray way
into the night and her friends were afraid she would go insane, but no
blessing came. One night as she prayed, some little matter of head
adornment, a matter that would probably not trouble many Christians
to-day, but a matter of controversy between her and God, came up (as it
had often come up before) as she knelt in prayer. She put her hand to her
head and took the pins out of her hair and threw them across the room and
said, "There go!" and instantly the Holy Ghost fell upon her. It was not
so much the matter of head adornment as the matter of controversy with God
that had kept her out of the blessing.

If there is anything that always comes up when you get nearest to God,
that is the thing to deal with. Some years ago at a convention in a
Southern state, the presiding officer, a minister in the Baptist Church,
called my attention to a man and said, "That man is the pope of our
denomination in ----; everything he says goes, but he is not at all with us
in this matter, but I am glad to see him here." This minister kept
attending the m